![]() ![]() Like her hero, Martha Stewart, Banks wants, most of all, for her name to immediately suggest a distinct point of view. “Top Model,” which pits would-be models against one another, is syndicated in more than 100 countries and has given birth to Banks’s newest venture, “Stylista,” the first show in which she will not appear and which features 11 aspirants competing to become a fashion editor at Elle magazine. ![]() Her talk show, “The Tyra Banks Show,” which had its premiere in 2005, is on every weekday (it is shown twice a day in many markets, including Los Angeles and New York) and her nighttime reality competition, “America’s Next Top Model,” the most successful show on the CW network, is entering its 11th 13-week cycle. In the fall, Banks will have three shows on the air, two of which she created and all of which she produced. on a clear, crisp day in April and Banks was standing near a subway entrance at Union Square in Manhattan, about to shoot a special out-of-the-studio segment for the 500th episode of her talk show, to be broadcast later that month. “Do you see?” she said, while still smiling. The smile was a little masklike and yet accessible. I can now pull out a smile at will.” Banks, who was wearing wide-leg jeans and a belted khaki trench coat that accentuated her height and her curves, demonstrated her most famous smile, the “smile with eyes.” Her catlike green eyes narrowed and began to sparkle and her lips slowly parted to reveal a row of perfect teeth. I looked at magazines, I’d practice in front of the mirror and I’d ask photographers about the best angles. “Smiles come naturally to me, but I started thinking of them as an art form at my command,” Banks told me. Modeling and smiling was a skill that could, if engineered and managed carefully, change the course of your life. Banks did not become a model to be a muse to designers or because she loved fashion. Then, and now, the smiles were her secret weapons: they could compel, manipulate, seduce. ![]() From the start of her career, when she was virtually plucked from an all-girl Catholic high school in Los Angeles and whisked off to Paris, to her days as a mass-market first-name-only supermodel strutting the catwalk in her underwear for Victoria’s Secret, Banks always treated modeling as a kind of beautiful science. In her arsenal are the “surprise smile,” the “angry but still smiling” smile, the “flirting with boyfriend” smile and the “commercial” smile, which, like the rest of Tyra’s smiles, was designed and perfected when Banks, who is now 34, began modeling at 15. Like a star athlete who has perfected a jump shot or a curveball, Banks has studied, honed and mastered the smile. ![]()
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