Off the racks

Naomi Campbell pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault last week for striking her maid in the head with a cell phone. The supermodel will pay her assistant’s medical expenses, attend a two-day anger management seminar and complete five days of community service for the fracas over a missing pair of jeans.

Miss Campbell likely won’t lose much magazine work over the incident, however. Fashion magazines rarely put models on their covers anymore.

There was a time when making the cover of Vogue meant a model had finally arrived. No longer.

Of Vogue’s 2006 covers, a model appeared on only one of the 12. Forty-one-year-old supermodel Linda Evangelista graced the August 2006 cover. She was the first model on the fashion bible’s cover in more than a year.

Vogue gave its prized space to actresses the rest of the time. Drew Barrymore had February, Natalie Portman was March, Jennifer Aniston followed in April, and Sandra Bullock was the October cover girl — make that woman.

These covers often come at convenient times for the stars. Kirsten Dunst was in full regalia for the September cover, which coincided with the release of her film “Marie Antoinette.”

The faces of Cindy Crawford, Christy Turlington and Claudia Schiffer are no longer on the magazine racks. And neither are those of any younger counterparts.

Is the era of the supermodel finally over?

If it is, we have no one to blame but ourselves. Our thirst for celebrity culture, it seems, has left no room for mere models.

“America is increasingly fascinated by celebrities, and their faces, personalities and personal lives seem to be what are selling magazines,” says Heather Cocks, one half of top celebrity fashion blog Go Fug Yourself (gofugyourself.typepad.com). “It’s all about the promise of reading something new and juicy that you didn’t know before, and if you have an anonymous model on the magazine cover, you’re not as likely to draw in as wide a group of readers.”

Simply put, celebrity covers sell more magazines because gossip is more universal than Gucci.

“When InStyle broke onto the scene they just blew everyone else away — and they’ve always had celebrity covers,” says the other half of the fashion blog, Jessica Morgan. “And so more classic fashion mags picked this up, to boost circulation.”

That’s why so many magazines put the celebrity of the moment on the cover, whether or not they make Mr. Blackwell’s worst-dressed list. Harper’s Bazaar put a pregnant Britney Spears on its cover last year (naked, no less), while the current issue of Vogue has one half of Hollywood’s It couple on its cover — Angelina Jolie.

“The Us Weekly generation is probably less likely to want to leaf through Vogue without the promise of never-before-heard tidbits about Brad Pitt from the mouth of Angelina Jolie,” Miss Cocks remarks.

Of course, we once wanted to know that kind of thing from models, too. Victoria’s Secret supermodel Gisele Bundchen was engaged to actor Leonardo DiCaprio, and the angry Miss Campbell has been linked to Mr. DiCaprio, too — and Eric Clapton, Robert De Niro and Prince Albert, to name just a few.

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