Titans vs Olympians: The Oldest Rivalry in Fashion

Every generation of fashion fights the same war: the incumbent who wants time to stop, and the challenger who wants it to run forever. The Romans had names for both.

By Anthony Perlas · Nightlife Report · Cultural analysis, not religious claims

The father who ate the future

Before Jupiter ruled the sky, Saturn ruled everything. Hesiod’s Theogony tells it plainly: warned that a child would overthrow him, Saturn (the Greek Kronos) swallowed each newborn. His wife hid the last one, Jupiter, and handed Saturn a stone in swaddling clothes.[1] Goya painted the scene on the walls of his own house around 1820. It now hangs in the Prado, and it remains one of the most frightening images in Western art.[2]

The Romans gave Saturn a second face. In Virgil’s Aeneid, Saturn brings a Golden Age to Latium, a time of peace and plenty.[3] Every December, Saturnalia flipped Rome upside down: masters served slaves, and the city feasted.[4] Saturn is both the devourer and the keeper of a lost golden age. He is the incumbent who stops time because the future threatens him.

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The war of the gods

The son grew up and came back. The Titanomachy, Hesiod says, lasted ten years. Jupiter freed the Hundred-Handed Ones and the Cyclopes, won, and bound the Titans in Tartarus.[1][5] Then the Olympians divided the world and built a new order.

Here is our editorial reading, and we flag it as one. Saturn’s age is a closed loop. Hesiod’s Ages of Man run downhill from gold, and Virgil’s fourth Eclogue promises that Saturn’s reign will simply return.[6][7] The Olympians stand for something else: a dynasty that expands. One camp wants the cycle to end in rest. The other wants a world without end.

El, and a boy named Kal-El

In 1928, on the Syrian coast near Latakia, a farmer’s plough opened a tomb that led archaeologists to Ugarit. Its clay tablets name El, the gray-bearded father of the gods in the Canaanite pantheon.[8] Ancient writers noticed the parallel; Philo of Byblos equated El with Kronos.[9] El also became the Hebrew word for “god.”

In 1938 two sons of Jewish immigrants in Cleveland, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, published Action Comics #1.[10] Their hero’s Kryptonian name became Kal-El. Fans often read it as “voice of God.” The creators never confirmed that, so treat it as folklore.[11] Still, the shape is unmistakable: a last son sent from a dying world to start again somewhere new. It is the Jupiter story with a spacecraft.

Sophia and the flawed maker

The Gnostic texts found at Nag Hammadi in 1945 tell a different origin.[12] In the Apocryphon of John, Sophia (Wisdom) creates without her partner and produces a flawed maker, Yaldabaoth, who builds a closed world and believes he is the only power.[13][14] Read as culture rather than doctrine, the Gnostic idea is that the person running the system is not the final authority, and that knowledge (gnosis) is the exit.

Minerva vs Venus, and what Sparta actually did

The Admiral’s brief pairs Minerva against Venus as Sparta against Persia. The real history is more interesting, so here it is straight.

In myth, Minerva and Venus did go to war, but at Troy. Paris gave Venus the golden apple, and Minerva backed the Greeks while Venus backed Troy.[15] Herodotus opens his Histories by noting that Persian storytellers traced the Greek–Persian feud back to those mythic abductions, Helen among them.[16] Then he gets to history: in 480 BC, Leonidas and his Spartans held the pass at Thermopylae against Xerxes.[17][18]

Flag: no ancient source calls the Persian Wars “Minerva vs Venus.” Athens, not Sparta, was Athena’s city, though Sparta did honor Athena of the Bronze House.[19] Persia did not worship Venus. The mapping is ours: discipline and strategy against desire and spectacle. Every runway needs both.

Ford vs Elite: the Titanomachy of Madison Avenue

Eileen and Jerry Ford founded Ford Models in 1946.[20] By the 1970s, the New York Times reported, four agencies “virtually controlled” New York modeling and “respected each other’s territory.”[21] Ford was the biggest, the Saturn of the room.

John Casablancas founded Elite in Paris in 1972 and worked with Ford for years. In 1977, TIME reported, he ignored an unwritten agreement and opened in Manhattan. About twenty Ford stars followed him, including Janice Dickinson and Christie Brinkley (Brinkley later went back to Ford).[22][23] Eileen Ford mailed the defectors Bibles with the Judas passages marked in red, and the Fords sued Elite for millions.[22] PEOPLE later reported the grudge had grown to a far larger suit.[24] The press called it the Model Wars.[21] Elite’s own history says plainly: “Elite prevailed.”[23]

The challenger won by turning models into businesswomen, celebrities with names, and that is how the supermodel era began.[23] The Times also recorded the darker side of Casablancas’s life, including accusations of relationships with teenage models.[25] Every Olympian era has its Titans to answer for.

Team Saturn or Team Jupiter, tonight

Today’s argument isn’t about agencies. It’s about time. Transhumanists argue that aging is a problem to solve.[26][27] Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence maps what happens when minds outgrow ours,[28] and Ray Kurzweil predicts that merger.[29] The other camp has serious thinkers too. Ernest Becker won a Pulitzer arguing that culture is built on the denial of death,[30] Epicurus said death is nothing to us,[31] and Bernard Williams argued that endless life would become unbearably tedious.[32]

Walk any LA or New York room after midnight and you’ll find both camps. One is the founder pitching a company that outlives her; the other is the artist who wants one perfect season and then rest. Nightlife Report is asking every founder, model and designer we interview one new question: Team Saturn or Team Jupiter? Do you want a world without end, or a well-earned rest?

Tell us which side you’re on. Your interview could be the next one we publish.

Sources

full list of 16 research seats in RESEARCH.md. [1] Hesiod, *Theogony* · [2] Museo del Prado · [3] Virgil, *Aeneid* 8 · [4] World History Encyclopedia, Saturnalia · [5] Britannica, Titan · [6] Hesiod, *Works and Days* · [7] Virgil, *Eclogue* 4 · [8] World History Encyclopedia, Ugarit · [9] Britannica, El · [10] Superman (Wikipedia) · [11] My Jewish Learning · [12] Britannica, Nag Hammadi · [13] Gnostic Society Library, *Apocryphon of John* · [14] IEP, Gnosticism · [15] Apollodorus, *Epitome* · [16] Herodotus 1.1–5 · [17] Herodotus 7 · [18] Britannica, Thermopylae · [19] Pausanias 3.17 · [20] NYT 2014 · [21] NYT 1978 · [22] TIME · [23] Elite Model Management · [24] PEOPLE · [25] NYT 2013 · [26] Bostrom, Transhumanist Values · [27] Humanity+ · [28] OUP · [29] Penguin Random House · [30] Pulitzer · [31] SEP, Death · [32] SEP, Immortality

1. https://www.theoi.com/Text/HesiodTheogony.html
2. https://www.theoi.com/Titan/TitanKronos.html
3. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Cronus
4. https://www.museodelprado.es/en/the-collection/art-work/saturn/18110ad9-1ed8-4f5d-9a77-db3c9cf8a9b4
5. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Saturn-Roman-god
6. https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.02.0055:book=8
7. https://www.worldhistory.org/Saturnalia/
8. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Jupiter-Roman-god
9. https://www.theoi.com/Olympios/Zeus.html
10. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Titan-Greek-mythology
11. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanomachy
12. https://www.theoi.com/Text/HesiodWorksDays.html
13. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/stoicism/
14. https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.02.0057:poem=4
15. https://www.britannica.com/topic/El-ancient-deity
16. https://www.worldhistory.org/ugarit/
17. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_(deity)
18. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superman
19. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/superman-jewish-immigrant-180962120/
20. https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/superman-jewish/
21. https://www.britannica.com/topic/gnosticism
22. http://gnosis.org/naghamm/apocjn.html
23. https://iep.utm.edu/gnostic/
24. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Nag-Hammadi-library
25. https://www.theoi.com/Text/ApollodorusE.html#3
26. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Athena-Greek-mythology
27. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Aphrodite-Greek-mythology
28. https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0126
29. https://www.britannica.com/event/Battle-of-Thermopylae-Greek-history-480-bce
30. https://www.worldhistory.org/Greco-Persian_Wars/
31. https://www.theoi.com/Text/Pausanias3B.html
32. https://nickbostrom.com/ethics/values
33. https://www.humanityplus.org/the-transhumanist-declaration
34. https://www.britannica.com/topic/transhumanism
35. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/superintelligence-9780199678112
36. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/311493/the-singularity-is-nearer-by-ray-kurzweil/
37. https://www.safe.ai/work/statement-on-ai-risk
38. https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/ernest-becker
39. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/death/
40. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/immortality/
41. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/10/business/eileen-ford-modeling-agency-co-founder-dies-at-92.html
42. https://www.nytimes.com/1978/12/07/archives/the-world-of-models-chaos-with-glamour-a-coveted-position-the-world.html
43. https://www.harpercollins.com/products/model-michael-gross
44. https://www.elitemodels.com/about
45. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/21/nyregion/john-casablancas-modeling-visionary-dies-at-70.html
46. https://time.com/archive/6882102/living-come-with-me-to-casablancas/
47. https://people.com/archive/the-fashion-world-is-rocked-by-model-wars-part-two-the-ford-empire-strikes-back-vol-14-no-5/

Image credits: real artworks are public domain via Wikimedia Commons; images labeled “AI image” are AI-generated. Related: more Nightlife Report features.