When we meet, Cindy Crawford is walking off the set – actually, a function room in the Berkeley Hotel in Knightsbridge – and along a narrow corridor, trailing publicists and various members of the photographic team. She has finished the shoot, dead on time, and is going upstairs to change before our interview. Hoping subtly to mirror her all-American style I had opted to wear jeans, wedges and a grey leather jacket for my meeting with an icon. But she has been styled as the full-blown Nietzschean mannequin, from pouffed hair to towering heels. In this confined space she appears to loom nearly a foot above me and, what with the Balmain shoulder pads, I feel physically overwhelmed. “Wow!” I think as we shake hands with only inches between us. “She really is something.”

Ten minutes later we are sitting on a sofa in her suite. Crawford is, as I’d predicted, in her own butter-soft leather jacket, perfect-cut dark-blue skinny jeans, and a great pair of strappy platform sandals. At 43, she is a beautifully toned, fabulously good-looking Los Angeles woman, the sort that you see driving an SUV or sitting in a hotel lobby in Beverly Hills. Probably the wife of somebody rich and powerful; certainly not someone who needs to work very hard. Then she smiles, and turns up the wattage a notch or two with a swing of her long brown hair. Suddenly, I’m sitting on a sofa with Cindy Crawford, supermodel.

Supermodelling may not equal, say, producing the Grand Unified Theory of atomic physics or the ability to beat the offside trap. But it is a talent nevertheless. As Sarah Walter, former fashion director of Marie Claire and now director of fashion communications at River Island, remembers from shoots with Crawford in the Eighties, “Cindy stood out from the rest for being incredibly professional, even when she was just starting out. She could just turn away and – bang! – come back to the photographer with the perfect look, again and again, always looking fresh, never giving up.”

Talk of the Eighties fashion revival prompting a “comeback of the supers” simply amuses her. As far as she is concerned, “I never really went away. I'm as busy as I ever was – but it’s not necessarily shooting for advertisements and editorial, it’s more in support of products I’m endorsing.” For this trip to London, it’s Omega watches’ new Constellation range. Other projects are a skincare range and a home furnishing collection sold through J C Penney.

If some of her old catwalk chums are appearing more frequently in the advertising pages of fashion magazines these days, she thinks it’s because they really know how to sell fashion. “My take on it is to do with the economy. People would rather spend money on the familiar. We are their generation. In times of uncertainty, women are happier being associated with someone they know, whereas a young model, whose name they can’t quite remember, doesn’t mean as much.”

Cindy Crawford, on the other hand, is a name that you do remember. And a face – with its trademark mole – to go with it. For while Linda Evangelista might have appealed to the more fashion-forward, or Christy Turlington to those who prize her exotic perfection, Cindy Crawford was, to the world at large, the ultimate supermodel.

Crawford was always a gloriously healthy, strong-looking woman, and she still is. What does she make of the size zero debate currently raging in fashion? “Well, I would have had to starve myself to be that size. Also, being skinny wasn’t the fashion then. Naomi [Campbell] and Kate [Moss] may have been smaller but Linda, Christy, Helena [Christensen] – we were all the same size, a 6 [UK 10]. But we’re talking fashion – and the whole point about fashion is that it changes.

“I just want to say though,” she adds, emphatically, “that if people have a problem with designers or magazines using too thin models, they should just stop buying the designers’ clothes or the magazines. Don’t buy them and then complain about it and feel bad about yourself! Use your power. Magazines will change if no one’s buying them, believe me.”

Models’ measurements was not the only difference in the fashion industry when Crawford was starting out in the mid-Eighties. For one thing, fashion magazines like Vogue or Elle or Marie Claire almost exclusively used models on their covers. Actresses were sniffy about getting too close to fashion or beauty editorial – or even the lucrative beauty contracts – because they feared they would not be taken seriously in the film industry. But, as Crawford recalls now, “That left a gap for glamour, which people were hungry for at that time. Well, they always are, aren’t they? Anyway, the models kind of said, ‘We can do that.’ ”

The famous five

Crawford was one of five models – together with Evangelista, Turlington, Naomi Campbell and Tatjana Patitz – Vogue put on its January 1990 cover. With that surprisingly naturalistic black and white shot, taken by Peter Lindbergh, they became something bigger than the sum of their parts and the “supermodels” idea took root. Even as they were shooting it, they understood its significance. There had been talk of Vogue adding a sixth girl; the models themselves nixed it.

Soon after publication George Michael put out the single Freedom ’90 with a six-and-a-half-minute video starring all five of the Vogue cover stars. These were the heady days of early MTV, when the combination of one of the world’s biggest pop stars and its most beautiful models made a very loud bang indeed.

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