What better way to celebrate C Magazine’s 20th anniversary than with the supermodel who defined a generation at Hollywood’s legendary home
Photography by MATTHEW BROOKES
Styling by PAUL CAVACO
Words by ROBERT HASKELL
People often ask Cindy Crawford about the lessons she’s passed along to her daughter, Kaia Gerber, from a career in modeling that has spanned more than four decades. Showing up on time (Crawford is always, famously, early) and putting your phone away represent the kind of nagging guidance that might earn a daughter’s eye roll, and Crawford knows it. She and her husband, the entrepreneur Rande Gerber, tend to think that their children hear only the “wah-wah” sound of the adults in Peanuts when they speak. So instead, they try to lead by example.
“I don’t want to tell women after a certain age we don’t deserve to be seen. It’s my responsibility to show up.”
CINDY CRAWFORD
That’s just what Crawford did in September, when her friend Chris Chelios, the Hall of Fame hockey player (whose career included nine seasons with the Chicago Blackhawks), convinced her to sing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” in the seventh-inning stretch at a Cubs game alongside Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder, in front of some 40,000 fans. Crawford is not, by a long shot, a singer. “I’d never been to a Cubs game, which is shocking because I grew up there,” she recalls over lunch at the Little Beach House Malibu, about 20 minutes down the Pacific Coast Highway from her home. “I figured that if I could back Eddie up, it wouldn’t be so bad. So I went, and I sang, and my daughter said, ‘Mom, it’s so cool that you did that.’ She knows it’s not anything I’m comfortable with. But if she sees me even at this point in my career taking chances and getting out of my comfort zone and not being so precious about being a supermodel, I think that means something.”
Of course, Crawford was always the least precious of the supermodels. Cognizant of the rarefied reach of pure fashion, at the height of her fame she signed on to a Pepsi ad and a Playboy shoot that Linda Evangelista and Christy Turlington likely wouldn’t have considered. She turns 60 next year, and when she reflects on a career that has included more than a thousand magazine covers, those early risks feel pivotal. “Playboy was a step away from the prescribed modeling path,” she says. “My agent didn’t think I should do it. My dad didn’t think I should do it. People were like, ‘Why? You’re on the cover of Vogue.’ But it was with Herb [Ritts]. That helped me get a totally different audience — a male audience. And that’s how I got MTV.” (For seven years, from 1989 to 1995, Crawford hosted MTV’s House of Style, interviewing designers and the planet’s coolest actors and rock stars, mic-in-hand.) “Fashion is so narrow, in a way.”
“For a model, you have a direct line to your fans, but social media is a hungry little animal that’s never full.”
CINDY CRAWFORD
That early lesson laid the foundation of a far-reaching career. For more than 20 years, Crawford has been a partner in and the public face of Meaningful Beauty, the skin-care company she founded with the Parisian cosmetic surgeon Jean-Louis Sebagh. Cindy Crawford Home, her furniture and home decor line, grosses more than $350 million annually. She has been a brand ambassador for Omega watches for 30 years. And she poses: She recently shot a cover for the French edition of Harper’s Bazaar, and she and Kaia continue to live stream for the world’s largest fashion company, Zara.
But lately Crawford finds she would like to give herself permission to do less. “I’m not chasing anything,” she says. The pandemic shifted her perspective. Before then, she had worked steadily for years. “I’d always been busy, and suddenly we found ourselves at home a lot,” she says. “That was something I was afraid of. I didn’t know if I would do well, and I thought I would need to be going at that same pace. COVID showed me that I don’t. But I’m aware of the importance of maintaining a presence. If you keep your foot in the door, you can turn the volume up or down. If you slam the door shut, it’s hard to get it open again.”
“My agent and my dad didn’t think I should do Playboy. And that’s how I got MTV.”
CINDY CRAWFORD
Malibu has been Crawford’s home for more than 20 years, and the threats to it have made it even more precious. The 2018 fire taught her to be prepared: to inventory her possessions for the insurance adjuster (for example, rare designer handbags given to her over the years); to get all her photographs digitized and loaded onto drives; to keep a note on her phone about precisely what to grab and what to leave behind (favorite jeans yes, favorite gown no). So when the Palisades Fire erupted, and little spot blazes started to dot the adjacent canyons, Crawford and her family were ready. They gathered at their son Presley’s house in town, and then, when fire was spotted in the Hollywood Hills, they drove to the desert, where they spent several weeks in their La Quinta home. The Crawford-Gerbers were lucky; their Malibu enclave was spared. Her old friend the model Karen Alexander lost her home and everything in it in Altadena.
“When I came back for the first time, driving it at night, it was like a Tim Burton movie,” she says. “I just saw the skeletons of houses, on and on. Seeing those mundane parts of people’s lives, [like] a burned-out washing machine — it was heartbreaking. I love Los Angeles so much. And I chose Malibu. I didn’t have to live here. When we first came to L.A., we were in Brentwood, and the kids were outside all day, and the weather was beautiful. Malibu was an amplified version of that. The people we knew out here had families with kids of similar ages, and you’d go to dinner and the kids would be included. That’s so not New York, where you go to restaurants and you’ve never even seen the inside of your friends’ apartments. We really wanted to build our life in California, and I don’t take it for granted.”
But with her kids settled in their own homes, Crawford is less tied to Malibu than she once was. “Our house is such a family house that my husband and I both rattle around in it,” she says. “I always say the ghosts of the kids are everywhere. I miss them more when I’m in that house because I walk by their childhood bedrooms, and all the memories come back.”
While Crawford has never been an especially spontaneous person, more free time has allowed her to bounce around and say yes more than she ever has. This summer she spent six weeks at her lake house in Muskoka, north of Toronto. “People are all into grounding now, and I love having my feet in the grass. But when I’m in the lake in Canada, I’m so grounded,” she says. “It’s not good for my hair color. By the end of the summer, every woman’s hair up there looks insane, but we don’t care because we’re so happy.” Several years ago, she and her husband bought an apartment in Miami — although not for the reason you might guess. “We still pay taxes here. My kids are in Los Angeles, so I’m not going anywhere. But Malibu in the spring and fall, the lake house in summer, and Miami in the winter — that’s kind of a good movement. And for my husband and me, it’s fun because we didn’t spend family time in Miami, but we each have a history there. Rande owned a bar there, and I modeled there a lot. So when we’re in Miami, it’s kind of like we’re a young couple again.”
The world of modeling is not the same place Crawford entered at age 17, when she was discovered by a local photographer while she was a high school student in DeKalb, Illinois. Some changes have been for the better. “Diversity is the best thing that has happened to modeling,” she says. “Fashion with a capital F has been very elitist and has had a very rigid idea of beauty for so long. Even my generation, we felt like we were broadening the definition because, oh my gosh — brown hair! I think it’s great when magazines and designers reflect back to their audience.”
She can’t help but feel ambivalent about the other major revolution, social media. “For a model, you have an opportunity to tell people who you are, a direct line of communication with your fans,” Crawford says. “But the negative is that social media is like a hungry little animal that’s never full.” She laments the gradual dwindling of print in favor of social media’s more fleeting gratifications. “A Steven Meisel picture, a Helmut Newton picture — these are not meant to be seen in the flick of a finger. They’re meant to be savored, and that’s what’s beautiful about magazines. You peruse them. You really take your time.”
In 2023, The Supermodels reunited Crawford, Turlington, Evangelista, and Naomi Campbell in a four-part docuseries on Apple TV+. “We all had the chance to tell our stories, and it was so much fun because we’re like a dysfunctional family,” she says. “We’re like sisters, and you get along better with some than with others. But we have a shared history that is undeniable, and through the lens of time, you’re really able to appreciate what an incredible moment we lived through.”
“I said, ‘Guys, we’ve got to do this documentary soon because no one’s getting younger except Naomi.’ ”
CINDY CRAWFORD
Crawford, Turlington, and Evangelista used to joke, “Guys, we’ve got to do this documentary soon because no one’s getting younger except Naomi.” The truth is that Crawford doesn’t put her old friends under the microscope. “I never think, Wow, she’s got a few more wrinkles,” she says. “I think, You look gorgeous. I try to turn that on myself as well. Women — and probably men — need to speak to ourselves the way we speak to our friends.”
As she gazes out at the next decade, she finds that she thinks about beauty in a different way. Her goal is not to be dazzling but to be free to do the things she enjoys. “Health is the single most important aspect of beauty now,” she says. “Why am I exercising? So I can go on a long hike or play pickleball. You don’t want your life to get smaller as you get older. I’ve tried the vampire facials and things like that, but honestly I’ve not found any magic thing that makes all the difference. Instead it’s the regular stuff — staying out of the sun, eating 80 percent good 80 percent of the time, getting enough sleep.”
For Crawford, the balance between accepting the slow creep of time and fighting against it has shifted. These days she is less likely to see a professional photo of herself and ask that the decades be airbrushed out. “I’ll say, ‘No, this is what I look like,’ ” she says. “My younger sister let her hair go white during the pandemic, and I was kind of jealous.” She has a friend in Miami, a retired makeup artist, whom she takes walks with. The subject of facelifts tends to come up. “I’m definitely at the age. But we’ve sort of made a pact together not to. There are so many options now, and I don’t judge anyone. Freedom is about being able to do whatever you want to do and to feel good about it. As long as a woman — whatever she does — is doing it for herself, it’s right.”
It’s hard to imagine Crawford will ever be anything other than one of the world’s most recognizable women. But if you don’t recognize her, that’s OK too. “If your goal is to stay relevant — well, yuck,” she says. “I don’t think about that. I’m not trying to show up like the hot 25-year-old at the party anymore. Instead, I try to embrace whatever stage I’m in. If it were up to me, would I just ride off into the sunset and say, ‘It was a great frigging ride, but I’m going to let them remember me at 25’? There is that temptation. But then I’d be complicit in telling women that after a certain age, we don’t deserve to be seen. I don’t want to do that. It’s my responsibility to show up.”
Hair by PETER GRAY at Home Agency using Oway USA Official and easihairpro;
assisted by FAITH KRAUSE.
Makeup by PATI DUBROFF at Forward Artists.
Set Design by MICHAEL STURGEON.
Movement Direction by WILL LOFTIS.
Dancers DANIEL RALPH MFAYA and ROMEIL JOHNSON.
Produced by PEPPER MADE.
Shot on location at THE STUDIOS AT PARAMOUNT.
Feature image: GABRIELA HEARST shirt, $6,840, skirt, $6,840, and boots, $2,230. LAMARQUE gloves, $195.
This story originally appeared in the 20th Anniversary 2025 issue of C Magazine.
Discover more STYLE news.
See the story in our digital edition
