Teen models, powerful men and private dinners: when Trump hosted Look of the Year
Donald Trump, then 45, with contestants in the 1991 Look of the Year competition, the year he was a judge
In the early 90s, Donald Trump judged the world’s biggest modelling competition - since hit by allegations of abuse. This is how the people who were there remember it
By Lucy Osborne, Harry Davies and Stephanie
The Guardian, 14 March 2020
Excerpt…
It’s not clear how Casablancas first met Trump but, according to several former models who encountered him during the 1980s, the businessman became a regular at his parties. With the opening of Trump Tower on New York’s Fifth Avenue in 1983, and the acquisition of the Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida in 1985, Trump had gained the reputation of a high-flying playboy in his own right. In 1987 he published The Art Of The Deal, and a flurry of publicity followed. “He sits atop a $3 billion empire,” proclaimed the Washington Post, “and seems to have a Midas touch.”
It was perhaps unsurprising that Trump, a New York celebrity who liked to date beautiful women, should come to know the city’s best-known model agent. “Trump was good with PR and that was something John liked,” says Jeremie Roux, who now runs System, a modelling agency he cofounded with Casablancas in 2009. “Good or negative press was all good to Trump.”
Patty Owen, an Elle and Cosmopolitan cover star, recalls seeing Trump at Elite parties as far back as 1982. “He would always be at the bar. That’s where he would stay and that’s where all the new models would hang out,” she says. “Whenever I saw him, I was always like: why does John have to invite him?” Barbara Pilling, also then an Elite model, told us Trump asked her out for dinner in the summer of 1989 at an industry soiree. She recalls Trump asking how old she was. “I said 17 and he said, ‘That’s just great – you’re not too old, not too young.’”
Continues…
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/14/teen-models-powerful-men-when-donald-trump-hosted-look-of-the-year
= new reply since forum marked as read