Michele Pommier made Miami Beach a modeling paradise. She has died at 78
Michele Pommier, who led a transformation of Miami Beach into a modeling magnet with her namesake agency, was an original Virginia Slims model in the 1970s’ “You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby” ad campaign.
At the height of a modeling career that began in 1968, her face was one of the world’s most recognizable. She graced magazine covers like Town & Country, Mademoiselle, McCall’s and Harper’s Bazaar, and she was also the “Clairol Model.”
Pommier modeled alongside pre-“American Gigolo” actress Lauren Hutton with lions and panthers strolling around the pair on the set early in her career. She partied at New York’s Studio 54 in the late-1970s with movie and rock stars that included Mick Jagger, Liza Minnelli and Cher, and jetted off to exotic locales around the world for photo shoots.
From her upbringing in Connecticut society to the world stage to South Florida after arriving in Coral Gables with husband, pro golfer Peter Diel in 1978, and settling her modeling agency on South Beach soon after, Pommier came a long way, indeed, baby.
Pommier died of cancer in Miami on April 11 at 78, her family and friends told the Miami Herald. They remember a trailblazer. When she envisioned South Beach as ground zero for a modeling empire, the area was derisively dubbed “God’s Waiting Room” for its predominant population of senior citizens.
“When Michele Pommier arrived on the scene, the vibrant colors of South Beach had yet to be fully painted onto the Art Deco treasures,” said Lisa Cole, Hilton’s director of communications. “Michele had vision. She saw potential, embraced risk and helped shape Miami Beach’s rise as a global destination. She recognized the city as a stunning backdrop of creativity and possibility for her clients and models.”
Pommier’s modeling career
Pommier’s possibilities began when she was 14. Family friend, celebrity photographer Milton Greene, famed for his black and white photographs of Marilyn Monroe inside his New York City studio in 1956, asked to photograph Pommier. Her mom said “OK,” and the image of Pommier in a burlap bag on a hill ran in Life magazine.
Born to Lorraine and Henri Pommier in Westport, Connecticut, on Feb 27, 1948, Pommier was jazzed after that experience with Greene. She wanted to become a professional model like the celebrities he had photographed, which included Elizabeth Taylor, Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly and Judy Garland.
But her parents wanted her to get an education first. She compromised.
Greene did her first test shots in New York, and she attended the University of Miami but only for her freshman year. She was selected by a scout for Glamour for the magazine’s “Best Dressed College Students” issue. Eileen Ford saw the spread and signed her to her agency.
By 1968, her first year with Ford, she earned $75,000, moved to New York City, and paid her sister’s college tuition, she told the Miami Herald in 1996.
For nearly a decade, she traveled the world, landing magazine covers, the Virginia Slim’s spread — “the original Virginia Slims model, Cheryl Tiegs was the blond and I was the brunet,” she told the Herald in 1992. She filmed a commercial for Givenchy and was featured in a worldwide beauty campaign for L’Oréal Cosmetics.
And there was that famed photo shoot with model-turned-actress Lauren Hutton with the wild cats as accessories.
“Lauren and I were the only two models in New York City who would do it. Can you imagine? I loved it,” she told Ocala Style Magazine in 2019, three years after she and her husband bought a second home there in North Central Florida.
Leaving modeling for Miami
But after nine years in the whirlwind of high-fashion modeling, Pommier, soon to be wed to Diel, was ready to parlay her talents to train others in Miami Beach.
The oceanfront city may have had the Fontainebleau appearing in movies like 1964’s “Goldfinger,” and landmark restaurant Joe’s Stone Crab, which drew celebrities — then and now. But it was hardly the glamour scene for modeling shoots across the street from faded Art Deco hotels.
NBC’s Michael Mann-helmed crime procedural “Miami Vice” and its effect on South Beach’s visual transformation in the mid- and late-1980s was still five years in the future when she opened Michele Pommier Models in 1979, the first modeling agency in Miami Beach.
“In the ‘70s when I was modeling, you either were a professional and a girl who took it seriously and made it, or you were a girl who lived in clubs and did drugs and had a very, very short career,” Pommier told the Herald in 1996.
She quit at the same time she had simultaneous covers on Bazaar and Town & Country magazines.
“I was bored with dressing-room talk. I was tired of living on airplanes. I didn’t want to be a model dragging out a career. I wanted to quit on top.”
So she set a goal of making Miami Beach a top spot for models.
Making Miami Beach model friendly
“She brought the stars that filled the pages of Ocean Drive. She gave this place its glamour, its ambition, its sense that anything was possible here. That was Michele,” said Joe’s Stone Crab owner Stephen Sawitz.
“When my family and I moved to South Beach in 1992 to launch Ocean Drive magazine, modeling was at the heart of the city’s energy. You couldn’t walk down Ocean Drive without seeing models, portfolios in hand, heading to castings — there was a sense that something big was unfolding. At the center of it all was Michele Pommier,” said Jacquelynn Powers, former owner and senior editor of Ocean Drive magazine and now editor-in-chief of Aventura magazine.
“Long before it was celebrated, Michele was a female founder shaping not just a scene, but an entire era,” Powers said.
Among the models Pommier helped groom from her South Beach headquarters were Christy Turlington, Charlize Theron and Paula Barbieri.
By 1996, her Pommier’s modeling agency was one of the biggest in the world, the Herald reported. That December, a Pommier Models Inc. office that she helped design took over The Foundlings’ 6,000-plus square-foot space in the Sterling Building at 927 Lincoln Rd.
“We gutted the whole place,” Pommier told the Herald at the time. “And we enclosed the whole terrace in the back. It’s all windows.”
Her agency’s several offices at the time, which included one in Atlanta, represented 800 models.
Along with figures like Miami Design Preservation League co-founder Barbara Capitman, Pommier was driven to advocate for the preservation and restoration of Miami Beach’s Art Deco buildings where she also had her agencies — one of them, a lavish office two doors from Joe’s.
“From the very beginning, I saw something in her that reminded me deeply of Mom,” he said in reference to restaurant matriarch Jo Ann Bass, “two fearless visionaries who carried the torch for this city, refusing to let it be anything less than extraordinary,” Sawitz said.
“Alongside Barbara Capitman, Michael Mann and Christo, she helped forge the identity of Miami Beach at a time when its future was far from certain. She did not simply witness that transformation — she drove it. She put things on the map that had no name yet, and she left her mark on every corner of it,” Sawitz said.
READ MORE: Jo Ann Bass, matriarch of Miami Beach landmark Joe’s Stone Crab, dies at 94
Survivors and services
Pommier’s survivors include her husband, Peter Diel; her son, David Diel; daughter Jacqueline Pommier Diel, who assumes ownership of Michele Pommier Models at 5255 Collins Ave.; sisters Monica Pommier Kravitt and Denise Pommier Johnson; and grandchildren Love and Henri.
The family suggests that donations be made in Pommier’s memory to the American Cancer Society, SoBe Cats Spay & Neuter and the Miami Beach Community Cat Program.
Family services were private.
This story was originally published April 20, 2026 at 6:00 PM.
