As fashion month continues, the trailblazing supermodel talks 90s nostalgia, career gambles, and embracing getting older. It's hard to picture Cindy Crawford being scared. The supermodel's signature gaze is pretty fearless, after all, with direct eye contact and a slight smile that makes Crawford look like she's always remembering a very good joke.
But just before the iconic model turned 35 in 2001, she felt "a bit frightened". "I had been on contract with Revlon for nearly 13 years," Crawford tells the BBC from her home in Los Angeles. "They were wonderful to me.
But models did not last past 35 back then. That was just the industry thinking at the time." As her million-dollar beauty contract came up for renewal, tabloids called Crawford "too old," even as they sent paparazzi to photograph her every move for their covers.
She had just given birth to her daughter, the now-famous Kaia Gerber. Her first child, Presley Gerber (now also a model), was a toddler. "And I was like, 'Okay, am I going to just ride off into the sunset? Or am I going to bet on myself, and try and do my own thing?' I just knew I had to take a chance on myself," she says.
"It was a gamble." But Crawford is something of a mastermind when it comes to career gambles. In the fashion world, she's long played master poker when others are yelling "Uno!" A midwestern catalogue model turned European runway bombshell, Crawford was one of the first models to work with luxury and mass brands simultaneously, starring in.