Cindy Crawford on beauty and ‘age maintenance’

As fashion month continues, the pioneering supermodel talks ’90s nostalgia, career gambling, and embracing aging.

It’s hard to imagine Cindy Crawford looking scared. The supermodel’s trademark gaze is fearless, after all, and when she makes direct eye contact and flashes a faint smile, Crawford always looks like she’s reminiscing about a funny joke. But just before the iconic model turned 35 in 2001, she found herself “a little scared.”

“I was under contract with Revlon for almost 13 years,” Crawford told the BBC from her Los Angeles home. “They were great for me, but at the time, models only lasted until 35. That was the industry’s thinking at the time.” As her million-dollar beauty contract came up for renewal, the tabloids accused Crawford of being “too old” and had the paparazzi capture her every move for their covers. She had just given birth to her daughter, the now-famous Kaia Gerber; her first child, Presley Gerber (who still models), was a toddler. “So I thought, ‘Okay, am I going to just ride off into the sunset, or am I going to take a bet on myself and do what I want?’ I knew I had to take a bet on myself,” she says. “It was a gamble.”

But Crawford is something of a genius when it comes to gambling on her career. In the fashion world, she’s been playing poker for years while others have been yelling “Uno!”. Crawford went from Midwestern catalog model to European catwalk star, and was one of the first models to work simultaneously with luxury and mass-market brands, appearing in a Pepsi commercial in 1991 and walking in fashion shows for Ralph Lauren and Versace. In 1996, she posed nude for Playboy while also serving as the face of luxury watch brand Omega. Her years on MTV’s House of Style helped transform Parisian haute couture into pop culture.

These high-low swoops are commonplace today. Gigi Hadid Victoria’s Secret And Miu Miu. Kendall Jenner represents Uber Eats and Calvin Klein. Crawford pioneered it by wearing Chanel heels and Hanes undershirts.

Starting a make-up brand would have been an easy choice for a model who had millions of women smearing their lips with dodgy brown lipstick in the ’90s, but Crawford had a different idea. She wanted to explore the emerging “French girl beauty” trend at the time, and enlisted the help of Parisian dermatologist Dr. Jean-Louis Sebag. “There was no word for it then. There was no social media,” Crawford explains. “But in 2001, Was I have the image that French women are very beautiful, take care of themselves, and are very chic even as they get older. And I thought, ‘I can really understand how they feel! Dr. Sebag is amazing!'”

Crawford also admired and agreed with Sebag’s “no panic” approach to skin in her 30s. “He calls his job age maintenance, which is practical: taking care of it and trying to look as good as you can for as long as you can, rather than fighting the age you’ve got.” The two decided to work together to bottle Sebag’s antioxidant facial formula, which Crawford first used in Sebag’s Paris clinic. They called it Meaningful Beauty, negotiated with high-end department stores, and then launched the product themselves with infomercials.

“It was really important to me that Meaningful Beauty was accessible to everyone,” Crawford says. “Plus, beauty tutorials and TikToks are basically little infomercials, right? Back then, infomercials were like, cheesy jing-soo knives.” Now, direct-to-consumer beauty lines are the norm, and branded videos are the norm. Meaningful Beauty created branded videos with some of its Gen-X celebrity friends, including Grey’s Anatomy star Ellen Pompeo, 54, and Sex and the City’s Kristin Davis, 59.

Meanwhile, Crawford herself has become something of a TV star thanks to her 2023 Apple TV+ documentary series. SupermodelThe show chronicled Crawford’s rise alongside Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista and Christy Turlington. Strange “We looked to the fashion industry back then,” Crawford says, “really! The generation before us was all blonde, blue-eyed girls. They called them ‘all-American,’ but of course, being American is so much more than that. In that environment, we were expanding our notions of beauty. Does that sound crazy now?”

Crawford said the show has been so successful that TV executives are discussing a second season. “I was thinking, ‘If we’re going to do this, what fashion story do we want to tell next?’ If you look at what’s happening in the fashion world, there’s something amazing happening. There’s so much more diversity in skin color, body types, nationalities and ages than there used to be. So I said, ‘If we’re going to do this, [Apple] For the show to be back on the air, we need to continue to make the case that beauty has many different faces.”

They also share some commonalities. Case in point: Crawford’s 23-year-old daughter, Kaia Gerber, who looks nearly identical to her famous mother in photos and occasionally wears her mom’s old runway looks on various red carpet appearances. At the Toronto Film Festival last week, Gerber wore a white Herve Léger bandage dress, a recreation of the Oscar dress her mother famously wore in 1993. “I never expected trends to come back like this,” Crawford says of her sudden love for ’90s style.

But Crawford is less interested in looking back and more interested in thinking about what to do tomorrow. “I’ve gotten to the point where I’m giving long, 45-minute speeches about issues I care about, which is a big challenge,” she says. Crawford is also discussing new business ideas with her husband, Rande Gerber, who co-owns the billion-dollar tequila brand Casamigos with George Clooney. “We have very different brains. We bounce ideas off each other. We don’t always understand each other’s ideas, but we understand each other’s perspectives.” other.”

Crawford continues to work as a model, currently appearing for both Donna Karan and Good American. “I honestly never thought I’d be photographed at this age,” she says. But wait, wasn’t Crawford told she was “too old” for international fashion campaigns once she turned 35?

“I mean,” she says, laughing, “I think they were wrong.”