The Woman I Wanted to Be (17 page)

I was still so bruised two weeks later that I considered passing up the amFAR benefit where I was going to be honored together with President Bill Clinton. I dreaded showing my face publicly, but then I felt ashamed for being so frivolous. “What are a few bruises compared to AIDS?” I scolded myself. “Of course you have to go.”

Still, to partially cover my face, I asked my art department to make me a little fan. They made it heart-shaped, inscribed with my motto: “Love is life is love is life.” I hid behind it at the beginning of the evening, but as soon as I went up onstage to accept the award, I put it down and simply said, “Excuse my appearance, I had a ski accident.”

I didn’t hide my face again. I wore sunglasses to my fashion show, and that was all. I also kept my long-standing appointment to be photographed by Chuck Close for
Harper’s Bazaar
. Having your photograph taken by Chuck Close is like having an X-ray. There is nothing between you and him, no filter, no makeup, no flattering lights, and practically no space because he takes his photos close up and head on. “How am I going to do this?” I thought at first, then surrendered, “I’m just going to.” The result was raw, very raw: My recovering face looked droopy and was laced with black smudges. I should have really hated the photo, but I kind of liked it because it was real. So did
Harper’s Bazaar,
which ran it as a full page and it hung very large on one wall at the Pace Gallery in Beijing, and even more prominently at my exhibition in Los Angeles in 2014.

The Chuck Close shoot wasn’t the last that made me hesitate. The hardest thing for me now is to be photographed; I’ve never really liked it, but at my age, it’s twice as hard. Two shoots I’ve done recently with Terry Richardson have taught me a lot about the nature of beauty. I’ve known Terry since he was a toddler, when I was working for the photo agent Albert Koski, who represented his father, Bob Richardson. The first time Terry photographed me was for
Purple
, Olivier Zahm’s very edgy fashion magazine. Olivier called me and asked if I would be the model for the collections in their spring/summer 2009 issue. “Are you insane? I’m sixty-two years old!” I told him. But he was so persistent that finally I laughed and told him, “OK, I’ll do it, but only if you put me on the cover.” “I can’t promise you that,” Olivier told me, “but I will try.” Their last cover model had been Kate Moss.

The day of the shoot arrived, and the last thing I wanted to do was have my picture taken. My eyes were swollen. I was tired. I was supposed to model half the collections, and a young, professional model would do the other half. I desperately wanted to back out, but there was no way. After hours of dreading, I said to myself. “I will just do this as fast as possible.” I couldn’t let them see how unhappy I was, so I affected confidence, and exaggerated all of my movements. With Terry, it’s quite easy to do that—he likes exaggerated movement. So I laughed, I was silly, and threw my arms out triumphantly. I ended up on the cover of
Purple
magazine at the age of sixty-two in only my stockings, my bodysuit, and a Maison Martin Margiela jacket made of blond hair.

For the fortieth anniversary of the wrap dress,
Harper’s Bazaar
asked if I would be photographed by Terry again, this time as “the original wrapper” with the famous American rap star Wale. It was a wild idea and my team was enthusiastic about it, so I reluctantly agreed. When the day arrived, once again I woke up looking
exhausted. It was a Friday, and it had been a busy week; I’d met with the mayor at seven a.m. on Monday, and it had been nonstop after that with design and merchandising meetings, interviews and speeches. Barry and I had had a dinner or a gala every night. I wanted to be alone in my car, driving to Cloudwalk, not in front of a camera, surrounded by young makeup artists and photographer’s assistants, all staring at my tired face. But I put on the wrap dress they had chosen for me and told Terry, “Let’s do it.” Again I laughed, I posed, I exaggerated. And in the end, I loved the photo of me with my hand on my hip and my leg on Wale’s knee. You can’t tell my face is swollen when it’s lifted by a huge smile. Clearly confidence is everything.

Confidence makes us beautiful, and it comes from accepting yourself. The moment you accept yourself, it makes everything better. I saw this in Nona Summers, who has been one of my best friends since we met at university in Geneva. Nona is this wild, glamorous, redheaded woman who was the inspiration for
Absolutely Fabulous.
She had been wild all her life . . . until the day she was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, which meant she will eventually go blind. We were all very shocked at the news, but Nona took complete charge at the very moment she could have surrendered. That day she decided to get sober. To accept yourself, to be true to who you are, is the only solution to being fulfilled.

Zakia is another strong illustration of self-acceptance and its power. I met her at the 2012
Glamour
Women of the Year Awards at Carnegie Hall when I was asked to give an award to Pakistani filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy for her Oscar-wining documentary on Zakia, an acid attack survivor. Zakia was asked to join us onstage, and her strength and quiet confidence moved the entire audience. After we left the stage, the three of us went downstairs to do some interviews. When I step into an elevator, I always check my makeup and
adjust my hair, but in respect for what had happened to Zakia’s face, I turned my back to the mirror. To my surprise, when Zakia stepped into the elevator, she faced it, gazing at her scarred image. I was awed watching her looking at herself, and embracing her image. Two operations and a skillful makeup job helped, but it was her dignity that made her very beautiful.

I
certainly don’t like to see my face aging in photographs, but I know if I wait ten years I will love those pictures. So I accept my image as who I am. What I found amusing about my ski accident was the number of people who said, “What a great opportunity for you to have a face-lift.” Some did think I had had a face-lift and was just faking a ski accident. The truth is, I’ve never wished for my old face more than I did in the month or so following the accident. I didn’t want surgery. I didn’t want a new face. I wanted my old face back.

I know that people look at me and wonder why I have not succumbed to the progress of technology. Why have I not frozen or filled in the lines of my forehead. Why I have not clipped the bits of surplus skin on my eyelids. I am not sure, but probably because I am afraid of freezing time, of not recognizing myself in the mirror, the image I have been so friendly with. Losing the complicity with myself is something I would not like to happen, the wink in the bathroom mirror as I pass it in the middle of the night, the straight-on look that I recognize. My image is who I am and even if I don’t always love it, I am intrigued by it and I find the changes interesting. I don’t like the freckles and age spots that I have all over, but they are there, so I joke and say I have a printed skin like one of my favorite leopard-printed dresses. Even staring at the small wrinkles that curl around my lips can be interesting. They just appear one day at a time.

In my older face, I see my life. Every wrinkle, every smile line, every age spot. My life is written on my face. There is a saying that with age, you look outside what you are inside. If you are someone who never smiles your face gets saggy. If you’re a person who smiles a lot, you will have more smile lines. Your wrinkles reflect the roads you have taken; they form the map of your life. My face reflects the wind and sun and rain and dust from the trips I’ve taken. My curiosity and love of life have filled me with colors and experiences and I wear them all with gratitude and pride. My face carries all my memories. Why would I erase them?

I don’t judge those who choose to have cosmetic procedures. I sometimes contemplate the idea, ask around, get a phone number of a doctor, and then forget. I may one day, out of the blue, decide to do something myself, but until now I have chosen not to. I cannot pretend that I am younger than I am, and truly I feel that I have lived so fully that I should be twice my age. It is no longer about looking beautiful, but about feeling beautiful and fulfilled.

The other day I was struck by a bouquet of garden roses that was on my night table near my bed in Paris. There was one particularly lovely rose in this fragrant bouquet. Days went by, and slowly the rose began to fade. Even fading, it maintained its beauty. Some of the petals dried, curled, and had little brown spots on them, giving it a special beauty that was different from the beauty it had when it was fresh and new. I felt connected to that rose. Every time I see a new imperfection appear on my face, I think of that rose and how beautiful it was. I want to grow to be that rose.

B
ecause of my work, I’m fortunate to be surrounded by youth and beauty—the models, the young women who work in my studio. They are a tonic for me. They make me feel young.

My surroundings are beautiful, too, which is very important to me. The six-story DVF headquarters at 440 West Fourteenth Street in the old Meatpacking District is filled with light. The building is a model of “green” technology, of which I am very proud. It has three geothermal wells that heat and cool it. The interior is lit by a “stairdelier,” a broad light shaft of a stairwell that runs all the way up from the ground floor to the “diamond” prism glass penthouse on the roof, where I sleep when in New York. There are mirrors and crystals along the central stairs to direct the natural light into all the interior spaces. The garden outside my glass aerie on the roof is planted with wild grasses, which, even though it’s in a working environment in a busy neighborhood, makes it an oasis of beauty and peace.

I love sleeping on the roof. My glass bedroom feels like a tree house, a comfortable urban tree house. I look out at the New York skyline and the Empire State Building from my bed, which is nestled under a tent of linen panels. The freestanding bathtub is teak, reminding me of Bali. When I was a young mother, I lived in an old, established building on Fifth Avenue and felt very grown up. Now a grandmother, I live like a bohemian and it keeps me feeling youthful. When in New York during the week, Barry and I sleep apart, he, uptown in his apartment in the Carlyle hotel, I on Fourteenth Street. I like our arrangement; it makes our weekends and vacations all the more special.

N
o place, however, is more beautiful than my home, Cloudwalk. However blessed I am with energy, I need quiet to preserve it. I find it in the beauty there—the apple orchards, the openness of the green lawns, the Balinese flags along the river, the basso profundo song of the frogs. I was fortunate to have bought what was then a
fifty-eight-acre farm for $210,000 when I was only twenty-seven. I’d fallen in love with it without even getting out of the car and immediately handed the startled real estate agent a deposit check. I have spent every possible minute there ever since. The trees at Cloudwalk have been my friends for forty years. I’m sure if I were sawed in half, our rings would match.

Nothing makes me feel more thankful than Cloudwalk. Nothing is more peaceful and reassuring. My children, Barry’s love, Cloudwalk, and my work have been the most consistent things in my life. All my memories, all my photos, letters, diaries, all my archives are stored there.

I can spend hours sitting in front of the fourteen-foot-long desk created by George Nakashima out of a single piece of wood, reading and working. Barry and I like to read and be silent. Our dogs are by us, Shannon, the old Jack Russell terrier that Barry found on a bicycle trip in Ireland; Evita, a new Jack Russell puppy; and two terriers we brought home from a recent trip to Chilean Patagonia.

But what brings me to Cloudwalk more is the beauty of nature. The older I get, the more important it is to me. The fact that we cannot control nature appeases me and somehow brings me back to a normal dimension. Whereas my size is magnified in the city where everything is man-made and every problem is mine to be fixed, when I go on a walk in the forest and climb the hills around Cloudwalk, I feel small and I like it.

Nature is never still. Things are growing, ripening, aging, fading, and then starting again. The trees are beautiful even when bare. I love every phase and I am endlessly fascinated by that life cycle moving on. Nature never stops. Sometimes it can be cruel, bringing droughts or floods. Sometimes it’s scary, spawning tornadoes and hurricanes. It can be unpredictable. We were hit one recent autumn by an early
snowstorm that killed many trees and left us without power for weeks. I was sad to lose those trees that have been my companions, but I think it’s good to be reminded of how little we are, how vulnerable.

One of my favorite walks at Cloudwalk is through the white pine forest to a sunny open field, then on to the side of the hill where I’ve chosen to be buried. For years, every Saturday I would go on a walk around Cloudwalk trying to think where I wanted to be buried. First I thought it would be in the woods among the beautiful stand of cathedral white pines, but then a few years ago the farm next door was put up for sale and to save the eighty-six acres from being turned into a housing development, we bought it. My original choice suddenly seemed too close to the house, so we chose this new spot as a meditation garden and a future burial place. I asked my friend Louis Benech, the French landscape architect, to think about it and he did a beautiful, simple design of two half-circle walls set in the hill. Victor, who, with his wife, Lourdes, has cared impeccably for Cloudwalk for years, has now built those walls with local stones. It is a special, quiet spot. Visitors to Cloudwalk always make fun of me for taking them to visit my future burial ground, so for now, we call it the meditation garden.

I love Cloudwalk and its beauty. I love to watch the sun set from one of the little stone walls and look out at the gorgeous views. I feel I become that view, that blend of meadow, forest, and hills. I am privileged to have all this beauty in my life. I worked hard for it and I’m still working hard. It’s satisfying to know that one day, as far away as possible, this perfect land will be the place of rest for the woman I set out to be fifty-seven years ago in Brussels at Mireille’s tenth birthday party.