How Cindy Crawford Became the Ultimate Model Matriarch
The world’s hottest mom is freezing. It’s an unusually chilly 57 degrees at midday in Malibu, and Cindy Crawford, wearing a tweed blazer over a cream sweater, has sought refuge next to a crackling fire inside the local Soho House. She asks for coffee, extra-hot with almond milk, and glances outside, where a choppy ocean shimmers in the February sun. “We’re not used to this cold,” she says with a little shiver. “My son and I were in Minneapolis for the Super Bowl, and they were deicing the plane, and he was like, ‘Mom, what’s that?’ He had no idea.” She laughs. “California kids!”
Crawford, 52, is now entering her fourth decade as a supermodel, walking the runway in glistening gold chain mail for Versace last fall, starring in a new Pepsi ad campaign (unveiled at the Super Bowl), and rolling out new products from Meaningful Beauty, her skincare line. “When I was in my late twenties I thought my career would last about 10 years, tops,” she says. “Out with the old. And yet somehow here I am.”
But as busy as she is with her own career, the role consuming Crawford at the moment is a new one: momager to her two children, Presley, 18, and Kaia, 16, who have arrived on the modeling scene like a pair of sonic booms. “They have agents, but I would say for the first year, for sure, everything was 100 percent through me,” Crawford says. “Eventually I want to empower them to be in charge of their own careers, but they’re not ready for that yet. Right now they’re mostly, ‘Mom, just tell me what to do.’”
She laughs. “Mom, as you might imagine, is fine with that.”
The dark-haired Kaia, who looks like Crawford’s mini-me, first gained the fashion world’s attention in 2012, when she posed in a leather jacket and miniskirt for a Versace ad. She was 10. But Crawford and her husband of 20 years, Rande Gerber, vetoed their daughter’s request to keep sitting for photographers: When you’re 16 we’ll talk about it.
That day came in early September, and Kaia was on a catwalk for Calvin Klein four days later. She has since walked for Prada, Chanel, Fendi, Alexander Wang, and Marc Jacobs. French Vogue gave Kaia her first solo magazine cover in February; she wore a hot pink Saint Laurent minidress and feathered thigh-high boots. On the chilly day I meet Crawford, Kaia is working in Milan. “I might go meet up with her in Paris,” Mom says. “I can only go, like, a week without seeing her.”
“But we talk every day, at least, and text,” Crawford continues, leaning in close as if she’s sharing a secret. “If she doesn’t text me back within 15 minutes, I do one in all caps and a lot of exclamation points. Just respond, okay? Or else I’m going to track you through your Uber account.”
His lack of winter aviation experience notwithstanding, Presley, who got his mom’s famous beauty mark (on his right cheek) and has a tattoo on his arm (be grateful), seems to worry her less. He recently appeared with Crawford in that new Pepsi spot, which reimagined the famed gas station scene from her 1992 soda ad. (“We love the generational and family aspects they bring, but Cindy and the kids are also just a total pleasure to work with—smart, hardworking, no entitlement,” says Kristin Patrick, Pepsico’s chief marketing officer.)
Presley, who graduated from Malibu High School last year, has also become a runway regular, strutting for brands like Moschino, Dolce & Gabbana, and Burberry. Paired with Kaia, he sells Calvin Klein jeans in a new campaign.
“My son lives in our guesthouse now, so he has more freedom, but somehow he still comes over for every meal and to do his laundry,” Crawford says.
Just then a guy carrying a plate of avocado toast walks past Crawford and does a double take, nearly falling at on his face. Yes, she’s still that stunning. For a split second I sense what it must be like to walk through the world as Cindy Crawford—to be sized up at a glance not as a successful business-woman but as an object of, well, lust.
I ask how she has taught her kids moral values when the world is obsessed with their external beauty.
“I didn’t find that hard to do at all, actually,” she says. “Kids don’t always listen, but they are always watching what you do. If you’re polite to people, they learn to be polite. If you make family time a priority, they don’t even question spending time together. If I’m constantly berating myself in front of them—I look old, I have more wrinkles every year, I can’t have that dessert because I’ll get fat—then they learn to do the same thing. You lead by example.”
Does she ever think those thoughts privately? “Sure, of course, sometimes,” she says, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “I’m insecure in many moments.” “Oh, thank god, you have a flaw,” I blurt out.
She laughs. “Fake it ’til you make it, right?”
Crawford’s path from ordinary Illinois childhood to super-stardom has been chronicled in a bazillion and one magazines over the years. To recap: She grew up in DeKalb, the middle daughter of a machinist father and a mother who worked at a dress shop called the Clothes Horse. She started modeling at 17 in Chicago—her mom talked her out of getting rid of the mole on her upper lip—and was soon making $1,000 a day. It sure beat shucking corn for $4 an hour, one of her actual summer jobs.
“My kids are very lucky, because money is not a motivating factor for them at this point in their lives,” Crawford says. “It was for me when I was getting started. I felt a responsibility to work all the time.” (Fun fact: When she was in her twenties Crawford told Playboy that $50 million was her idea of “fuck-you money.” Last year Gerber sold Casamigos, the tequila brand he started with his pal George Clooney, for an estimated $1 billion.)
In 1985, Crawford dropped out of Northwestern University, where she was studying chemical engineering on a scholarship, and moved to New York to pursue modeling. It was a feral, drug-fueled time in the media and fashion worlds, and she stood out by staying grounded: exceedingly polite, on time for appointments, not throwing phones at people, helping to hang up clothes after her shoots.
“It sounds obvious—act like a human being—but there is no one like Cindy in terms of professionalism,” says Steven Lashever, co-head of commercial endorsements at Creative Artists Agency. “Look at her brand relationships and how long they have lasted. There are very few people who have achieved that. It’s a testament to her.” (She has been the face of Omega watches, for instance, for an astounding 23 years.)
While her career was sizzling, Crawford posed for Playboy in 1988, which led to a gig hosting MTV’s House of Style, which overlapped with her tabloid-friendly four-year marriage to Richard Gere. She then gave Hollywood a brief whirl, appearing in the dreadful 1995 action romance Fair Game, before marrying Gerber, himself a onetime model. Not long afterward she started Meaningful Beauty with Dr. Jean-Louis Sebagh, the French cosmetic medicine wizard.
“I was 35, living in L.A., with children, and there was a shift in me,” she says. “I felt like it was time to take a chance on myself. So I took a gamble and started this company with Dr. Sebagh.”
Although she had been pitching Revlon products for a long time, Crawford was not interested in launching her own makeup company. “I cared about makeup, but I wasn’t passionate about it, and I knew that wasn’t a good start for a business,” she says. “But I was very concerned about aging—taking care of your skin so you can look as good as you can for as long as you can.”
Meaningful Beauty aims to streamline skincare. “Whether you’re 20 or 70—mostly women but a lot of men, too—we all want to have just the one sunscreen, the one cleanser, to not be worrying about chasing down the newest miracle cream every second,” she says. “As women, I think a lot of us have spent a lot of money that way, and we have drawers full of products, and it’s such a waste of mental energy and space.”
Over the past year Meaningful Beauty has overhauled its packaging and introduced four new products, including a serum made with melon leaf stem cells and sea daffodil extract. This spring the company will expand into new categories, including lips (a plumping gloss with damiana extract), and roll out a new infomercial.
Just as I start to feel self-conscious about talking to a supermodel about her skin, an iPhone rings. Crawford jumps, then checks to make sure it’s not hers. It’s not. "Same annoying ringtone,” she says apologetically. I wonder if she thinks it might be Kaia calling from Milan with some kind of problem. Had the wave of models, male and female, coming forward with #MeToostories about predatory photographers made Crawford more concerned about her daughter setting forth in fashion?
“I’m really lucky, because I don’t have a #MeToo story,” Crawford says, a bit cautiously. “As far as being a mother of two young people going into fashion, of course I worry. But let’s be honest. My kids are blessed in that business because they aren’t coming in as unknowns. People know that I will come after them if they mess with my kids.”
She reflects for a moment. “Look, I’ve done nude photos, lots. The only ones I regretted were the ones that I kind of got talked into. I don’t want my children to ever look back and think, ‘Gosh, I wish I hadn’t done that.’ I want to empower them to just say, ‘I’m outta here.’”
The conversation turns to other advice she has given her tenderfoots. “I don’t really think that you can teach how to model,” she says. “It needs to come from within. But like with Kaia when she was little, about seven years old—she would play dress-up in Mom’s clothes, and I would do her hair and makeup and we would play photo shoot or runway show. I would be shooting the pictures, and I’d be like, ‘No, put your chin up,’ or ‘Hold your arm out like that.’ Probably a little of it stuck.”
Crawford stands up, and I realize just how tall she is, especially in the knee-high green suede Sarah Flint boots she’s wearing. “I think my only specific advice to her with the runway shows was just, like, personally, I don’t like seeing a girl with dead eyes and no expression walking down a runway,” she says.
“I don’t think it’s interesting. Yes, I know that’s what’s in style now. But I said I feel as if people want to see a personality. It’s not appropriate for every show, but I think that Kaia has found those little places. Like with the Anna Sui show she just did. Even though no one else was doing turns, all of a sudden she threw one in.”
And Presley?
“It’s different for guys,” she says, offering one of her signature smiles. “I’m just happy when he gets there on time.”
Photographs by Victor Demarchelier, Styled by Nicoletta Santoro
Hair by Teddy Charles at the Wall Group using R+Co. Makeup by Pati Dubroff at Forward Artists using Chanel. Nails by Michelle Saunders at Forward Artists for Essie. Tailoring by Hasmik Kourinian at Susie’s Custom Designs Inc. Produced by Carisa Barah at 3 Star Productions.
This article appears in the May 2018 issue of Town & Country. Subscribe Today
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