In an age where airbrushing rules supreme, we no longer expect celebrities to actually look like their magazine or screen images.
It comes as a strangely reassuring sort of surprise then, when Claudia Schiffer looks, well, just like Claudia Schiffer. For a start, she is so tall that tilting my head to look upwards at her face feels like staring up at one of her billboards. Then there is her skin: taut, unlined, and as creamy and pale as a panna cotta. Her cheekbones are arched and cat-like, her eyes a bright ice-blue. Her long, thick blonde hair is straight out of a Timotei advert – it’s the kind of thick, shiny mane that men want to tousle, and schoolgirls want to plait.
Schiffer is here in the Milan offices of D&G (Dolce & Gabbana’s “contemporary line”) – a chic, white-walled and floored building busy with Italians wearing all-black – as one of the faces of the brand’s new perfume series. The campaign also features fellow “supers” Naomi Campbell and Eva Herzigova – who is swishing through the building, all long lean legs in spray-on jeans and peroxide blonde hair – and three male models. There are five unisex fragrances in the collection, and each one represents a different character trait. Schiffer is La Lune, a fresh white floral. “It’s meant to be quite soft and sensual, mysterious, charismatic and also calming,” explains Schiffer in a very un-self-conscious, matter-of-fact fashion, as if she was listing recipe ingredients. “In that sense it is like me because I am a very balanced person. I am calm most of the time.” Indeed, the 39-year-old model has a very serene presence. As she talks, she gestures gently with graceful, balletic movements that bear little resemblance to the hyperbolic, verging-on-hysterical hand waving generally associated with fashion types.
This calmness is often mistaken for seriousness, perhaps a bit of squareness. While Schiffer’s career might have been kick-started by her resemblance to Brigitte Bardot and her playfully sexual image, she is also known as being the sensible supermodel who has escaped the various drug habits, mental breakdowns, temper tantrums, court appearances, tempestuous relationships – or, gasp! – ageing that have afflicted various members of the supermodel gang. Schiffer hasn’t had any major relationship scandals – although her pairing with perma-tanned magician David Copperfield in the Nineties was a bizarre match which met with some surprise, not to mention sarcastic headlines about how the model was under his spell. She is very anti-drugs, as is husband Matthew Vaughn, the film producer, director and mate of Guy Ritchie, with whom she was set up by friends in 2001.
–Agencies