The original supermodel has been a fashion player for 30 years. At 49, she reflects on making waves in the nineties and her new plans for the twenties.
Photographs by Sebastian Kim, Styling by Aurelia Donaldson, Words by Farrah Storr
The view from Claudia Schiffer’s kitchen window is wide and green. Field follows field, broken only by a small coppice and then, in the far distance, the lights of a small town down below. This is the less flashy side of Oxfordshire, the side far from the area of the Cotswolds now dominated by spotless Range Rovers and private members’ clubs. It is where farmers still farm and pubs are untouched by Farrow & Ball. It is not where one would expect an original supermodel to be found, gazing out on a landscape as big as a Gursky, on the cusp of her 50th birthday.
Then again, Claudia Schiffer never was like any other supermodel. She was quieter, more serious, more steely. There was a sense she was there for the work, not for the play. She did not routinely tread the red carpet or shimmy up to rock stars. Pull the clips, do the internet trawl, ask around... but you’ll be hard-pressed to find a single image of Claudia Schiffer sat on a lap, snorting with laughter over a bottle of Bollinger.
Let’s be clear: Claudia Schiffer was, for at least the 1990s, one of the most famous women on earth. She was a supermodel, part of the phenomenally powerful collective of women who owned the catwalks, snaffled every luxury ad campaign and could sell anything to anyone. Supermodel... today the term is tossed about with gracious abandon, but really, if we’re being completely honest, there were only ever five: Linda, Christy, Cindy, Naomi and Claudia.
‘I never had that urge to be in the limelight,’ she tells me, as we settle into two worn leather chairs in what I assume is her living room, but feels more like an art gallery. It is a cloudless February morning. Sun pours through the floor-to-ceiling windows as a lone cat moves languorously from room to room. Art hangs on every wall and on the coffee table sits a rather incongruous bowl of Quality Street.
‘When I started modelling, I didn’t go to an agency saying, “I want to be a model.” And I never looked at it as, “I want to be famous,” either,’ she says. ‘So I came at the angle of, “I want to be good at it and I want to be at the top.”’
The story of how she was ‘spotted’ as a 17-year-old in a Düsseldorf nightclub is now legend. She was tall, gangly and knock-kneed. Her bum ‘stuck out’. She was there, so the story goes, with a far more attractive friend, and yet it was Schiffer the model agent wanted. She cut a deal with her parents: she would postpone her law degree and learn French while she tried to make it as a model, then return home when it inevitably didn’t work out.
By 1989 however, a Guess campaign shot by Ellen von Unwerth unleashed her into the world – a juicy, cantilevered approximation of a young Bardot – her image lining every adolescent’s bedroom from Innsbrook to Idaho. It was the first step on a fashion treadmill whose speed and incline only increased from there. She became known by her first name alone, opened and closed couture shows, was a muse for Karl Lagerfeld and quickly became accustomed to a life under the giant insect eye of a genuflecting public.
It’s been 30 years since the supermodels first reigned... but their impact still settles over the fashion world like table confetti left behind from the world’s brightest party. Schiffer will turn 50 this year. Fifty. Can you believe it? Fifty used to be the age when the world stopped watching – the gateway to old. But not any more. On the day we meet, JLo has just kamikazed her way around the Super Bowl stage with all the energy and slink of a tiger cub. At 52, Julia Roberts is splashed across the papers in an Eres bikini with the words ‘sizzling’ festooned above her image. Minnie Driver’s birthday, meanwhile, is furiously trending on social media as the world scratches its head, slack-jawed and saying: ‘She’s 50?’
Schiffer, too, is a bright semaphore for what experience and age bring to the table. She still fronts ad campaigns (she is, three decades later, still a face of Chanel – this time for its J12 watches), paparazzi lenses still twitch when she walks by and she is still the great beauty she once was. Less bouncy, sure. Instead her beauty is contained in a much more still vessel, the patina of time and experience lending her an almost handsome quality. She barely drinks, she tells me – and, despite being a sugar addict, has been sugar-free for the last few months. (Her pets, past and present, bear the names Rollo, Smartie and Milka). She’s not big on exercise, though, she says – a bit of barre here, tennis with friends, walking the dogs – she could take it or leave it.
I ask whether it’s harder to age when beauty has defined your entire life. She smiles.
‘I’ve had many wonderful compliments in my time,’ she says. 'But then you get to the next stage and you move on. You don’t have to be called [beautiful] your entire life. It’s a nice memory, but then the next generation starts and you hand over. For me, it’s a natural thing to do... to hand over, to not be envious or jealous. As a matter of fact, I can’t think of anything worse right now than if you said, “There’s a magic pill and it’s going to make you look 20 again.”’
Her life now is full, but less hectic. She is married to film director Matthew Vaughn and much of their time is spent shuttling their brood (they have three children, all of whose privacy is meticulously well kept) between their home in Oxfordshire and a beautiful Tudor pile buried deep in the folds of Suffolk. She still works furiously hard, largely behind the scenes and on creative projects undertaken out of personal interest rather than to maintain any sort of profile. She is about to launch a collection of sweatshirts, knitwear and tees with French-inspired brand Être Cécile and there is a collaboration this year with Portuguese ceramics company Bordallo Pinheiro, inspired by her love of nature, such as butterflies and clouds. She was also (Trivial Pursuit question) one of the executive producers on Rocketman and the Kingsman films.
Granting an interview in her home is a rare thing, simply because she doesn’t do every magazine cover offered any more. She doesn’t have to. She has done them all. Still she was intrigued at the idea of revisiting the clothes that helped make her – the baby pink Versace jumper that in the flesh is as teeny and tactile as a powder puff; the sugary Chanel tweed jacket and matching bra; the gold lamé shimmer dress that she wore in 2017 on the Versace runway to commemorate Gianni Versace’s death. Most of the clothes on these pages she pillaged from her own wardrobe – a glorious, temperature-controlled archive meticulously documenting different pieces from her supermodel heyday. No, life for Claudia Schiffer right now is... exactly where she has always wanted it to be.
The assumption is the Supers rolled along on casters of confidence. And to some degree that is true. Cindy bounced in front of the cameras for her MTV show, House of Style; Naomi never looked more at home than when she was on a dancefloor with Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton.
But Schiffer’s case was different.
‘In comparison to the other girls, I was very strange because I wouldn’t speak to anyone much while in the studio. Everyone would be chatting and going crazy. They probably all thought I was very arrogant... and it was seen as coldness sometimes, because people assumed “She’s not interested” or “She doesn’t want to communicate”.
‘The nerves before a catwalk show could be intense sometimes. I enjoyed them when they were over and we were all celebrating, but before I did not enjoy it. And getting there, I literally had to convince myself to go to each one. It was a very fast learning curve. Suddenly I was thrown into this world... I just thought: Close your eyes and jump in.’
And jump in she did, to a world that was as punishing as it was fabulous.
‘It was insane... like being like a rock star. You couldn’t get to your car unless a path was carved for you. People would cut holes in the fashion tents and try to take pictures of us. We had security at every fashion show.’ Security was even employed to guard her underwear, she tells me, laughing. ‘When I was out on the runway I’d come back and constantly my underwear would be gone – my bra, my knickers... gone!’
There is a sense when you talk to Claudia Schiffer that, where others lived through the 1990s, she worked her way through them. ‘I remember one day sitting next to [film director] Luc Besson on a first-class flight. I loved all of his films but all I thought was: Oh no! My shyness kicked in and I thought, I’m just going to pretend to be sleeping the whole time, so I don’t have to speak to him. And then there was Michael J Fox. I thought he was amazing. I bumped into him somewhere and I couldn’t even say hello. He asked me to work with him on a TV series, but I said no. It was too much!’
The other opportunities she passed up were vast, she says. ‘People normally showered you with everything, really. Particularly at Chanel. Karl [Lagerfeld] would say, “Go downstairs to the boutique and take whatever you want. You can take the entire collection – whatever.” Where others may have taken advantage, I never felt I could. There’s a certain limit when someone says, “Choose what you want.” You don’t literally choose everything there is. Once Hermès offered for a handbag to be named after me and I thought, No! I don’t quite remember why now...’
And then, of course, there was the Freedom! ’90 video, now a sort of cultural relic, both for George Michael and the supermodels who lip synced their way through it: Linda, Christy, Naomi, Cindy and Tatjana Patitz.
She laughs. ‘Oh, the George Michael video where everyone participated... I was working with a lot of high-end brands at that time and I just thought, That doesn’t fit with the strategy right now.’ There’s a pause. ‘It was stupid.’
If this all makes her sound rather like the school prefect of supermodels, you’d be wrong. One on one, on home turf, Schiffer is smiley, funny, easy. Her warmth is not immediate, but it builds like a furnace.
‘I think the term was, “She’s very professional,”’ she says when recalling her reputation. ‘I would just do my work and go: “I’m leaving! I’m rushing out the door!” There were constantly parties after dinner, but I always thought, I must succeed, I must be the best, I must go from place to place and not take time off. So there was rarely “Let’s have drinks” afterwards. It’s very dangerous opening that up, and sometimes unpredictable. I was lucky. But I would definitely say to the younger generation of models, it’s a job at the end of the day – just don’t mix it in with anything else. Sometimes, of course, you can’t avoid it, even with those rules.’
Schiffer becomes firm when talking about fashion and the harsher edges she has witnessed firsthand. She admits she was spared any form of sexual intimidation during that time, but intimidation made itself known in other areas.
‘I have seen it and it’s not nice,’ she says. ‘I’m not talking about sexual terms, but just bullying and exercising of power that you don’t need. Or asking for things that you don’t need. I’ve seen that a lot and I’ve made a mental note that I don’t want to work with those people again. And I haven’t.’
She won’t be drawn on names but will say rather cryptically: 'Sometimes they are not great people, but at the same time the photos are really great and sometimes you make compromises. And that’s life...’
She is proud, however, of how the supermodels used their own power to boycott those in the industry known for foul play. ‘There was camaraderie in that sense. If somebody had a bad experience or if they felt they were treated unfairly, [we] would call everyone and say, “By the way, this just happened.” We thought, We have the power all together and we should use it, because this is wrong. We made things change.’
Often with celebrities for whom fame was most prominent early on in life, there is a reluctance to dwell on the past. They edge away from it, as though the association somehow confirms their altered status. Not Schiffer. There is an ease when she talks about the supermodel days, the sort of fondness only afforded those who never felt defined by it.
As the interview wraps up, she walks me to the door. She asks what my husband does for a living. I explain that he is a writer. She smiles and there is a short pause. ‘I think, for me, being a writer is the perfect job. You’re known for your name, not particularly for how you look. So you can have a completely private life, yet have all the glory from your name. And you can do it from wherever you are. You can just do your bit of work, live in the middle of nowhere and [your work] speaks for itself.’
With that, I leave her in her own middle of nowhere; a striking figure on a gravel driveway whose own name stands for far more than she will ever know.
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