John Casablancas | Supermodel creator, 70

John Casablancas, 70, the brash upstart who transformed the modeling business when he founded the Elite agency and turned its young beauties - including Linda Evangelista, Gisele Bundchen, and Naomi Campbell - into celebrities, died Saturday in Rio de Janeiro.

Mr. Casablancas, who lived in Miami, had cancer, said his executive assistant.

When he ventured into the business in the early 1970s, the super-agents were Eileen Ford and Wilhemina Cooper, who took an old-school approach that included providing chaperones for their models and tucking them into bed at a reasonable hour.

He challenged their domination in 1977 when he moved his operation from Europe to New York City with a very different approach to modeling.

"We gave them huge amounts of money, and we gave them names and personalities," he told the Chicago Sun-Times in 2000.

The main difference between his approach and Ford's, he told another interviewer, was "Ford was a prude, and I was not."

Through the 1980s and '90s, his vision gave Elite a coveted roster of talents who became household names and earned extravagant fees. Evangelista famously quipped that models at her level "don't wake up for less than $10,000 a day."

He came to regret his role in turning models into superstars. In 2000, when he sold his share of Elite, he lashed out at the "spoilt troublemakers" he had made famous. "I hate them all," he said.

He is survived by his wife, Aline Wermelinger, and their three children. Other survivors include a son and daughter from his first two marriages, including Julian Casablancas, front man for the band the Strokes. - Los Angeles Times