When and if a peace is declared in the great Model War of 2016, Tyra Banks would like to have helped sow its seeds.

“I would hope that we could join together and be more of a family and not have such dissension,” she told Vanity Fair on Thursday evening, a day after a post she wrote calling for an end to the recent intergenerational feuding amid the runway pack had crashed her Web site. “I come from a divorced home, so maybe I just like things to be nice and healthy. I also feel the younger generation can learn from the older generation, and the older generation can learn from the younger generation. There’s power in connectivity as well.”

The veteran model and television presence’s essay called for bonhomie after Stephanie Seymour referred to Kendall Jenner and Gigi Hadid as “bitches of the moment” in jest when asked if the newcomers were worthy heirs to the supermodel title. (For the record, though the term is now tossed around with abandon, Seymour was one of the “Big Six” supermodels—along with Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Claudia Schiffer, Linda Evangelista, and Christy Turlington—that ruled the catwalks in their day). The incident illustrated the divide between the social media generation and the supers of the 90s, in which Jenner and Hadid are often held up as examples of models who took shortcuts past generations weren’t able to because of their pedigree and followings. In response, Jenner posted a message on her Web site in which she compared Seymour’s comments to cyberbullying. As Banks put it in her post: “I LIVE IN THE MIDDLE OF A CERTAIN WAR THAT IS RAGING RIGHT NOW. A MODEL WAR.”

But she may be in unique position to broker its truce.

“I have to say, I don’t think Stephanie Seymour at all was being nasty; I really think she was joking,” Banks told Vanity Fair when asked about her foray into the fray. “She’s one of the original Victoria’s Secret Angels. There’s five of us, and I spent a lot of time with her. She is just very precious, very sweet. I’ve never heard anything negative about her, or never saw her be negative or jealous or anything. It was taken out of context [by outlets that didn't note Seymour's joking tone], but I think it still opens up a conversation that is happening every day.”

Yet even as a veteran, Banks has an appreciation of the social media set. “From the outside, it looks so effortless, and so it makes people go, ‘What did you do to get where you are?’ And they might not have done all the crazy things I listed in my piece that the older girls or [Jenner and Hadid's] contemporaries have done, but they’re not sitting on their asses doing nothing and getting a bunch of accolades,” she said about Jenner and Hadid. “They’re working their butt off. I can tell; I’ve done it.”

Banks personally got a lot of flack when she segued from high fashion to more mass-market gigs with Sports Illustrated and Victoria’s Secret, and then started America’s Next Top Model. “A lot of people were like, ‘What the hell is she doing on TV? She’s putting our secrets and our exclusive world into this mass arena,’" she said. “So I got a lot of backlash. I tend to understand what’s happening now because I feel like there’s some connection of this to what a lot of the younger girls are doing now, which is reality television, social media, and acceptance from the mass audience that are loving them and creating stars."

Model infighting doesn’t just happen between the older and younger generations; there’s also a lot of resentment among some of the social media stars’ contemporaries. Banks passed along a story from a friend about a model at a top agency who was “pissed that this model she was on a job with was hired off of Instagram, and that this Instagram model got this job and didn’t know how to model. The model said something like, ‘It’s different modeling on a set than it is in your living room.’ She was pissed. This is a conversation that is everywhere, not just among the supers.”

Banks has managed to maintain a very kumbaya approach to the whole situation, which is why she felt the need to get involved. “Everybody comes from the same background,” she said. “It’s the same fashion houses, just a different designer designing for that line.”

And if right now you’re shaking your head about all of this, Tyra Banks would agree with you on that point, too. When asked where she hopes the conversation goes next, she replied, “I hope it goes away. I hope it’s a non-starter. That’s my objective. O.K. already, let’s move on. I’m happy that there are supermodels again.”

Basically, there’s enough room on the runway and Instagram for everyone to do their thing.