Laura Craik
“Never meet your heroes,” they say – so perhaps it’s just as well that, while I’ve sat down with many models, I’ve never interviewed Christy Turlington. Although my husband did in 2003. “What was she like?” I asked immediately afterwards. “Really lovely,” he said. “So beautiful, it was kind of disconcerting.” He went on to write that “she walks with the strange, elegant weightlessness of an antelope”.
When I was a fashion student in the 1990s, Christy was the model on my pin board. While her contemporaries – Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista and Naomi Campbell – are all generational beauties, it was Christy my fellow students and I most wanted to dress like and look like.
We loved her classicism: a cable-knit sweater, the perfect jeans. Christy was doing “quiet luxury” decades before it became a cliché. While The Row was yet to exist, she wore the 1990s equivalents: understated labels such as Calvin Klein, lesser-known labels such as Katayone Adeli (RIP), and classic soft tailoring by Giorgio Armani.
Of all the recent autumn/winter ad campaigns to have been released in the northern hemisphere, it’s Turlington’s for Giorgio Armani that seems to have had the most impact. Photographed by Oliver Hadlee Pearch, a series of images depicts the 57-year-old supermodel dressed in a selection of looks including a charcoal-grey blazer, a leather trench coat and a dark-green velvet suit.
Apart from Turlington’s natural (and barely retouched) beauty, what’s most striking about the images is their integrity. Which might seem a pretentious word to use, were it not for the fact that too many ad campaigns these days feature models who look like they’re playing dress-up for the day. A brand will hire the latest face and plonk them in clothes they look as if they’ve been paid to wear. Which they have – handsomely. But as a consequence, it can all look one-dimensional, with little depth.
Since Giorgio Armani passed away in September 2025, aged 91, the brand has been in a state of flux, the continuity of Armani’s 50-year reign as its founder and sole designer halted abruptly by his passing. In this context, casting Turlington makes perfect sense. Apart from the fact that, at 57, she’s a rare and beloved beauty, eschewing a new face for the familiarity of an older one lends the brand a continuity it could be in danger of lacking.
Clearly, Turlington isn’t Armani, but she’s arguably his closest model ambassador, sharing his love of understatement. Her relationship with the late designer dates back to the early 1990s, when she appeared in his spring/summer 1991 catwalk show at the peak of the supermodel era. But she also genuinely loves and wears his clothes. And even though Armani’s autumn/winter collection is the first to be designed by his niece, Silvana Armani, the messaging is that she will continue to do so.
Whether wearing Armani or not, Turlington has always subscribed to that “old money” aesthetic that has become something of a fetish among younger Gen Z audiences on social media platforms such as TikTok. As one of the most successful models of the 1990s, with lucrative contracts with Maybelline and Calvin Klein, Turlington was enmeshed in high fashion yet somehow always managed to stand apart from it.
While her friend and contemporary Linda Evangelista changed her hair and wardrobe at the same pace as the trend cycle, Turlington’s barely altered. Her hair was typically swept back from her face and fastened in a simple bun, a style she wears to this day. Her wardrobe, meanwhile, was largely comprised of roll necks, blazers, loafers and jeans – but classic jeans.
This, of course, is the quintessence of “old money”: wearing classic pieces that never date. Like Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, Turlington preferred to reach for a suite of labels that suited her, rather than chasing fads. While she loved Armani and Chanel, she was particularly loyal to American fashion, frequently wearing Donna Karan and Ralph Lauren as well as Calvin Klein.
“Christy is gracious, kind, funny and very mischievous,” says Lucinda Chambers, the co-founder of shopping platform Collagerie and before that British Vogue’s fashion director for 36 years. “She wears her beauty so lightly. She has no vanity, which makes her a brilliant model.
“Her lack of self-consciousness and spontaneity make her a joy to work with, always. I remember being on a trip to India with [photographer] Arthur Elgort, with Christy and Kate Moss. They sat on top of an elephant and took my breath away with their beauty.”
While some heroes turn out to be false gods, Christy is still up there on her pedestal, just nonchalantly being Christy. As she approaches 60, the hands of time have sheared nothing from her beauty. Her laughter lines and greying temples are a wholesome, rare reminder that it is possible to age naturally, even when you work at the summit of fashion and are married to a Hollywood actor (her 23-year marriage to Edward Burns is one of the most enduring in the entertainment business).
So many of her contemporaries are reaching for the scalpel and/or the airbrush, choices they’re perfectly at liberty to make. We all age in our own way. To the fans who grew up with her, however, that Turlington seems to have changed very little feels like an anchor of sorts in discombobulating times. “I’ve always been more of a ‘less is more’ kind of person,” she told Harper’s Bazaar in 2020.
It takes confidence to stand still. But in doing so, she’s stood the test of time.
The Telegraph, UK
Get the best of Sunday Life magazine delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning. Sign up for our newsletter.
