When Turlington enters the room, the conversation stops and all eyes swivel in her direction. She does an impeccable job of ignoring them. Of course, I tell her the three-table reservation story. “Oh, really? I’ve never been here before,” she says matter-of-factly.
While she chooses between tomato caprese and spaghetti marinara, I cop an eyeful of the flukish arrangement of facial features that, in Turlington’s early-1990s heyday, graced a squillion magazine covers. Fashion editors fawned, fans wept and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York recast 120 of its mannequins in her image. I used to be among those who found her android-like beauty a bit chilly, preferring, say, the Puckishness of Kate Moss. But now, at 36, she looks brilliant. More than brilliant. The skin is dusky — olive-toned on account of her Salvadoran mother, and tanned from weekends here at the beach. The eyes are lively, the mouth is full and curvy, with fine laughter lines fanning out across the cheeks and no evidence of Botox. The whole package is so much better in the flesh, her beauty made real and sexy by age.
I’ve asked around among those who know or have worked with Turlington, and the consensus is that she’s a really nice, unaffected person: a girl’s girl who has lots of normal friends, and few airs and graces. She’s certainly a more relaxed and down-to-earth lunch companion than the celeb-struck behaviour of the restaurant staff would imply. Of the original supermodel line-up — Naomi, Cindy, Linda, Kate and her — Turlington is the only one who has made “being good” a post-fashion career choice. You still see pictures of the others at parties, but the Californian is more often papped in the street, looking a little frumpy. She doesn’t play the game any more. And the game, after all, takes two.
Instead, with a couple of beauty contracts remaining (including one for Calvin Klein), a successful business, a husband (the Hollywood actor/writer/director Ed Burns), a 19-month-old daughter, weeks divided between a loft in New York and a fisherman’s cottage in the Hamptons, and plenty of time for her daily asanas, Turlington has chosen a life out of the spotlight. “There are those who think about it and decide to move on, and you never hear anything more about them,” she says drily. “Then people say, ‘What happened to her?’ And you say, ‘She’s probably living a very nice life somewhere, and is very happy.’”
Not that Turlington has moved on entirely. She is here to promote Maha Nuala, a new, high-tech, gymtastic offshoot of Nuala, the yoga lifestyle brand she founded six years ago in collaboration with Puma. Nuala means “natural, universal, altruistic, limitless and authentic”. That’s her code for living. The collection of chic, comfy clothes is designed to sidestep the tyranny of trends and concentrate on what’s important. “Don’t ask me about fashion, ” she says. “I’m totally out of the loop. My favourite stuff I’ve had for years and years. You know, I don’t think fashion was ever really me. The idea of giving a lot of thought to what I wore wasn’t really what I was ever about.”
This seems almost disingenuous. After all, wasn’t it Turlington and her cohorts who sold us the dream in the first place — the one that said if you were tall and skinny enough, with good enough hair and a big enough pout, you too could have loads of money, rock-star boyfriends, perfect happiness and, ultimately, a friendship with Gianni Versace? Then again, perhaps looking a million dollars and being invited to the best parties isn’t all that when you never wanted it in the first place. She was 15 when she started modelling, and had never even opened a fashion magazine. “I made a lot of money, I had a long career, but it fell into my life in a weird way,” she says. “I never enjoyed walking down catwalks. I always felt clumsy. I went to the parties because it was what you did after a show. I hated nightclubs. And champagne,” she adds, “gives me a headache.”
During the glory years — Vogue covers, George Michael’s Freedom video, lotsa da casha — Turlington suffered a tortuous hybrid of child-star syndrome and model malaise, stunted emotionally, from being a teenage workaholic, and desperate to prove she was more than just a gorgeous face, when that was all people were interested in. “I see pictures of myself back then,” she says, “and I don’t even find myself pretty. I had nothing to offer, because I wasn’t really a person.”
Turlington tells a story about the time, in her teens, when a cousin asked her for an autograph. “I thought, ‘Please don’t ask me for that.’” There was guilt in being different from her two sisters and being feted for a quality she hadn’t earned. “I was the one who was always working, while the other two were busy rebelling,” she says. “That isolated me. I just wanted to be the same as them.”
How odd to feel so disconnected from the way you look. Perhaps that’s why ageing agrees with her. Finally, she’s getting the face she thinks she deserves, not the one she got given by a freak of fate.
At 26, she retired from the catwalk and enrolled at New York University to study comparative religion, in a bid to become a person, instead of just a supermodel. “It was the first time I’d had a normal life — gone to the store, had a home, turned up at classes,” she says. Nuala followed a couple of years later, linking her love of yoga with what has turned out to be a pretty decent business instinct. She has become an outspoken critic of smoking, plastic surgery and the beauty myth. “I have such a hard time with [photographic] retouching,” she says. “In the 1980s, if something in a magazine was fake, people said it was fake. Now we’re all pretending what we see in magazines is real, when it isn’t. And with collagen and Botox, people are actually trying to look like that.”
When Turlington began practising yoga at 19, it was still considered a bird-food-eater’s hobby. Now classes are standing room only. She thinks everyone’s gone mad for it because we’re bored, spiritually empty and looking for meaning. “Yoga gives you so much more than getting on a treadmill and running for an hour. It’s something people can stick with, and that feeds more than one part of themselves.”
Obviously she’s right. But having role models like her, Gwyneth and Madonna hasn’t hurt the cause. Yes, you too can be physically, emotionally and spiritually fulfilled, and be gorgeous at the same time. It wasn’t her intention to bring looks into it — she seems horrified at the suggestion — but what could she do? When it comes to entering a yoga studio full of other women, an old pair of trackie bottoms and a Fruit of the Loom T-shirt just don’t cut it like a pair of £60 Nuala trousers designed by Christy Turlington.
It’s a contradiction she won’t escape until she is old and riddled with wrinkles as deep as the Grand Canyon. In the meantime, unlike Campbell and Moss, she simply avoids being looked at too much: ducking the paparazzi, keeping photoshoots to a minimum and trying to be a good girl, as her spiritual teachers have no doubt taught her. “No, I don’t miss the glamour and fame at all,” she says with a smile. “Sure, a little bit of fame is nice, but I’m telling you, it’s overrated. Life is so much more than that.”
