Cindy Crawford talks about beauty and aging – 09/28/2024 – Equilíbrio

It’s hard to imagine Cindy Crawford being scared. After all, the supermodel’s signature look is quite brave. She maintains direct eye contact and a slight smile, as if she is always remembering a great joke.

But just before her 35th birthday in 2001, Cindy Crawford remembers feeling “a little scared.”

“I was employed by Revlon for around 13 years”, the model tells the BBC, from her home in Los Angeles, in the United States.

“They were wonderful to me. But models didn’t last past 35. It was simply the thinking of the industry at the time.”

When it came time for her million-dollar beauty contract to be renewed, the tabloids called Crawford “too old.”

At the same time, they ironically deployed paparazzi to photograph the model’s every move to appear on their covers.

Crawford had just given birth to her now-famous daughter Kaia Gerber. Their first child, Presley Gerber (who is also a model), was a baby.

“And I said, ‘OK, am I just going to walk away? Or am I going to bet on myself and try to do something on my own?'” she says. “I just knew I had to give myself a chance. It was a gamble.”

And when it comes to career bets, Cindy Crawford is something of a genius. In the fashion world, she looks like a professional poker player.

Crawford was a model for American catalogs until she exploded onto the European catwalks. She was one of the first models to work simultaneously with popular brands and luxury designers.

In 1991, she starred in a Pepsi commercial, while also dominating the runways for Ralph Lauren and Versace. In 1996, she posed nude for Playboy while serving as the main face of luxury watch brand Omega. And the years she spent hosting MTV’s House of Style helped bring Parisian haute couture into popular culture.

These simultaneous forays into popular and high-profile areas are now common among models. Gigi Hadid is the face of Victoria’s Secret and Miu Miu, while Kendall Jenner represents Calvin Klein and Uber Eats.

But Cindy Crawford was the one who paved the way, parading in Chanel high heels and a Hanes T-shirt.

Founding a makeup brand would be a simple move for the model who convinced millions of women to wear the odd brown lipstick in the 1990s. But Crawford was planning something different.

She wanted to explore a nascent trend at the time called “French girl beauty.” To help her, she called her Parisian dermatologist, Jean-Louis Sebagh.

“We didn’t have a word for it at the time — there was no social media,” recalls Crawford.

“But in 2001, there was this idea about how French women maintain their appearance so well as they get older, how they take care of themselves and how they look so chic. And I thought ‘I know how they do it! It’s Dr. Sebagh !”

Crawford respected and agreed with Sebagh’s “no panic” technique regarding the skin of people in their 30s.

“He calls his work ‘age maintenance,'” she explains. “It’s a realistic thing. You’re taking care of yourself; you’re trying to look good for as long as possible. You’re not fighting against the years you’ve earned.”

Together, they decided to bottle Sebagh’s antioxidant facial formula, which Crawford began using at the doctor’s clinic in Paris. They called it Meaningful Beauty and spoke to luxury department stores before launching the product with an infomercial.

“It was very important that Meaningful Beauty was accessible to everyone,” explains Crawford.

“See, beauty tutorials and TikToks are basically little infomercials, right? Back then, infomercials resembled something like shoddy Ginsu knives.”

These days, it’s common to sell beauty lines direct to consumer and brand videos are the standard. Meaningful Beauty created its videos with famous Gen X friends, like Grey’s Anatomy star Ellen Pompeo, 54, and Sex and the City’s Kristin Davis, 59.

At the same time, Cindy Crawford herself became something of a TV star, thanks to the documentary series Supermodels (2023), on Apple TV+. The production shows Crawford’s rise, alongside Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista and Christy Turlington.

“I don’t think people realize how strange we seemed to be in the fashion industry at that time,” recalls Crawford.

“I’m serious! The generation before us were all blonde, blue-eyed girls. They called them ‘all-American,’ but of course American girls are so much more than that. In that environment, we were expanding the idea of ​​beauty. Doesn’t it seem crazy nowadays?”

Crawford says the series’ success was enough for TV executives to discuss a second season.

“I’ve been thinking, ‘If we do this, what fashion story do we want to tell next?’ And I look at what’s happened in fashion, which has been incredible. We have a much greater variety of skin colors, sizes, nationalities and ages. So I said, ‘If we have this program again, we have to keep advocating that. Beauty has many different aspects.”

And there are also aspects that are repeated. This is the case of Crawford’s daughter, Kaia Gerber, now 23 years old.

Gerber’s appearance is almost identical to her famous mother in photographs. Sometimes she walks the red carpet in the same dresses worn by Cindy Crawford on the catwalk.

At the Toronto Film Festival in Canada in September, Gerber wore a Hervé Léger bandage dress – a recreation of the famous dress worn by her mother at the 1993 Oscar ceremony.

“I never thought trends would come back like this,” says Crawford of the sudden attraction to 1990s style.

But Crawford is more interested in finding out what he will do tomorrow than in revisiting the past. “I’ve started offering longer, 45-minute talks on issues that concern me, and this is a big challenge.”

Crawford also discusses new business ideas with her husband, Rande Gerber, who co-owns the billion-dollar Casamigos tequila brand with actor George Clooney.

“We have very, very different brains,” she says. “We share things between us. We don’t always understand each other’s ideas, but we understand each other.”

And Crawford still models, currently for the brands Donna Karan and Good American. “Honestly, I had no idea that I would still be being photographed at this age,” she says.

But wait: didn’t people say Cindy Crawford was “too old” for international fashion campaigns at 35?

“Then [risos]I think they were wrong.”

Read the original version of this report (in English) on the BBC Culture website.