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Helena Christensen on Why Supermodels Became a Phenomenon

Helena ChristensenPhoto: BEN STANSALL/AFP/Getty Images

If you're the type of fashion-hungry person who laments the era of celebrities landing covers to promote their movies, and longs for another era of supermodels but can't put your finger on why, Helena Christensen explains her view on the matter to Elle. She and her fellow top models who ruled covers in the nineties, like Cindy Crawford and Naomi Campbell, were able to do so, she believes, because they were allowed to be themselves rather than monotonous-looking, personality-less stick figures forced to conform to someone else's extreme idea of beauty.

Why do you think supermodels became such a phenomenon when they did?

Sometimes, moments just happen to coordinate and work out. But I do think that if I was to say anything, we were allowed to just be ourselves. Each one of us had a very unique look in the sense that we looked different. There was no conformity about our look—and our personalities too, we had very different personalities, and emotionally and mentally we were different—but I think that that put together created this strong force of women. And no one told us to be any different. No one ever came up to me and said, “you need to reshape your body, to lose weight, or to be more outgoing, or less outgoing”. We were just allowed to be us, and I think at the end of the day, isn’t that the whole point of being a human being? To be allowed to be yourself, to be accepted the way you are? Ironically enough, in a business where a lot of styles and looks are dictated in some way, from the point of view of the media onto the audience, I think it’s so great that we got to just remain our quirky selves and have the body shapes that we had without anyone ever pointing a finger at anything. Maybe that’s what gave our careers longevity.

Fashion should be about celebrating somebody’s individual style, personality and look. That’s what’s unique about a person. If you’re going to go and say, you need to look like this, you need to weigh this—what is the point of that, then? It’s so simple, really, and so complicated. It’s always about dictating, it’s always about pointing fingers. Everybody is so busy pointing fingers at someone else that they forget that what we actually need to celebrate is the individuality.

Nicolas Ghesquière Made Flats for a Balenciaga Show Because Gisele Wouldn’t Walk in His Heels

Gisele closing the spring 2011 Balenciaga show.Photo: Imaxtree

Gisele's been down many runways, appeared in many campaigns, made many millions of dollars. She can afford to be choosy. She can afford to say, "You want me in your runway show,Balenciaga designer Nicolas Ghesquière? My feet better be comfortable." And so Ghesquière tellsWWD about the flats in his spring 2011 show:

The idea was to have this crazy casting with Gisele [Bündchen] and Amber Valletta and Carolyn [Murphy], and they said no for high heels. They were not used to walking with heels anymore. Gisele was worried; she would not walk with my heels.

Ms. Muse

Miuccia Prada loves Shala Monroque. Larry Gagosian does, too. The birth of a very modern kind of style icon.

By Vanessa Grigoriadis THE CUT

(Photo: Brigitte Lacombe. Styling by Kate Young; Hair by Italo Gregorio; Makeup by Fulvia Farolfi for Chanel. On Monroque: vintage Dolce & Gabbana Bodysuit and vintage Alaïa shoes, both at Albright Fashion Library.)

Shala Monroque arrives at a restaurant in Soho for lunch on a steaming summer day, her arms brimming with packages from the Prada store on Broadway. As a street-style icon and fashion demi-celebrity who has the distinction of being a central inspiration for two of this era’s most powerful visual tastemakers, Monroque, 32, is impeccably dressed, of course, in a sleeveless denim shirt paired with a knee-length denim skirt. She’s a friend of Miuccia Prada, for whom she functions as a kind of muse and unofficial ambassador, hosting a salon called Miu Miu Musings at the stores around the world. And she’s the girlfriend of art-world impresario Larry Gagosian, the foremost gallerist on the planet. In her bag are Prada’s crazy Minimal Baroque sunglasses, embellished with bawdy scrolled lines like a violin’s carved neck, in the same color as her denim. “I’m in my blue period right now,” she says, with a bit of a wink.

Monroque orders tuna tartare, then gives a nervous laugh. She’s a shy woman, slightly formal and sphinx-like. She abhors talking about her life, unspooling stories reluctantly. Monroque was brought up near the beach in St. Lucia, where her family still lives, and didn’t leave the island until after she graduated from high school. “I always knew as a kid that I wanted to live in America,” she says, choosing her words carefully. “We always got all of the American TV shows late, and I grew up watchingLeave It to Beaver and other shows from the fifties. Life here just seemed better, and freer. I couldn’t believe that on TV, kids would just open the fridge, pull out a box of orange juice, and drink from it.”

Monroque’s mother ran a gift shop at a hotel, and she brought her daughter copies of theVogue and Tatler magazines that the shop couldn’t sell, usually tearing off the front covers so that they could be sent back to the publishers for reimbursement. She was also close with her aunt, who made trips to New York’s garment district every few months to buy copies of high-fashion American clothes for Trendy’s, a boutique she ran on the island. “I always loved dressing and had the newest things, but I always had the fifties ideas,” says Monroque. “Once, my mom bought me a dress with a tie around the waist, trying to tie it in my front, but I wanted to tie it in the back.”

As a teenager, Monroque was a track star, wrote poetry, and entered beauty contests, coming in second in a St. Lucia carnival-queen pageant. The prize was a ticket to Miami. “There wasn’t anything to do in Miami, though,” she says. “I had always had this romantic idea about taking a Greyhound bus, so I thought I’d take the 30-hour trip to New York.” She met a guy who tried to sell her a phone that she could use anywhere in the world by satellite (“I didn’t quite understand what he was saying, but this was twelve years ago, so I guess it was a mobile phone and legit”) and another one who told her, when she said she was going to New York, “I can see you’d love it there. You’d fit right in.” She stayed with her uncle in Rosedale, Queens, and was initially unimpressed by the stink and sloppiness of the city—until she visited another aunt, a dresser at fashion shows. “The moment I knew I wanted to live here is when I got to go to a Jean Paul Gaultier party,” she says, smiling, “and there were red knee-high feathers throughout the whole floor.”

Baby-sitting was the most obvious job for a woman from the islands, but her uncle dissuaded her, because “he thought it was demeaning for me to look after another woman’s kids.” She started working at a photo studio for $200 a week. Then she figured out that unemployed actors and models (she tried to model herself, but she couldn’t get traction) were making a lot more in restaurants downtown. Monroque began hostessing at Man Ray, and then Nobu, which provided enough liquidity for her to secure a kitchenette with a shared bathroom in Harlem. For clothes, she mostly shopped at Daffy’s on 34th Street (“If you look for the right fabrics, you can find good things”) and made her first purchase of a luxury item: dark wraparound glasses with little gold screws. “Very intense, like something guys from St. Lucia would wear,” she says. “They cost me a fortune, more than I was making in a week.” And her next purchase? Monroque pauses. “I’d say there was a big gap after that.”

The gap, though she may not want to say so, may have had something to do with her relationship with Gagosian, which has catapulted her into the uppermost reaches of fashion, art, and society. “I’d prefer not to talk about him,” she demurs, when I ask how they met. “I will say that he has been a great mentor. He’s one of the most stylish people I know, not necessarily in terms of fashion, though I think his fashion sense is interesting, but in terms of art and the way he deals with things. Hopefully a little bit of that has rubbed off.”

These days, Monroque, who says her favorite artists are Richard Prince and Damien Hirst—“the gallery artists, essentially”—hopscotches around the world with Gagosian to his eleven galleries, from London to Athens to Hong Kong (“The sun never sets on my gallery,” he recently said). Monroque has established her own identity within this Valhalla, turning heads with a turban paired with a Jason Wu dress at the CFDA awards, animal prints, and her impeccable fifties fashion by Prada and Chanel (she’s also trying to incorporate some fashion at Gagosian, where she will soon introduce bangles by Delfina Delettrez, of the Fendi family, into the gallery store). “Now when I go to a show, the photographers ask me to stop, and 30 of them start snapping,” she says, covering her face. “It’s a little embarrassing, honestly.” Until recently, she was also editing Pop, an edgy fashion magazine, with Dasha Zhukova, the girlfriend of Russian oligarch Roman Abramovitch; in September, they are launching a new magazine, Garage, named after Zhukova’s gallery in Moscow. She’s thought about college. “James Frey told me I should forget it, though, and just go out into the world,” she says.

Monroque finishes her lunch and steps onto the burning pavement, loading her Prada packages onto a blue cruiser bike locked to a lamppost. She’s just returned from a safari to Botswana and Namibia, and next week, she’ll be back in St. Lucia, on a shoot for JapaneseVogue. Later today, she’s driving to Amagansett, since Gagosian is due back there after a trip. “I love the dogs we have out there, these two big poodles that we got after Larry’s old dogs, a present from Richard Serra, passed away,” she says. “I like to walk them on the ocean, though I don’t always go in the sea.” She smiles. “When everyone in the Hamptons says, ‘The water’s so warm today,’ it’s still too cold for me.”