Supermodel-maker, agency founder
NEW YORK — Modeling-agency founder Eileen Ford, who shaped a generation’s standards of beauty as she built an empire and launched the careers of Candice Bergen, Lauren Hutton, Christie Brinkley and many others, has died.
She was 92 and died Wednesday of complications from a brain tumor and osteoporosis, said Arielle Baran, a spokesman for Derris & Co., which handles public relations for Ford and announced the death Thursday.
Ford demanded professionalism from her models, putting them on strict diets and firing those with a taste for late-night revelry. Her discipline pushed Ford Model Agency to the top, making multimillionaires of Ford and her late husband, Jerry, who handled the agency’s business side.
The typical Ford woman was 5 feet 7 inches or taller, thin, often blond, with wide-set eyes and a long neck.
Ford’s daughter, Katie, said her mother’s “greatest thrill was to spot a model in the daily course of life.”
Ford maintained that a model’s charisma was as important as her looks and prided herself on being able to detect successful personalities.
Eileen Ford, born Eileen Otte in New York City in 1922, earned a psychology degree from Barnard College, then worked as a photographer, stylist and fashion reporter. After losing her stylist job when she became pregnant, according to Katie Ford, she helped several friends book modeling jobs. That led her and her husband to found the agency in 1946.
The agency’s revenue topped $40 million a year by the 1990s. Katie Ford served as CEO from 1995 until the company was sold in 2007. Jerry Ford died in August 2008.