America’s Next Top Model Groomed a Generation

Models are born, not made, to tweak Simone de Beauvoir’s famous saying. Every once in a blue moon, a human being arrives on Earth as a freak accident of genetic alchemy, gifted with bone structure, height, and the uncanny positioning of features that registers to other humans as beauty. When they grow up (some barely), models have to be distinctive enough to be recognizable but bland enough to be chameleonic, a canvas for constant reinvention. They should look assertive in images but be compliant in the studio. They cannot overshadow the clothes, or the designers, or the photographers.

The idea that a normal person could work to transform themselves into a model is preposterous, like spinning straw into gold. But, for much of the 2000s, reality television insisted that this was possible, never with more fervor, ruthlessness, and capitalist commitment than on America’s Next Top Model.

Because why not? Reality television was still in its infancy in 2003, when the show first started airing, but the genre had already spawned pop stars, celebrity comebacks, even marriages (short-lived but legal ones). To Tyra Banks—a bona fide supermodel with a career spanning runway shows, Vogue, and guest stints on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air—the formula seemed obvious. “I wanna marry American Idol and The Real World and set it in the modeling industry” is how she recalls things now, on the new Netflix series Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model. Idol was devoted to discovering hidden talent and steering it all the way to the bank; The Real World made an art of watching ordinary people crack in manufactured high-stress environments. Add in fashion, an industry practically built on demoralizing vulnerable girls, and what could go wrong?

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The first season of America’s Next Top Model tried to pull off a strange trick: Banks insisted that she wanted to change the conditions of modeling while replicating them beat by beat for 10 eager contestants. “I wanted to show that beauty is not one thing. And I wanted to fight against the fashion industry,” she explains. She cast young women with different body types, but then weighed and measured them in the first episode, and introduced a personal trainer who’d be tasked with getting them into shape. She fought to be able to cast contestants of different ethnicities, but often reduced them on camera to stereotypes. (Cycle 1’s Ebony, who is Black, was labeled “angry” and “aggressive”; Cycle 8’s Jaslene, who is from Puerto Rico, was described as “spicy” by the judges.) Toward the end of Cycle 1, Banks flew the remaining contestants to Paris, where they were forced to share a cramped, dorm-style apartment and tasked with charming four strange men at lunch—a kind of hazing that, far from reforming the system, seemed to be preparing them for the degradations of the industry.

“I’m gonna say the exact opposite than what these people in fashion have been telling women for years,” Banks recalls herself thinking regarding the pressure on models to be skinny, and the prevalence of eating disorders in fashion. But she also critiqued contestants for gaining weight, for not being disciplined enough, for not ordering the burger and discarding the bun.

The very first episode of ANTM subjected the contestants to on-camera Brazilian bikini waxes and then sent them up to a Manhattan roof terrace to pose in swimwear in frigid weather. Right away, the show made clear that it wanted them to suffer: to squabble over who was the smallest—“She has a little more insulation than me,” one contestant, Elyse (114 pounds), griped of one of her peers after shivering up on the roof—and to wail while their pubic hair was ripped out. It wanted viewers to see beauty as something that could be earned. It was a product not of luck, but of labor.

“Il faut souffrir pour être belle,” my mother told me as a child, a phrase you would have to torture me to make me repeat to my own daughter. “Sometimes you have to go through pain, you know, to be beautiful,” Joanie, a former Top Model contestant, explains in Reality Check. The point Banks makes, over and over, is that the 2000s were a different time—the implication is that no one then knew that criticizing people’s weight on national television might be bad, or that subjecting young women to sadistic photo shoots and arbitrary commands might damage them psychologically.

Which is bunk: Plenty of people were criticizing Top Model while it was on the air. But this things were different then line of defense does ward off a more crucial critique of the show—one that Reality Check doesn’t identify. Top Model and shows like it were intoxicating because they compelled each woman who watched to imagine herself as a virtual contestant, and to internalize the idea that beauty wasn’t a pleasurable pursuit but a necessary grind for self-optimization and profit. The world we live in now, with its casual parlance of Botox and blephs, glass skin and looks-maxxing, was built on the foundation that Top Model helped set—the idea that if you simply work hard enough on your physical form, blessings will surely follow. That if you do enough to yourself, whether with procedures or products, you can become a product yourself, no matter what you were born with.

Reality Check has been a sensation, which is surprising only because it offers little in the way of insight: It splices together contemporaneous interviews with Top Model’s biggest stars (Banks, as well as coaches such as Jay Manuel and J. Alexander), archival clips from the show, and TikTok commentary that dissects its excesses, all accompanied by a pounding EDM score. But it doesn’t analyze the genre Top Model was helping to pioneer (we’d soon get extreme-makeover shows and contests such as The Swan and I Want a Famous Face). Nor does it examine the era of naked American consumerism the show emerged into—a post-9/11 period that espoused a go shopping philosophy of patriotism perfect for wanton product placement. (In Cycle 2 of Top Model, the contestants were charged with styling themselves in shoes by Steve Madden, a company that had previously stiffed New York City firefighters on the profits of a bedazzled flag-themed shoe line titled “Bravest.”)

Much of the water-cooler talk regarding Reality Check has focused on Banks herself, an imperious, enigmatic figure wrapped in a laser-cut trench coat. (Inspector Clouseau, but make it fashion!) The question of whether she knew what she was putting her models through, and whether she was sincerely interested in reforming the industry or more invested in building a business empire, hovers over the documentary series. (“You just have a magazine?” Banks tells the camera, imagining herself talking to a rival, explaining her motivations for wanting to be a producer. “I have a TV show.”)

Reality Check picks out a handful of moments that seem to indict Top Model and its motives: When Banks encouraged two contestants to get painful dental work, then filmed it; when Jay Manuel told Cycle 4’s Keenyah, who’d complained about being harassed by a male model during a shoot, to stop holding things up; when, most appalling, producers seem to have done nothing while a Cycle 2 contestant, Shandi, got blackout drunk before having sex with one of the Italian men serving as the models’ chauffeurs—an incident that Shandi describes on Reality Check as obviously nonconsensual—and then recorded her calling her boyfriend, sobbing, to confess what she’d done. The point of ANTM was not to create models, Reality Check suggests. It was to make TV entertainment, no matter what happened to the contestants in the process.

This conclusion seems fairly obvious, and it skirts the more interesting purpose of revisiting ANTM, which is to consider its legacy. The media-literacy scholar Jennifer Pozner has argued that reality TV during the 2000s was about entertainment, yes, but also “ideological persuasion”; it informed how viewers saw the world, and themselves. And the overarching gospel of ANTM was transformation. In scouring America for unrefined material, girls who could supposedly be sculpted into supermodels like raw clay, the show was telling viewers, You yourself are not beautiful.

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If Banks had an ethos on the show, it was one of rational egoism—the elevation of the self by any means necessary. (In 2007, the critic Ann Powers compared Banks to Ayn Rand, writing, “When she’s about to send a girl home, she always has that face, that Tyra stare, that says, this is no laughing matter, ladies. This is capitalism; this is democracy; this is the heroine’s quest.”) There was no “we” on ANTM. Nobody was there to make friends. The models who went all the way were the ones who ceded to Banks’s worldview, who agreed to have their hair dyed and their teeth messed with and their bodies altered.

And when models protested, when they asserted themselves, they invariably triggered fury. The first episode of Reality Check opens with Banks’s infamous “rooting for you” meltdown of Cycle 4, in which she berates a woman named Tiffany for not being committed enough to the self-abnegation and relentless effort that Banks has deemed necessary. “I have never in my life yelled at a girl like this,” Banks says feverishly. “I was rooting for you. We were all rooting for you! How dare you?” Tiffany, rationally, points out afterward that Banks, who is positioning herself as a mentor, hasn’t done anything for her except “bring me here and put me through hell these weeks.”

But the point isn’t what Tiffany has or hasn’t been given. It’s that she has insufficiently submitted to Banks’s will. Docility is the secret sauce on ANTM, the quality that, more than any other, will get a girl to the top. (When Cycle 1’s winner, Adrianne, left the hospital bed where she was being treated for food poisoning to return to the competition, she was praised by judges; when she missed a go-see in Paris after being sexually assaulted on the street, she said she was criticized for not meeting her commitments.)

As the series progressed, the challenges got more extreme, the conditions of photo shoots more precarious. Models were tasked with changing their ethnicities with makeup and hairstyling for more than one challenge, as though even the reality of their biology could be altered with the right level of commitment. To refuse to change yourself, to embrace your imperfect smile or your natural hair texture, was sedition, and it would not be tolerated. (A guest judge once sneeringly asked Cycle 3’s Yaya DaCosta, who refused to straighten her hair, “If you walk into a toothpaste ad, are you gonna go in a dashiki or T-shirt and jeans?”)

Models were also asked to pose as corpses in crime scenes, to personify eating disorders and addictions that models might have. The Cycle 8 contestant Dionne, whose mother had been shot when she was a child, was told to embody a shooting victim herself. “I think they wanted to see some type of mental breakdown or, you know, to see me crumble,” she says in Reality Check. During a shoot that took place in an unheated swimming pool in Cycle 7, one contestant was rebuked for coming down with hypothermia. “As a model, you have to know your limits,” Banks reprimanded her, as though we hadn’t all witnessed contestants being told to suppress their instincts, never talk back, push through pain, for the entirety of the show.

All the while, the rewards remained intangible. No contestant on ANTM ever became a top model; the stigma of reality television was too strong. Before Instagram, people who appeared on the show had no way to parlay their brief notoriety into actual followings, or to portray themselves as they wanted to be perceived. The show itself was a juggernaut, doing what was essentially sponsored content for Sephora, CoverGirl, Revlon, Wonderbra, Baby Phat, and Guess. But most contestants received next to nothing for their labor. Banks, by contrast, became arguably America’s first true girlboss: a magnate in the making with a beauty line sold via multilevel marketing, a talk show, an ice-cream brand, and a truly incomprehensible young-adult novel called Modelland in which supernatural talismans called smizes (a Banksian term for “smiling with your eyes”) are sent out into the world to transform seven humdrum commoners into extraordinary beauties.

This was always Banks’s philosophy. Beauty isn’t something that anyone innately possesses; it’s something you fight and suffer for. In the real world, it’s subjective, but on ANTM, as the critic E. Alex Jung wrote in 2015, “it’s a skill that can be honed.” Watching the show, we were encouraged to project ourselves right into the contestants’ places—to change our hair and our clothes, to transform our bodies and alter our aesthetic and buy buy buy, always, what the show was selling. You wanna be on top? Then put in the work. It will never be enough, and nor will you, but the market is waiting.