|
Home > People Index Page > Claudia Schiffer
The Golden Girl
Supermodel Claudia Schiffer Skillfully Manages a Career that
Proves that Classic Beauty Will Always Be in Fashion
by Mervyn Rothstein
Claudia Schiffer is talking tough. There's a problem in the world
of fashion these days, she says--the fact that too often models have
to look like junkies just to be cool. "I think fashion should be
promoting beauty and health," she says. "That doesn't happen if the
model looks anorexic, unhealthy, tired, if the photography makes her
look as if she's on drugs or been out partying all night. That kind of
thing can end up hurting young women or girls who feel they have to
imitate the models they see in the magazines. That's not what fashion
is about. For me, fashion is about beauty."
When Claudia Schiffer is the subject, that's what it's always
about. The 26-year-old German-born supermodel has been called, by GQ
magazine and countless others, the most beautiful woman in the
world. Her face and body have graced the covers of more than 500
magazines, among them Elle, Harper's Bazaar, Vogue, Cosmopolitan,
Vanity Fair and Time. She was the first model to make the cover of
Rolling Stone. She has walked down runways for all the major designers
and appeared in ad campaigns for Revlon, Chanel, Versace, Valentino
and Ralph Lauren. Her image, on billboards for Kenar, has loomed above
the millions of tourists in Times Square. She danced in a Fanta ad
with Mickey Mouse for a reported $2 million. Last fall, she appeared
on the cover of the Victoria's Secret catalogue wearing a
diamond-encrusted brassiere worth $1 million. She also has a contract
to do Pepsi commercials with Space Jam co- director Joe Pytka and has
appeared in a TV commercial for cotton "Underware," which was censored
in the United States.
John Fairchild, the publisher of Women's Wear Daily, once said
that Schiffer "looks better in jeans than any model ever looked in
Chanel." And on this rainy early spring day, as she exits the elevator
at the Four Seasons Hotel on East 57th Street in Manhat-tan, it is
clear that Fairchild knows whereof he speaks. She is clad all in
black--simple, tight black Gucci jeans and a black wool V-neck Prada
sweater--and she is radiant. Her long, glistening blonde hair glides
gently and gracefully down her back. Her magnetic blue eyes twinkle;
her soft, high cheekbones personify the blush of youth.
Her body, all 5-feet-11 and 127 pounds, sparkles with an
unself-conscious sensuality that, combined with her still-present air
of youthful innocence, is--there's no other word for it but the
cliché--breathtaking. And yet, inside this tall, willowy body
beautiful, this perfect mannequin for haute couture, there lies the
mind of an experienced, tough and highly expert businesswoman, the
very model of a modern major female entrepreneur at the turn of the
twenty-first century. A profile by Nathaniel Nash last year in The New
York Times called her "focused" and "no-nonsense," a "combination that
may be the reason she is considered by many to be the best
businesswoman in modeling."
Designer Karl Lagerfeld has explained her success by saying that
underneath the glamour she is "all work, very serious, essentially a
smooth-running German business machine." While that may be a bit of an
exaggeration, it is clear that she loves to work, loves her business,
and has risen to great heights in the worlds of fashion and commerce.
She won't discuss her finances, but there is no doubt she is the
world's highest-paid supermodel. That title was attained in 1992, Nash
wrote, when she inked an exclusive global deal with Revlon for a
reported $6 million a year for 10 years and surpassed the previous
titleholder, Cindy Crawford. According to the Times, fashion insiders
estimate her yearly income at as much as $14 million--or more. She has
put out a yearly swimsuit calendar since 1990; she designs it herself,
and industry estimates put her annual earnings from it at $500,000
(this year her royalties are going to the Pediatric AIDS
Foundation). Her series of four exercise videos, "Claudia Schiffer's
Perfectly Fit," for CBS/Fox, has made the best-seller list. She has
published two books, Memories, a pictorial for young people about a
fashion shoot, and Claudia Schiffer by Karl Lagerfeld, a
black-and-white coffee table book she designed with photos by
Lagerfeld.
In 1995, she and two of her fellow supermodels--Naomi Campbell and
Elle MacPherson--and Tommaso Buti, an Italian restaurateur, opened the
Fashion Cafe in Rockefeller Center. It was so successful that there
are now Fashion Cafes in New Orleans, London, Jakarta and Barcelona;
another supermodel, Christy Turlington, has joined the crew, and there
are plans to open in 10 more cities this year, among them Mexico City,
Manila, Paris, Singapore and Madrid. Last October she switched from
the Metropolitan modeling agency--where she had been since her career
began--to Elite, and, she says, things have gotten even busier.
Sitting in a lounge at the Four Seasons this Saturday morning,
there is about Schiffer a clear and imaginative intelligence, a
disarming friendliness. With Claudia Schiffer, in life and on a
magazine cover, what you see is what you get.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about her this April day is that
she is not exhausted. It is the end of Fashion Week in New York. She
has completed two all-day shoots posing for two magazine covers--Cigar
Aficionado and Cosmopolitan.
She has spent countless hours on fittings and taking part in two
runway shows, for the designers Badgley Mishka and Halston
International. Yet she also found the time recently to take her
brother to a Knicks game, do a day-in-the-life photo shoot for Gala
magazine, attend dozens of business meetings and spend a weekend with
a 13-year-old girl who won a contest in Europe that allowed her to tag
along with Claudia.
And there is no rest. Immediately after the interview, she will be
off to another cover shoot, for Fitness magazine. Tomorrow morning,
she will be on a flight to New Orleans to supervise several changes at
that city's Fashion Cafe.
"I work all year long," she says. "There are no off seasons. And I
travel all year long. I make sure I can go home"--as with many other
European celebrities, home is Monte Carlo, for tax purposes--"for a
couple of days every few months, even if it's only to switch things in
my suit-cases. Whenever I leave I pack for at least two months."
Her schedule in the next two weeks is typical. After three days in
New Orleans, she moves on to Los Angeles, to shoot a cover for Allure
magazine. "I'll be in L.A. for one day," she says. "I arrive in the
morning, and after the Allure cover I'm attending a charity event, a
benefit for the Make-a-Wish Foundation," which helps seriously ill
children. (She is also a spokeswoman for the National Breast Cancer
Coalition Signature Drive and takes part in many events on behalf of
Revlon to help cure the disease, as well as donating time with other
supermodels in the fight against pediatric AIDS.) "Then I catch a
plane at 1:35 in the morning and go directly to Lima, Peru. I arrive
at 12:35 p.m., and the next morning I work from 7 a.m. all the way to
9:30 in the evening. The following day, it's the same hours. And then
I travel to Chile and work for two days from 9 a.m. to 11 p.m. And
then I go to Argentina for one day. And then, finally, I'm back in
Europe."
"It can be crazy," she says, "because when you don't have time to
relax it can be very tiring. When I go back to the hotel room, there
are always the daily faxes to look at, and the phone calls to be made
if there's something urgent. And then it's time to sleep. Once in
Monaco, I started work at 9 in the morning and worked all through the
night until 6 a.m. I didn't know in advance I would be doing that, but
if the photographer decides artistically that he doesn't have what he
needs, you just keep on going until you have it. And it can take all
night. So we finished at 6, and I had to take a 7 a.m. plane from Nice
to Paris and catch the Concorde to New York. I didn't get any
sleep. And when I arrived in New York I had to go straight to the
studio."
But despite it all, she says, she loves what she does. "It's so
much fun," she says. "Working with photographers, collaborating on a
shoot, you can create so many different things. You can come in with
one idea of what you're planning to do and then a couple of hours
later you can change the idea to something completely different. I
love the creative part of it so much."
With such a schedule, one might think she wouldn't need to
exercise and watch her diet to keep fit. But she does. "I enjoy good
food very much," she says, "and I'm not one of those women who can eat
whatever they want. I have to watch myself very carefully and think
about what I eat all the time. If I don't it's a disaster."
On a typical morning she will have fruit for breakfast, along with
tea and honey. "For lunch I try to have salads or vegetables or
soups," she says. "And for dinner, chicken salad or tuna salad or a
bit of regular chicken or vegetables. I try very hard to eat
healthy. And it's not only for my figure.
Sure, I would like to keep it the way it is. But it's also for the
energy. I have much more energy when I'm thinner. Sweets make me very
tired. Heavy food, lots of meat, makes me tired."
When it comes to exercise, she tries to work out in a gym four or
five days a week, an hour and a half or two hours a day, on the
stationary bicycle, the Stairmaster, the treadmill and a new machine
she has fallen in love with, the Transport, which is a cross between a
bike and a treadmill that puts much less pressure on the knees. She
also uses weights for her upper body, and sometimes for her lower
body. But with all her travel, she says, "I need to have something I
can do in hotel rooms." So she does a one-hour workout routine with
her private trainer, Kathy Kaehler, that closely resembles those seen
in her videos. "The tapes were first developed for me," she says, "so
I could show people what I do."
The rigors of her work schedule and training are a bit like the
rigor she brings to her business planning. The fashion writer Michael
Gross has called her "the model who doesn't make mistakes." Schiffer
doesn't quite agree, but does admit that she has "not made the same
mistake twice." She continues: "I can't say I don't make mistakes. I
do make them, but I try to think of mistakes--even though my first
reaction is, 'Oh, my God'--as an experience I can learn from. I have
lists of things where I remind myself I cannot do it this way again."
For her determination and her success, she unhesitatingly credits
her upbringing. "The main structure of the way I think, the logic and
the organization, comes from my parents," she says. "They are both
very strong people. My father is a very successful lawyer. My mother
helps my father a lot in his business. And she helps me a lot in my
financial business--almost more than my father does. They are both
really excellent. I admire their work ethic. They are very
straightforward, logical and direct. I think that's what I've learned
from them." To her parents she also credits what she calls "a very
happy childhood," though it was not without some of the problems of
youth.
Claudia Schiffer was born on Aug. 25, 1970, in Rheinberg, Germany,
a small town about a half hour outside of Düsseldorf, to Heinz
and Gudrun Schiffer, in a very upper-middle-class family that was soon
to include two brothers, Stefan and Andreas, and a sister, Ann
Carolin. "We had, and have, a real family life," says Schiffer. "Even
though my parents are very involved in their work, both of them were
always there for us. Especially my mother. She became our hero,
because she knew and answered everything. She would help us with our
schoolwork, especially if we were having difficulty with a
subject. She would sit down with us every afternoon and show us
things, explain them to us."
Her parents would help her and her siblings in other ways as
well. "They didn't want us to be getting the wrong influences in
school or during the afternoons after school, so they made sure we
were very much involved in other activities," she says. "I learned to
play the piano. I took tennis lessons, aerobics, jazz, tap dancing,
swimming classes. I think they helped a lot. Because of them, I don't
drink. I don't smoke [cigarettes]. I'm not one of those people who
likes to go out every night and dance until 6 in the morning. That's
part of what they were trying to do. They wanted to have children they
could trust, children who would come home and tell them the truth."
In school, she says, she was "kind of" popular, but not to the
degree you would think. "I wasn't a star," she says. "There were other
girls who were the stars, who were the ones everybody thought were
beautiful, the ones everybody wanted to go out with. I had my friends,
but I was never 100 percent part of them, because I was so different."
First of all, she says, she was too tall. And too thin. And too
rich.
"Because I was so tall, I was very shy," she says. "When a teacher
would ask me a question, I would be very embarrassed because I didn't
want anyone to notice me. There was also a lot of jealousy in school
because I come from a family that is very well known in the area where
I grew up. There are five Schiffer brothers, and each has a successful
business in town. We have a big house; my parents didn't have to worry
about anything financially, and neither did the other Schiffer
families. I wanted to be like everybody else, but my father and mother
were both driving Mercedes, and if I came to school in a great outfit
people would be very jealous. So because of that I never wanted to be
the center of attention. After a while I wouldn't wear new clothes. My
mother would always say, 'You're so beautiful, why don't you dress
that way?' And I just wanted to be in jeans and tennis shoes.
"That's why a lot of people were so surprised when I told them I
was going to Paris to be a model. The girls who were the stars would
all talk about going to school to become models. And I was the one who
became a model. That was when all the disadvantages I thought I had,
being so tall and so skinny, turned out to be advantages."
She was near the top of her class in school, excelling in
languages--she speaks fluent French and English as well as German--and
for a while she thought of becoming a lawyer like her father. "I
admire him very much," she says. "I even took Latin in school, because
in those days if you wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer you had to
learn Latin. I went to his law office and thought about working with
him. I went to court with him many times, sat in the last row, and
watched him and thought, 'Wow, this is what I'm going to do, too.'"
But one day in October 1987, she and some friends went to a
Düsseldorf discotheque to dance. Aline Souliers of the
Metropolitan modeling agency saw her, gave her a card and told her she
had what it took to become a model. Claudia told her parents. "She met
my parents the next day and invited them to come to Paris," Claudia
says. They were hesitant, concerned that she complete high school.
"When we made the final decision to do it, I still had to stay to
finish high school," she says. "I didn't tell anybody in school about
it for six months. Even when they were doing the test photos in Paris
and writing up the contract I didn't tell anyone, not even my best
girlfriend. I thought, 'What if they find out. Then I'll really be
different.' It was all done very discreetly. It was only the day
before I left that I told my friends."
Once in Paris, the rise was swift. Editors at the influential Elle
magazine saw her, liked what they saw and put her on their cover. It
was Schiffer's first. Soon she was chosen for the coveted Guess? jeans
campaign, which carried her face and figure around the world. Within a
year, she modeled at her first fashion show--for Chanel. It led to
work with Versace, Valentino, Dior and all the other giants of the
fashion industry. Her relationships with Chanel and Metropolitan's
Souliers would last until 1996.
"At first I wasn't sure I was doing the right thing," Schiffer
says of her beginnings in the business. "I thought they were making a
mistake about me. Why choose me and not these other girls at school,
who I thought were much more beautiful? I thought I would be there a
year, improve my French and go home. But I was lucky. I had a good
start because my family was behind me. Some girls just starting out
make the wrong choices because they have to do those things to make
money. I was able to say, let's have fun, do things I like to do. And
they turned out to be the right things."
In her nine years in the fashion world, Schiffer has learned that
not all in the business do the right thing. There is, for one, the
large drug subculture.
"There are a lot of drugs around," she says. "Especially lately,
because drugs have become fashionable again. When I began in the late
'80s, the drug world of those days was essentially over. People were
more health conscious. But it's back again. Some people have nothing
to do with it because of their education and beliefs, and some think
it's cool. In the beginning I didn't even notice. I came from such a
clean home. I was so naive. People would tell me afterward that
everybody in the studio was stoned except me, and I had no idea. Now I
notice. But it's not something I would ever do. I don't like to lose
control over myself. I don't like the feeling of not controlling what
I'm saying or thinking."
Now, of course, Claudia Schiffer is recognized everywhere she
goes--by the media, the paparrazzi and her many fans, all of whom
constantly seek her out, taking photographs, asking for interviews and
autographs. At times, she admits, it can be a little much.
"When I'm working, I consider it part of my work," she says. "If
I'm attending a public event, or even if I'm on the street going to
work, it's not a problem for me. But on vacation it has bothered me a
lot. I understand logically that people have a need to see a
celebrity, to know what's going on in their lives. But after a while
it became so bad it was affecting the rest of my family, too."
Her family vacations on Majorca, where they owned a house. "There
was no big wall," she says. "There was the house and the pool and the
view and a little wall. And we had 20 photographers out on the wall
every day. So I would stay inside all day. I didn't want to go out
until the evening, when they would be gone. Then my sister and my
mother started to do the same thing. We felt awkward going out in
bikinis with everybody watching, or sunbathing topless on a boat,
which in Europe everybody does. We couldn't do it. It was very
uncomfortable being watched all the time. So we sold the house, and
we're building a new one with a wall around it so we can have our
private family life. I feel I have the right to take a vacation. There
are many advantages of being well known, but that's the major
disadvantage."
Schiffer refuses to pose nude, and many paparrazzi have gone to
great lengths to catch her topless. A group of photographers, she
says, once rented a boat and masqueraded as a vacationing family, then
suddenly turned with their cameras and caught her relaxing far out at
sea. Another photographer cut a hole in a tent at a fashion show in
New York to benefit AIDS research and took shots of her changing
costumes. Even the store on Majorca where she has photos developed,
she says, made copies of shots a friend took of her topless in the
Bahamas eight years ago, kept them and recently sold them. She says
she has been talking with her lawyers about keeping the photos from
being circulated more widely.
Another area in which she insists on some semblance of privacy is
her personal life. She and the magician David Copperfield have been
engaged for more than three years. He reportedly gave her a five-carat
engagement ring, but so far there have been no wedding bells. She will
talk about their relationship, but only a little. "I don't want to
talk about my private life too much," she says. There are as yet, she
says, "no official plans for marriage," but they are still very
close. "We're just really great friends," she says. "We share a lot of
things--hobbies, passions, interests. We have a lot of fun together."
And yes, he does share with her the secrets of his astounding
prestidigitations. "I'm there when he invents something, when he
rehearses it, so naturally I know," she says.
Schiffer has many hobbies she enjoys pursuing in the little spare
time she has, with or without Copperfield. She enjoys contemporary art
and collects paintings and drawings she has found in her travels,
particularly the (former Soviet) Georgian painter Kako, who creates
figurative art. She enjoys skiing and playing tennis, and likes to
curl up with a good book at night. One of her favorite relaxations is
painting--watercolors or acrylics of animals and people.
But what this woman of beauty considers one of the most beautiful
things in life, she says, is singing; not her own, but that of
others. "I have a real passion for singing," she says, "especially
Broadway musicals. The dancing, the acting, it all makes the
performers beautiful. I saw the revival of Chicago last week and
thought the dancers and singers were marvelous."
And she really appreciates good cigars. "I love the smell of a
good cigar, the elegance, the feel. I enjoy the camaraderie of being
with people smoking cigars, the friendship, the good feeling, the
laughter." She most often experiences cigars with her fashion friends,
among them Steven Florio, the president of Conde-Nast Publications. "I
like being part of the mood, the excitement of the occasion," she
says.
For five hours on the day of her Cigar Aficionado photo shoot,
clad first in a light blue Armani dress, then a navy Ralph Lauren
halter dress, and surrounded by a garland of hydrangeas, she puffed
away contentedly at a passel of the finest Cubans--Cohiba Robustos and
Siglo IVs, Montecristos No. 1 and 2. The elegance of the cigars seemed
a perfect accompaniment to the grace of her slender hands; the smile
on her face enhanced her pervasive sensuality, and the aromatic smoke
drifting gently overhead added just a touch of mystery to her magical
beauty. One look made it clear that handmade Havanas and haute couture
go well together.
One hobby Schiffer most emphatically does not have is collecting,
or wearing, jewelry. "I'm not a jewelry person," she says--an
unexpected declaration from one who travels in a world where gold and
diamonds are de rigueur. A glance reveals that she practices what she
preaches--she is wearing a wristwatch with a plain black band, and a
small jeweled crucifix on a thin gold chain around her neck. "I think
it's because my mother has never been a jewelry person," she says. "I
don't have holes in my ears, so I couldn't even wear earrings. It
bothers me when I have a lot of things on. It's not me. I'm more
simple and practical. Jewelry doesn't reflect my personality."
What her personality does reflect is the desire to continue to
branch out from modeling. "In the beginning, modeling was very
exciting. It fulfilled me. It was very satisfying, because everything
was new, and you have all these dreams and goals, and you're hoping to
achieve them. I wanted to be on certain covers, work with certain
photographers and designers. And that's what happened. I fulfilled
them. But now that I'm a little older, I think to myself that I've
done this. Now I want to be more involved, more creative, make more
decisions myself, come up with my own ideas and have them carried
out."
She has appeared on television in Europe, hosting the French
Fashion Awards and the World Music Awards in Monaco. She has completed
her first major movie, a drama called The Blackout, directed by Abel
Ferrara (Bad Lieutenant, The Funeral). Scheduled for release this
year, the movie costars Matthew Modine and Dennis Hopper. "I loved
it," she says. "I didn't want to leave. We all became friends, we
became a team, and I enjoyed acting so much. Ferrara is so great with
actors. He takes the time to help you, to explain, to allow you to
come up with your own ideas. He is so open to them."
She would like to return to the screen, but only with the right
script and the right role. "I don't want the main role," she says. "I
want to start first with small things, to get my feet wet, to see what
I can do. I'm just a beginner."
Last year, the House of Chanel ended its relationship with
Schiffer and replaced her with the very skinny British model Stella
Tennant--after Tennant removed rings in her nose and navel. Some in
the fashion press, which is, by definition, trendy and fickle, began
saying that perhaps the era of Claudia was over, that the public was
getting tired of her, that she was not as much in demand on the
runways of Paris and New York, that she was really more a look than a
model.
Such talk, Schiffer says, does not surprise or trouble her. "It
would concern me if it was true," she says. "But it's not. I work as
much as I've always worked. I make the same amount of money. I see my
schedule in front of me and I know how busy it is. I still have my
contracts, and if I lose one I get another. What I think is happening
is simply that the more well known you get, the more you are
criticized, the more people try to bring you down. I see it all the
time with other celebrities, so why shouldn't it happen to me, too?"
Eventually, though, she says, the era of Claudia will be
over. Last year she said that because she was financially secure, she
no longer had to think about what she would be doing when she was 30
or 35. But she has thought about what she would like to be involved in
a decade from now--and it is unlikely to include modeling.
"In 10 years, I think I will probably not model anymore," she
declares. "Lauren Hutton and Christie Brinkley are great examples of
those who fight the image of successful models only being there for a
certain period of time, but I think that what they do is not for me. I
would still need to be active. I can't sit still for long periods. I
need always to be doing something. So I'd love to develop book or
television projects, or make a movie. And I'd like to be involved in a
charity to which I can give a lot of time. Because I'll have a lot of
time."
She has always been a fan of Audrey Hepburn, she says. "I really
admire her very much. And I love that when she didn't do that many
movies anymore, because she was older and didn't get enough good
roles, she gave all that time to Unicef. I'd love when I'm older to
have her grace and charisma. Which is not something you can have when
you're young, because it's the experience of life that gives it to
you. But that's what I'd like for my future."
Another goal is being more comfortable with herself. "I've never
liked myself too much," she says. "I've always thought I was too shy,
too reserved, that I should be more open, more this, more that. But
I've learned to say to myself that I am the way I am, and the more I
am myself the better I'll be. Of course you want to work to be a good
person, but first you have to learn to accept yourself."
Mervyn Rothstein is an editor at The New York Times and a frequent contributor to Cigar Aficionado.
Return to the People page
|
Cigar Aficionado RSS Feed