When Cindy Crawford walked into a lounge at the Santa Monica Proper Hotel one morning in early June, her vibe was immediate: comfortable, professional, direct. No artifice. No consequence. Only her longtime publicist Annett Wolf, who made a brief introduction and disappeared, leaving Ms. Crawford at the head of a table set with a display of products from her Meaningful Beauty skin and hair care line, a $400 million brand that she introduced in 2012. years ago.
“Where do you want to start?” Mrs. Crawford asked. “What feels most organic?”
It is tempting to describe Ms. Crawford, 58, as casual, but that’s not quite it. Dressed in a corduroy denim jacket from Celine, a tank top, bootleg jeans from Nili Lotan and a Foundrae charm necklace that symbolizes resilience, her beauty radiates without being at all overwhelming. A native of Malibu, where she lives with her husband of 27 years, nightlife and tequila maestro Rande Gerber, she exuded California no-nonsense. She is literally a household face and has been photographed and filmed thousands of times over the course of her 35-plus year career as one of the world’s most successful models.
What felt most organic was starting with Cindy’s business. More than the mole above her lip, more than her brown eyes and va-va-voom hair and her healthy physique, Ms. Crawford’s interest in transcending modeling to become a brand — decades before personal branding was a career path – what set her apart from her peers.
“I always say, ‘I modeled,’” Ms. Crawford said. “It’s not, ‘I’m a model.’ It’s a verb for me. It is not an identity.”
An enterprising role model among aspiring supermodels, Ms. Crawford invented the modern playbook that powers today’s generation of professionally beautiful people, including Gigi and Bella Hadid, Hailey Bieber, Ms. Crawford’s own daughter, Kaia Gerber, and most of the Kardashian-Jenner family. stay. Brand partnerships, brand ownership, products, campaigns, deals in various media forms.
“There was no one who was me saying, ‘I want her career,’” Ms. Crawford said. “A lot of it was just, ‘Why not?’ or ‘Let’s try this.’”
“Cindy, Inc. Not just your standard $7 million a year supermodel.” That was the coverline of a 1994 Vanity Fair profile that attempted to pinpoint Ms. Crawford’s newfangled golden touch as a model who controlled markets, demographics and products ranging from Vogue to Playboy to MTV to Kay Jewelers. Mrs. Crawford was 28 years old at the time, married to Richard Gere (they filed for divorce the following year) and a perfect example of youth and exceptional beauty.
Two of the themes of the profile were Ms Crawford’s happiness and whether she would find the ‘engine’ to fuel her ambitions. Much was made of her obvious physical appeal, but the article also touched on the fact that Ms. Crawford possessed something else — pragmatism, a lack of pretension and snobbery, a sense of humor and self-awareness — that positioned her for greatness.
“She was born knowing what she was doing,” fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi, a contemporary of Ms. Crawford, said in a recent interview. “This is her fifteenth life or something.”
Thirty years later, Ms. Crawford proved to be the driving force behind her own career, a rare example of longevity in an industry known for discarding women as soon as a hint of middle age enters the picture.
Ms. Crawford has been the face of many brands, perhaps most famously Pepsi. Her blockbuster 1992 Super Bowl ad is an advertising legend. She has been working at Omega watches for 29 years. She had a 15-year mega contract with Revlon that ended when she was 35, after which she started developing Meaningful Beauty. It is Ms. Crawford’s largest company, the first ownership stake of her career, a 50-50 partnership with Guthy-Renker, the direct-to-consumer subscription marketing company known for brands such as Proactiv, JLo Beauty, IT Cosmetics and Tony Robbins Personal Current.
Traditionally an infomercial model, but the Guthy-Renker way is not sexy. “You could say infomercials were beneath Cindy,” says Greg Renker, who co-founded the company with Bill Guthy. ‘She knew. She reminded us.”
Mr. Guthy and Mr. Renker pursued Ms. Crawford for years before she took them seriously and demanded an equity partnership.
If Ms. Crawford were going to start an infomercial skin care line, it would be her way. She wanted to develop the products together with Dr. Jean-Louis Sebagh as a distillation of the antioxidant treatment he provides in his Parisian practice, but made more accessible.
“I was like, ‘Pretty much every director you’ve used, I don’t want to use,’” she said. “I have to do it completely differently.”
Mr Renker said Meaningful Beauty was Guthy-Renker’s largest investment at the time. Their bet on Mrs. Crawford initially yielded no results.
“It was difficult to present Cindy with warmth, even though she was in fact a warm and wonderful person,” Mr. Renker said. “At that time in supermodeldom they were all quite intimidating and untouchable. We almost quit.”
They recalibrated, emphasizing the connection with Dr. Sebagh and the filming of the infomercials where Ms. Crawford spoke to a colleague, rather than directly to the customer. The brand has flourished and is no longer solely dependent on television infomercials or Mrs. Crawford. Customers purchase the products through the brand’s website, social media and from wholesalers such as Amazon, and the line has additional spokespeople including Ellen Pompeo and Porsha Williams.
“I didn’t even want my name on the brand,” Ms. Crawford said. “I hoped it would have a life bigger than just me.”
Ms. Crawford has never clung to the rarefied world of fashion. In a career not marked by scandal, one of her most controversial moves was playing Playboy in 1988, tastefully shot by fashion photographer Herb Ritts. Ms. Crawford was extremely smart at 22 and said she thought the Playboy shoot would broaden her audience: heterosexual men, as opposed to the mostly female fans of luxury fashion. The broad lens through which she viewed the opportunities has applied to many of her business decisions.
“My main collaborations were with Pepsi and Revlon, not Hermès,” Ms. Crawford said. “They were with brands that are for everyone.”
Raised in a working-class family in DeKalb, Ill., Ms. Crawford never lost touch with her roots, even at the height of 1990s glamourama, when she starred in George Michael’s “Freedom!” ’90” video and part of Gianni Versace’s inner circle.
“You’re in some palazzo in Capri, and you say, ‘Wait, I just came from DeKalb, Illinois,’” Ms. Crawford said. “How did I get here and what should I wear?”
Early in her career, her mother visited her in New York and borrowed one of Ms. Crawford’s dresses, a simple style by Donna Karan. “She says, ‘Oh my god, I love this dress.’ I’m going to buy one just like this,” Ms Crawford said. But it was about eight hundred dollars, she remembered, more than what her mother would spend on clothes in a year. Mrs. Crawford gave her the dress.
“My mother recognized quality when she had it,” Ms. Crawford said. “It was an ‘aha’ moment that was about access and knowledge.”
Mr. Mizrahi recalled a shoot he did with Ms. Crawford in Big Sur, California, in the 1990s. “The crew and everyone just assumed she wasn’t smart,” Mr. Mizrahi said. “I knew her very well and I thought, ‘What are they talking about? Wait until she opens her mouth. ”
In the late 1980s, before the words “super” and “model” were combined into a new noun to identify the group of models that included Ms. Crawford, Christy Turlington, Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista and a handful of others, Ms. Crawford was known as the small-town Midwestern girl who was co-valedictorian of her high school class and attended Northwestern on a scholarship before dropping out to pursue modeling.
She was willing to break the fourth wall and be heard and not just seen – anathema to the modeling world. As the first host of MTV’s “House of Style,” the beloved behind-the-scenes fashion news program that aired in 1989, Ms. Crawford had zero broadcasting experience. She was no Elsa Klensch, but she made it look easier than it was.
Ms. Turlington recalled that when Ms. Crawford walked away from “House of Style,” Ms. Evangelista auditioned as host. “Linda came in and said, ‘I’m a high-fashion model. “I’ll really show you what it’s like,” she said. “It didn’t have the sense of humor, and it didn’t have the lightness.”
Last year, Ms. Crawford, Ms. Turlington, Ms. Evangelista and Ms. Campbell were all on camera together for the first time in years for the Apple TV+ series “The Super Models.” It was a trip down memory lane of four episodes through the most intense times of supermodels: the ups, the downs, the underestimation, the growing older. Ms Campbell and Ms Crawford were the instigators behind bringing the foursome together for the series, which was eight years in the making.
“There is so much obsession with the 1990s,” Ms. Crawford said. ‘We think someone is going to make this documentary. Let us cherish our own story.” All four women received executive producer credits. None had a definitive cut.
Ms. Crawford was especially pleased with the finished product. Her first present moment on screen captures her on a plane, jockeying for a photo that will attract the highest bid at a charity auction. “I think we’re all exactly who we are,” she said.
Rafael Pavarotti’s cover shoot with Ms. Crawford, Ms. Turlington, Ms. Campbell and Ms. Evangelista that appeared in the September issue of Vogue drew considerable criticism for unnecessary retouching.
“Do I think this is my best Vogue cover ever? No,” said Mrs. Crawford. “We have no say in how much they retouch us with Vogue. We don’t even have final approval of the photo yet. I hated my eyebrows; they were way too exaggerated. But no one asks me.”
After living off her physique for so long, she’s used to the world dissecting her appearance.
“I wasn’t interested in changing my face,” she said.
There is maintenance. She has done Botox, but less as she gets older because she wants her forehead to match the rest of her face. Radiofrequency, microneedling, infrared sauna, cold plunge, a red light mask. She does dry brushing and lymphatic drainage every morning, followed by gua sha with a Meaningful Beauty oil.
“I’ll do things like that,” she said. “But at the end of the day, I really haven’t seen anything that has made that big of a difference in me liking someone.”
“I’m 58,” she said. “Part of me wouldn’t want to do magazines or photo shoots. If you care to scroll through your comments, you’ll find some really mean stuff. But they are no meaner than you have thought of yourself.’ “But at the same time, am I complicit in this message to women that we have to stop doing it at a certain age?”
