Of all the supermodels, Claudia Schiffer, 36, is the one who has least in common with her billboard alter ego. The girl who looked like the second coming of Bardot in the Guess campaign that catapulted her to world attention in 1989, the one whom Karl Lagerfeld then promptly installed at Chanel (to cries in the fashion world of “sell-out” and “bimbo”), the model who epitomised the whole Wonderbra era (though, to her eternal regret, she turned the campaign down and it went to Eva Herzigova), the first Vogue model to give us sex on a stick body, seems almost anachronistically demure and, in an age of celebrated neurosis, rather normal and nice.
Innocent of any obvious make-up, alabaster-skinned (she hasn’t had cosmetic work, but wouldn’t rule it out), she has, she says, “trained” herself to stay out of the sun, despite owning an extensive house in Majorca. Her translucent whiteness heightened by her black Prada dress, together with her pale freckles and creamy eyebrows, makes her look both grown up and childlike — a sort of elegant vanilla and chocolate ice-cream cone.
The supes don’t hang out much any more, but when they regrouped for a W cover a few years ago, “it was like a high-school reunion. We hadn’t seen each other in ages and we were all taking pictures of one another.” The crazy years — when she had to have bodyguards; when Lagerfeld unceremoniously dispatched her after she’d been his muse at Chanel for seven years, branding her dull (“Everyone had warned me that he’d do it. It’s what he did to Inès de la Fressange before me, but I thought, no, Karl won’t do that to me, he’s so sweet”); the record number of covers (more than any other model); when the supers all thought their careers had imploded overnight (“None of us understood grunge at the start. We thought it was ugly and we felt old”) — everything seems so long ago. She can still produce the goods, though, as the pictures for the Accessorize campaign prove.
It all goes to show that what they always said about Claudia — that she was the canniest of them all about protecting her image — is true. She certainly guards her privacy ferociously, successfully suing a former chef who used her name to sell a recipe book, although she seems to have learnt to live with a degree of omnipresent scrutiny. Or maybe she has trained herself to be dispassionate. She says the only time she notices the paparazzi now is when her friends point them out — or her son Casper, now 3½. She told him that the photographer was taking pictures because he thought Casper was so handsome. She also says that she understands why the press claimed that she was anorexic after her first child was born. “I looked anorexic. But the annoying truth is that, after years of dieting, when I had kids I turned into the kind of woman I used to hate — the kind who can eat what they like.”
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She understands why Lagerfeld was cruel. “I wish I could have let it all go over the top of my head at the time,” she muses, “because fashion has to change. But at the time it was heartbreaking.” She even understands the goody-two-shoes reputation. “They called me the girl with the wool knickers. Meaning that I would be in all this sensible German Hanro stuff backstage when all the others were in G-strings.”
That was Claudia: unfailingly polite, slightly steely, inordinately professional and a bit, well, German. She grew up in a small town near Düsseldorf, the daughter of a criminal lawyer (she planned to follow in her father’s footsteps).
And while she wouldn’t encourage her daughter to model, she wouldn’t prevent her either — but only if she were going to get to the very top. (Actually, one suspects that she would be out there ensuring that her daughter got to the very top, and at the best price). “I would be brilliant as an agent now,” Claudia laughs. “All that dumb stuff they do with new girls today, such as sending them to do a campaign for cookies. Well, say goodbye to Vogue after that. If you get it right, it opens so many doors. You have to explain to girls that they need to hold out.”
Holding out could be her mantra: she didn’t drink until she was 28 (“someone offered me a glass of red wine for the first time and it tasted nice, now I love it”); didn’t eat much (“if I had chocolate cake, I’d be a kilo heavier the next day”); didn’t go out much (“I think I went to three Versace parties the whole time I was modelling; I was so shy, I was physically sick the first time I went on the catwalk”); didn’t date much, apart from a somewhat mystifying engagement to the magician David Copperfield and a fling with Tim Jefferies, of the Green Shields Stamp family. She was working so hard that by the late 1990s mournful comments emerged about how she couldn’t envisage settling down. Then, in 2001, on a date set up by friends in LA, she met Matthew Vaughn, the British producer of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch.
Marriage, a 450-acre estate in Suffolk, where they spend every weekend, two children (Casper now has a sister, Clementine, aged 20 months), a house in Notting Hill followed and an orderly existence — she and Vaughan have made a deal never to leave the children at the same time. They hope to have another child soon.
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She still works on average three days a week (she has longstanding contracts with Ebel watches, L’Oréal and a new, one-season deal with Acessorize). Last summer, at a stage when most models must accept that, professionally, the greatest is behind, came what she calls her pinnacle: starring in the opening ceremony for the World Cup. In the run-up to the tournament, the German Government called to see if she’d be an international ambassador. “I thought ‘ great’. Angela Merkel is a very good thing.”
Her tour of duty consisted of taking part in a campaign to encourage young Germans to feel good about their nationality. “Germans don’t wear their flag. I have a Union Jack on a jumper but they’re afraid of being branded with the tiny minority Nazi element. It’s sad.”
Having pigeonholed her as Old Woolly Knickers and Vaughn as part of the Guy Ritchie diamond geezer set, the media were initially baffled by their relationship (Vaughn is forging a successful career as a director, having just wrapped Stardust, starring Robert De Niro, Michelle Pfeiffer and most of British Equity, which seems less geezer and more gentry these days). She says they clicked from the start. “We are so alike. One of us always says what the other’s thinking. We share a lot of family values and we’re both very anti-drugs.”
If she seems a touch wistful about not enjoying herself more during the supermodel years, she also believes that if she hadn’t taken it seriously she wouldn’t be where she is today: one of the richest models, with such clout that Richard Curtis enlisted her help during Live 8 when Germany wasn’t “meeting its targets” and with sufficient offers on the table to guarantee that, eventually, she will launch some kind of clothing line of her own.
She speaks German to her children, but in other respects has settled cosily into upper-middle class English life, fretting about where her children are going to school, involving herself with the organic movement and dining with the Prince of Wales, Sting and Trudie (she wore her Accessorize Claudia bag to the last dinner at Windsor Castle, and seems positively gleeful that they all thought it was vintage Valentino). Ah, you see the woman who has cupboards full of Chanel and Valentino down in Suffolk loves nothing better than rooting through the vintage stalls in Portobello market for bargains — which is why she also loves her Accessorize earrings. You can take the girl out of a legal career, but you’ll never stop her hammering a deal.
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The Claudia bag, £45, is available at Accessorize stores nationwide, 0870 4129000, www.accessorize.co.uk