Battle of the Gods: The Business of Beauty, a Five-Part Series

Top image: Venus de Milo, Musée du Louvre. Photo: Jastrow (2007), public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Nightlife Report’s Battle of the Gods frames fashion coverage through myth. In the Venus Games, Venus is Ava Kortman’s champion and Athena is Emily Sophie Christine’s. The myth sits on top of a real industry: agencies, contracts, runways, cameras, and crowds that decide who’s remembered. This five-part series covers that industry’s history, from a 1940s Manhattan booking office back to Mount Ida, and connects each part to modeling and the business of beauty.

The series

1. Eileen Ford Built the Business of Beauty
   How Eileen and Jerry Ford turned modeling into an industry after World War II: vouchers, Friday paydays, commissions, chaperones, famous discoveries and real controversies. The business of beauty exists in its modern form because of her.
2. The History of Modeling: From Worth’s House Mannequins to AI Twins
   Marie Vernet in the Worth salon, Lucile’s “goddesses,” the camera, the 1990 Vogue supermodels, and the new consent rules for digital replicas.
3. The Colosseum: Spectacle, Crowds and the Runway as Arena
   Titus’s 100-day opening, numbered gates, Augustus’s seating chart and the first giveaways. Why a runway is still an arena.
4. The Trojan War: The Judgment of Paris and the Face That Launched a Thousand Ships
   Aphrodite against Athena, Helen of Sparta, Agamemnon of Mycenae, Marlowe’s famous line, and what Schliemann’s dig at Troy has to do with styling.
5. Aphrodite vs. Venus: Two Goddesses, Two Business Models
   The Greek force and the Roman franchise: cults, Caesar’s Venus Genetrix, Praxiteles, Botticelli, and Dolce & Gabbana’s Venus dress.

The Ford standard, as Eileen Otte Ford laid it out: the “tall, thin, often blond” Ford woman with “wide-set eyes and a long neck” (AP), and the blue-eyed Nordic look Vogue credits her with popularizing in the early 1960s (“They work hard, and they look more American than American girls,” she said of Swedish models). Anyone under 5 feet 7 was told to forget it: “If you’re short you’re not going to model. That’s it” (The Telegraph). The high-fashion bracket, as Robert Lacey records it in Model Woman (Vanity Fair adaptation), started at 5 feet 8, with a 32- to 33-inch bust, a 20- to 21-inch waist and 33-inch hips, because, as she explained, “photographic models must fit manufacturers’ samples.” The 34-24-34 figure is often cited for Ford models (Los Angeles Times, 2014). That’s the historical benchmark, not Nightlife Report’s standard.
Sources: Robert Lacey, Model Woman: Eileen Ford and the Business of Beauty (2015); the New York Times and AP obituaries (2014); The Telegraph; Vogue; Los Angeles Times. Her own books: Eileen Ford’s Book of Model Beauty (1968), Secrets of the Model’s World (1970), Eileen Ford’s A More Beautiful You in 21 Days (1972) and Eileen Ford’s Beauty Now and Forever (1977).

Vote: Battle of the Gods

Read the myths, then cast your vote. Battle of the Gods: The Venus Games crowning puts first and second place between Venus (Aphrodite) and Minerva (Athena). It’s one vote per email at blog.nightlifereport.app/vote, and voting closes Tue Oct 20, 2026, 11:59 PM PT. We score the performance, never the person’s looks.

Every story in the series cites its sources, including encyclopedias, museums, ancient texts in public-domain translations, and major press, with links at the bottom of each post. Images are public domain or Creative Commons from Wikimedia Commons, credited on each post.

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