Beginning in the 1980s and continuing through the 1990s, Cindy Crawford was America's most celebrated fashion model and one of the most famous in the world, embodying the rise of the "super model" as a late twentieth century cultural phenomenon. Although there had been star models in previous decades—Twiggy in the 1960s, for example, or Lauren Hutton and Cheryl Tiegs in the 1970s—they did not sustain prolonged mainstream recognition. Cindy Crawford and her contemporaries (Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell among them) no longer merely posed as nameless faces on magazine covers, calendars, and fashion runways but, rather, became celebrities whose fame rivaled that of movie stars and rock musicians. Cindy Crawford stood at the forefront of this insurgence.

Although she found fame through her physical appearance, the brown-haired, brown-eyed Crawford first distinguished herself through her intellectual attributes. A native of DeKalb, Illinois...