Cindy Crawford
The mole, the mane, the Pepsi. Cindy Crawford was the supermodel era's all-American face — MTV's House of Style host, Super Bowl commercial legend, and the reason a generation's living rooms had a workout VHS parked in the VCR.
Born February 20, 1966, in DeKalb, Illinois, Cindy Crawford turned the mole above her lip into the most famous beauty mark since Marilyn Monroe. The January 1990 British Vogue cover — Crawford alongside Christy Turlington, Linda Evangelista, Tatjana Patitz, and Naomi Campbell — became the defining class photo of the supermodel era, the moment models stopped being anonymous and started being household names.
Crawford was the most American of them, and the most televised. She hosted and executive-produced MTV's fashion show House of Style from 1989 to 1995, bridging the runway and the MTV generation. Her 1992 Pepsi commercial, aired during Super Bowl XXVI — two awestruck kids, a dusty gas station, the new Pepsi can — entered the all-time ad canon, so durably that Pepsi remade it with Crawford in 2016. And her Shape Your Body workout video (1992) was so successful it spawned two follow-ups, planting her in America's living rooms alongside the family VCR.
She married Richard Gere in 1991 (they divorced in 1995) and Rande Gerber in May 1998. Her one big acting swing, the thriller Fair Game (1995), flopped — roughly $50 million spent against about $11 million at the box office — but modeling never needed the movies. She stepped back from full-time modeling in 2000, the supermodel archetype retired at the top of the reference class she helped invent.
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