Songfacts®:

• "Supermodel" is best known for its use in the 1995 movie Clueless, where it plays as Cher and Dionne give Tai a dramatic makeover so she can fit in with the cool kids at their high school in Beverly Hills, where being skinny enough and pretty enough to make other girls green with envy is a major life goal.
  
  The movie takes a lot of jabs at rich-kid culture, and the song does as well. Here's the hook:
  
  I'm young and I'm here and so beautiful
  I'm gonna be a supermodel
  
  The song lets us know that this vanity-driven makeover probably won't work out in the end.
• The song was written specifically for the movie Clueless by a team of four writers that includes David Baerwald (formerly of the rock duo David & David) and David Kitay, who scored the film. Baerwald was far from being a trendy schoolgirl, so he turned to teen magazines for advice.
  
  "I remember thinking, 'Oh I don't know how teenage girls think,'" he told Flavorwire. "So I got an issue of Sassy magazine and I read the letters to the editor. I think even got lyrics from the letters page. Every demographic has its way of talking, and I wanted to capture a sense of the rhythm and the kinds of things girls were talking about. I thought Sassy was really cool!"
• Sobule thought Clueless was going to be "some dumb teenage movie" but changed her tune after seeing the film. "I saw the movie and thought it was freaking great," she said. "It was feminist and I thought this was gonna be good for the girls. I was surprised and hated myself for having a bad attitude at first."
• Jill Sobule, who died in a house fire in 2025, wrote her own songs and agreed to record "Supermodel" on the condition that she could add the spoken part that goes:
  
  I didn't eat yesterday, I didn't eat today
  I didn't eat tomorrow so I'm gonna be a supermodel
  
  This earned her a writing credit on the song (lucrative, since the Clueless soundtrack sold over a million copies) and allowed her to "bring some social consciousness" into it.
  
  "In the '80s for three years I had an eating disorder," she told Nylon. "So it came to me and I had my three cents; my kind of sense of humor, but with a purpose."
• The song first appeared on Jill Sobule's self-titled album in April 1995, three months before Clueless hit theaters.
  
  The first single from the album was "I Kissed A Girl," a groundbreaking song about two women who are irresistibly attracted to each other (in 2008 Katy Perry used the same title in her first hit). Buoyed by a clever video, that song rose to #67 in the US weeks before the movie came out. "Supermodel" was Sobule's next single, and it didn't chart.
  
  Her career stalled commercially by the end of the decade, and Clueless music supervisor Karyn Rachtman thinks the song may have had something to do with it. "I really love Jill Sobule, but I think 'Supermodel' might have been the death of her career," she explained. "Her first song, 'I Kissed a Girl,' was a novelty song, and then this song kind of had a novelty feel to it."
• The music video is based on the 1976 movie Carrie, where Sissy Spacek's character exacts revenge after she is pranked at prom. Jill Sobule plays a similar character in the video, but the climactic scene is a talent show.
• "Supermodel" was the only song on the Clueless soundtrack written specifically for the film. Other songs used in the movie include "Kids In America" by Kim Wilde and "Tenderness" by General Public.