Book excerpt: In 2008, Christopher Niquet, a well-known French stylist, spotted the 1960s supermodel Peggy Moffit in a Beverly Hills restaurant. Never an autograph chaser, he nonetheless felt compelled to ask for hers. This candid moment ignited an obsessive, ongoing quest. Niquet began to reach out to the models he considered quintessentials figures in his industry, for their epic beauty and remote auras. Deploying a sleuth's methods to locate these models around the globe, he collected 100 signatures, most of which are framed along with an iconic portrait. "My original purpose was to get beyond the abstract, incorporeal beauty of these icons, and bring back a sense of their physicality. For me, each signature restored a womanly reality to the imaginary being." This book highlights the unique personalities of celebrated or forgotten women from the late 1950s to the 1990s and what they all have in common: the power to awaken creativity in the people who see them. Through generations of cover stories, Models That Matter explores a multi-layered history of feminine beauty, from Jean Shrimpton to Jerry Hall, from Lauren Bacall to Linda Evangelista, from Anita Pallenberg to Naomi Campbell, muses for extraordinary fashion lensmen like Steven Meisel-who wrote the preface-to Irving Penn or Richard Avedon.