Valletta is a contributing sustainability editor at British Vogue and a sustainability ambassador for the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. Her values around sustainability, she explains, now lead her career choices. In the past year, she has walked for only Michael Kors, Balenciaga and Stella McCartney, and starred in campaigns for Lyma skincare and Tiffany & Co. These days, though, she is incredibly selective about what she will say yes to. And this isn’t tokenism – she is getting the best jobs of the lot. She spent almost a decade away to raise her son, and focus on acting in the early 2000s, but triumphantly returned to the catwalk again at 40. When so many fizzled out (or were, more specifically, dismissed by what has traditionally been an ageist industry), she is as in demand as ever. ‘I’ve been in the fashion industry 35 years,’ she nods. She launched Tom Ford’s Gucci in 1995, and modelled Jennifer Lopez’s Versace jungle dress before the singer even knew she wanted it. She cut her teeth with Karl Lagerfeld, and her hair for Vogue. Her clique was the ‘waifs’ – she shared her first model apartment in New York with best friend Shalom Harlow, and a ‘cute little British girl’ called Kate Moss had just arrived in the city and came over to hang out. But I am looking back at how fast everything went and is going.’Īs a second-wave supermodel, Valletta arrived in the early 1990s, immediately after the famous four: Naomi, Christy, Cindy and Linda. It’s not that I think there’ll be fireworks – it won’t be any different than it is today. ‘I’m turning 50, I’m 25 years sober, I’ve been with my partner for 10 years. She is approaching, arguably, the biggest year of her life. When we speak, she’s sitting in her Los Angeles home office, make-up free, wearing an old Alaïa T-shirt and holding a chihuahua. She’s open and warm trusting, raw and honest. By the end of our hour together, she concludes we have ‘had therapy’.īut Valletta is not like other supermodels – she’s not the never-complain-never-explain type. It would be a frank start to any interview, let alone one with a supermodel. “He transforms the people who come before his lens into the most beautiful versions of themselves.‘I’m doing a lot of self-reflection right now,’ admits Amber Valletta. “When you work with Steven you simply know that you are in the hands of a master,” said Ortega Pérez on the occasion of the exhibition. Steven Meisel New York represents a new chapter in the photographer’s long collaboration with the Spanish fashion juggernaut, which began with him shooting its seasonal campaigns and culminated last year with the exhibition Steven Meisel 1993: A Year In Photographs in A Coruña, a show made possible by Inditex and its chair Marta Ortega Pérez. Now, in a table-turning moment, Meisel is behind a new collection at Zara, landing in stores and online this month. Meisel isn’t just the best, he’s known for bringing the best out of his subjects. Ask any of them what they learned from working with the venerated photographer and the same few words recur: movement, self-expression, intimacy, effortlessness, elegance. His portraits, after all, are one of the reasons they’ve achieved such nomenclature. Name a mononymous model and it’s a sure bet they’ve been photographed by Steven Meisel. Linda, Amber, Irina, Gigi, Kaia, Sora, Alton.
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