Obituary: John Casablancas: Casanova agency boss who changed the face of modelling

1942-2013: John Casablancas, who has died aged 70, was a modelling agent who played Henry Higgins to the fashion industry's most beautiful women - and was said to have bedded more of them than anyone else on the planet.

When Casablancas established his Elite Model Management agency in Paris in the early 1970s, the business was dominated by Eileen Ford and Wilhelmina Cooper - mother hens who provided strict chaperones for their models, made sure they got their beauty sleep and often gave designers discounts to find work for their less glamorous girls.

Casablancas's answer was to promote only the most beautiful women, give them a good time and pay them fat fees. "I identified what I perceived to be the weak point of other agencies," he said. "They didn't cater to the ego of their models. I created an agency like a small private club where I could make a fuss of them and treat them like celebrities.

"I only had stars, so I could bill customers more because they couldn't bargain me down on price by refusing to book any of our less important girls. We gave them huge amounts of money and we gave them names and personalities. We let them give interviews.

"Suddenly, they became a dream for the larger public. They became supermodels."

The business really took off after 1977 when Casablancas set up shop in New York. In what became known as the "model wars", he ignored an unwritten agreement that prevented agencies poaching each other's models and embarked on a strategy of signing his competitors' top girls by offering them a lot more money and plenty more fun.

"The gamble was that maybe it wouldn't appeal to some of the parents, but the kids would like it - and it worked," he said.

Dismissing the relatively modest standard modelling rates, he began charging whatever he could get, forcing booking fees through the roof. He was sued for $10-million by Ford and Cooper for the violation of fiduciary trust, but the cases failed and only won Elite more publicity.

Casablancas concocted a range of aggressive promotion techniques, including the Look of the Year model search contest (renamed Elite Model Look in 1995), which launched dozens of successful modelling careers. With his brother, Fernando, he also developed an expanding network of 105 John Casablancas modelling schools.

To achieve wider recognition, he set about developing his models as celebrities - the stars of music videos and presenters on MTV. The Elite models and their Svengali became regulars at New York nightspots such as Studio 54, partying into the small hours, providing juicy material for the gossip columns - and free publicity for Casablancas.

Within a decade of Casablancas's arrival in New York, Elite had become a global network with a stable that would grow to include Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Claudia Schiffer, Andie MacDowell, Iman, Gisele Bündchen, Carol Alt and Linda Evangelista (who famously observed that models at her level "don't wake up for less than $10000 a day").

But there was always an unsavoury undercurrent. "John Casablancas wants you!" declared the adverts for his modelling schools, and in many cases the declaration was meant to be taken literally. In Model: The Ugly Business Of Beautiful Women (1995), Michael Gross detailed Casablancas's numerous affairs with the ingénues he represented: under his name in the index was a separate reference purely for "extramarital affairs".

In Shut Up And Smile - Supermodels: The Dark Side , Ian Halperin wrote: "Countless stories were floating around about how some of the girls [Casablancas] recruited as models were being steered into the party life of drugs, alcohol and sex ... Two of his models were dead before Elite was barely a year old."

Although he insisted that he had never knowingly made love to a girl under the age of 16, Casablancas, a good-looking man (for those who like the smooth, perma-tanned type), had a well-publicised fling with the model Stephanie Seymour when she was 16 (or, by some accounts, 15) and he was 41 - leading to the break-up of his second marriage. In 1993, when he was 51, he married Aline Wermelinger, a 17-year-old he had met the previous year when the Brazilian high school girl had participated in Elite's Look of the Year contest.

In an interview in 1997, Casablancas admitted that he had often dated young girls "because that was the business I was in", observing that "many of us are fascinated by the idea of a woman-child, like Brooke Shields in the movie Pretty Baby".

Casablancas retired from the agency he created in 2000, his decision to go hastened by a scandal involving the then president of Elite Europe, Gerald Marie, who had featured in a BBC exposé propositioning a young model. Casablancas took the opportunity to tell the world what he really thought of models, denouncing them as spoilt brats "surrounded by idiots and leeches".

"I hate them all," he declared, singling out Bündchen as "a monster of selfishness" and Heidi Klum as "a German sausage without talent", after both defected to rival agencies. As for Campbell: "You can't imagine the pleasure it gave me to sack her. She was odious."

He told The Daily Telegraph: "One of my biggest regrets is that I created the supermodel. They can be impossible. Elite single-handedly brought modelling rates to a peak no one could have imagined, but the girls never thanked me for it. I've had enough."

Casablancas was born in New York on December 12 1942, the son of a Spanish textile machinery tycoon and a former Balenciaga model. Educated in Switzerland at the exclusive boarding school Le Rosey, he embarked on degrees at several European universities, but never graduated.

At the age of 20 he was hired by the mother of a school friend as a marketing manager for Coca-Cola in Brazil, and at about the same time married his French girlfriend, Marie Christine. But neither the marriage nor the job lasted and by 1967 he was living alone in a Paris hotel.

There he bumped into Jeanette Christjansen, a 19-year-old former Miss Denmark who was in town modelling. They soon moved in together. It was Christjansen, who was unhappy with the service she was getting from her own model agency, who gave him the idea of establishing his own. In 1968 he pulled together about 15 models and opened his first agency, Elysée 3, named after his Paris phone number. He and Christjansen subsequently married.

The agency struggled in the beginning and Casablancas was forced to turn to his brother Fernando to bail him out. In 1971 he decided to sell the business, but had difficulty finding a buyer. When a female rival pulled out because her lawyer had advised her she could pick up Elysée's models without paying a penny, he decided to take on and beat his rivals at their own game. Offloading Elysée 3 on Fernando, he took its three best models, including Christjansen, and founded Elite.

His first customers, Dior and Mary Quant, seemed happy to write out fat cheques and women queued up to join his books. When he left the agency it had 500 models on four continents bringing in $100-million (about R1-billion) a year in bookings.

After Casablancas's retirement, Elite faced a series of problems and filed for bankruptcy protection in 2004, when its assets were subsequently acquired by the Pacific Global Management Group.

Casablancas, meanwhile, amused himself by creating Illusion 2K, a "cybermodel agency'' that promoted a computer-animated model called Webbie Tookay. Her greatest advantage, he observed, was that she never complained.

Casablancas is survived by his third wife, their daughter and two sons, a daughter from his first marriage and a son from his second marriage to Christjansen - Julian Casablancas, who is the frontman for The Strokes rock group.