Falling comet, rising star

and Europe, saying that “if the clients and agencies did not know me, then I flew to them.” He watched how agencies would get magazine covers and book runway shows and decided he could do the same in the Southwest.

“It’s a maverick spirit,” said Matt Englehart, an on-camera/ commercial-print director who has been with the agency for 15 years.

“I wanted people to know who we were,” Black said.

It worked. The agency would boom in the early and mid-’90s, and he describes the era as some of the most fun he’s ever had. He traveled every week, carrying a suitcase prepacked with only black clothes to make for easy dressing; he met almost every supermodel, including Cindy Crawford, Christie Brinkley, Carol Alt and Kathy Ireland. He scouted talent everywhere from Hawaii to Geneva.

“In the ’90s, everything was up, up, up, up, up, and money was just everywhere,” he said.

In 1994, a pinnacle: The agency would catch the eye of three legendary New Yorkbased national modeling agencies — Ford Models, Wilhelmina Models and Elite Model Management — and each was interested in his company. Black met Ford Models owner Eileen Ford and her daughter for lunch in New York, and was “absolutely terrified” at first.

“I was scared to death; she is, after all, a true icon in the fashion industry, and I was this kid from Arizona,” Black said. But he was excited that Ford was family-owned and had a stellar reputation. In the end, they were the only agency interested in partnering instead of “consuming” Black’s company.

Joey Hunter, president of Ford Models at the time, said as soon as he met Black, the two were “on the same wavelength.”

“Arizona was an emerging market; Robert Black was on top of it,” Hunter said. “He had great models … (and) he really nurtured them like they were part of his family, and that’s the way we were at Ford.”

The Ford/Robert Agency was born.

Black

The early ‘ 90s were also good to Sheree Hartwell. The braces on her teeth came off, her adolescent awkwardness receded, and Hartwell started modeling regularly the same year Black partnered with Ford. She appeared in ads for Dillard’s, for Smitty’s grocery store, in the style section of The Arizona Republic, and in local fashion and bridal shows.

“Everything was very bighaired and overstyled, and harem pants and shoulder pads and lots of makeup,” she said.

As a teen model, Hartwell usually worked a few days a month, earning $100-$125 per hour. She traveled for modeling while attending Saguaro High School in Scottsdale, and lived in Milan for three months after graduating in1996. That experience was pivotal, she said, and still informs her management style today.

“I really was in one of the fashion capitals, living there, doing it, but also had kind of the exposure to the entire business,” such as decadent partying or models sleeping with photographers. The scene helped her decide to attend Northern Arizona University for a degree in communications with an emphasis in fashion merchandising and advertising.

In her last year as a student, she completed an internship with Ford/RBA, and fell in love with the business side of modeling. At the height of the dotcom era, with business plentiful, Hartwell would move to San Francisco to run the women’s division of a modeling agency there — the division in any agency that typically makes the most money.

It was 2001, and Hartwell flourished in the big city. New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami and one or two other major cities are the primary fashion markets in the United States; everything else is, at most, a “secondary” market. That includes Arizona, where business at Black’s agency plateaued after Sept. 11 as travel slowed and companies became more cautious with money.

In addition to the Sept. 11 effect, Black started to feel like the industry had changed again, he said. Parents wanted

Today, Ford/RBA is housed in a small, sleek office tucked behind the Coffee Bean at Miller and Indian School. This is the fifth office in the company’s history — the first two in Tempe, the rest in Scottsdale. Black says his favorite was in Tempe.

“We had a round booking desk with four stations and it was crazy, everyone connected to headsets and the phones ringing constantly, and beepers going off. We did not have the Internet, so it was very fastpaced.”

This office is surprisingly quiet and mellow; e-mail has made history of incessantly ringing phones. However, the office explodes on the second Wednesday of every month, when 75 to 100 hopefuls come for the open call.

Hartwell said the agency is lucky if they find one person to sign on those days. Although they see thousands in person or through online submissions, Ford/RBA signs only about 25 new talents per year. And as always, the models evolve to reflect “the look” of the era.

After the Barbie look of the ’80s, the quirky grunge of the ’90s and the “5-foot-11, Size zero days of the early 2000s,” Hartwell said the “ideal” look has diversified. In recent years many