Not without reason has modeling been termed the ugly business of being beautiful. Opaque, barely regulated and often cutthroat, it is seldom viewed as an incubator of big-hearted altruists. Instrumental over his 30-year career in finding and then shaping the careers of some of the most stellar names in the business — among them, Gisele Bündchen, Liya Kebede, Carolyn Murphy, Gigi Hadid, Stephanie Seymour, Tyra Banks, Kate Upton and Joan Smalls — he was also an early champion of diversity and inclusion and a canny marketer with a gift for anticipating shifts in the overall cultural mood. When Mr. Bart went to IMG after a previous job heading Ford Models, “people still thought of models as having a use-by date,” said James Scully, a retired casting agent and himself a noted star-maker. “It was, ‘You had your moment, and now there’s a new car in town.’”Mr. Bart, by contrast, took a long view of the talents he helped foster and had a singular ability to recalibrate a model’s trajectory, often more than once over the course of their career.

---

Persons: Ivan Bart, Fern Mallis, ”, Bart, Gisele Bündchen, Liya Kebede, Carolyn Murphy, Gigi Hadid, Stephanie Seymour, Tyra Banks, Kate Upton, Joan Smalls —, James Scully, ‘, ’, Mr Organizations: IMG, Ford