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Queen of the catwalk
Carmen Dell’Orefice’s glittering career as a model has spanned six decades, and as Judy Rumbold discovers, her grace and stamina set her apart from today’s breed of young fashion hopefuls
Carmen Dell’Orefice is routinely referred to as “the world’s oldest working model”, which makes her sound a bit like a rusting traction engine with, perhaps, compromised bodywork and limited functioning parts. It would be nice to be able to report that, at 76, this catwalk veteran is in flawless working order, but when I meet her she is lying on a sofa in a corner of the photographic studio, her face obscured behind sunglasses, barely moving and facing the wall. Everything about her body language says, “Go away”. I am apprehensive. A young model in a strop is bad enough, but an older, grander one with more than 60 years’ experience and photographs by Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, Cecil Beaton and Horst P Horst to her name is altogether more worrying. The Carmen Dell’Orefice of legend, with the knife-edge cheekbones, startling blue eyes and cloud of white hair, has about her the sort of hauteur that suggests she might easily have an icily Snow Queenish way with a withering put-down.
I approach gingerly, at which point she whips off the glasses, sits bolt upright and greets me with the warmest smile. Arthritic toes, she explains cheerfully – a legacy of her days dancing with the Ballets Russes in New York – are the reason for her lying down, coupled with fatigue after a late night and little sleep thanks to hotel pillows like boulders. She looks as if she should be at home, parked in front of Countdown with a milky drink. I ask her why on earth she didn’t kick up a stink with the hotel management. She looks aghast. “What, and come over as the ugly American, complaining?” Throwing hissy fits might come naturally to some of today’s pushy fashion folk, but Carmen Dell’Orefice is from a different era. She is gracious and gloriously old-school in her approach to her profession. While a younger girl might cry off for a broken fingernail, Dell’Orefice is not going to let aching feet and tiredness mar an assignment. Some of today’s models turn up for shoots looking like filthy, sleep-deprived crack addicts, but she arrived immaculately turned out.
What becomes clear is that she feels privileged still to be doing a job that started with her first Vogue cover at the age of 15. She has had five more since, with recent career highlights including Jean Paul Gaultier’s first show for Hermès in 2004 and John Galliano’s Dior haute couture show (pictured overleaf) in 2000. And to think her mother dismissed her as an ungainly child with “ears like sedan chairs and feet like coffins”. It took a bus passenger, all those years ago, to see beyond the ears and feet. Journeying from a dance class in New York, she was spotted by a woman whose husband was a photographer for Harper’s Bazaar. Test pictures were taken, after which a letter was sent to her mother. “It said I was a very polite young lady but, unfortunately, at this time, I was unphotogenic,” she recalls. But her godfather contacted a friend who worked for Vogue. “Two weeks later, I did my first shoot for Horst.” She recounts a meeting, when she was 14, with the legendary editor Diana Vreeland.
“She ran her hands through my chestnut locks and said, ‘Grow your neck another inch and I’ll send you to Paris.’” The rest is history. “My life has been amazing,” she sighs. “How many other ladies of 76 can say that the snapshot on their senior citizen’s card was taken by Norman Parkinson?”
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