Carmen Dell'Orefice Quotes

1. I live alone and enjoy doing most domestic things myself. I like living simply and cooking occasionally for small groups of friends.


2. I always have a male friend, if I can find one who is suitable. If it doesn't suit you to have one, that's fine, but I always do.

3. If they say: "Oh, you're too tall, you're not this or whatever," I just leave. It's as simple as that. There's another job. Or there isn't another job.


4. (on her current modeling career) I don't know if it's good or silly. It's what I enjoy doing, and I'm able to do it.

5. My mother was very hands-on; so were the nuns at my school. If I didn't learn my catechisms, I'd get physically punished by them.

6. I had double-knee-replacement surgery recently, and the doctor let me bring my video biographer - who is making a film about my life - into the operating room. He also came to the dentist with me, and to see my dermatologist of 45 years, who does my silicone. I want to show the world what it is to be a so-called natural beauty.


7. Dieting, or watching your figure, is not that complicated. You just have to have self-discipline, and understand what you have been given genetically. I always wanted to be smaller than I am; I'm a typical woman in that sense.

8. I projected a strong personality for a grey-haired aging population - I gave them the permission to be themselves. Then my career was on the high road again, and it didn't really stop. Now I consider myself a cover girl. I am 80-years-old.





9. As a model, I didn't have an identity; I was a chameleon, a silent actress. I was an amorphous thing. I wasn't full of personality, I was full of solitude and solemnity. I wasn't a cover-girl type. I've had more covers in the past 15 years than I had in all the years before that.

10. I broke my nose on a diving board when I was a kid, and my first husband said: "I know the best doctor in the world and, for your 18th birthday, I'm going to give you a nose job." He didn't like my nose. I've never told anyone that before. 





11. I didn't marry to have children. I married to have a relationship and I was blessed with one child. I was an only child, too - my mother was smarter than most women today; she just had me. I nurtured my own daughter's ambitions the best way I knew how (she was 22 when she had Laura, who is now 60). Laura always knew that she was a wanted child; she got all of me and she still has me.

12. I'm 80, and I'm sick of it.


13. I was never a big shopper, but I have some wonderful Calvin Klein suits that I have bought in the past ten years, all for under $100. He is a tall man and designs for tall people. Donna Karan does that too - the sleeves actually come to my wrist.

14. Life exists beyond 50.

15. I'm a working woman of 80 trying to work out what the image I can project is. How I can do it with, you know, dignity.

16. The treatment I had (to eliminate sun damage) is not available to the public any more. It wasn't a peel; it wasn't a lift. The doctor used the finest wire brush, and he planed off my skin. It brings you right down to baby skin, and those layers of skin never grow back so you have to be so careful in daylight. I go to sleep with sunblock on, in case I forget to put it on in the morning.

17. I think America may be growing up and accepting the fact that the bulk of life exists beyond 50. Because demographically…the vast population is over 50. This is not to negate the young people coming up. But what kind of an example are we giving young people?

18. Diana Vreeland (the late legendary Harper's Bazaar fashion editor) was a good friend and a great champion. She knew everything about my life and respected the way I conducted it. Once when I was called into her office, she stood behind me and said: "I want you to do this collection in Paris with (Richard) Avedon, but you have to grow your neck." She told me to think tall and stretch my neck, and she'd see me next week - if my neck was longer, I'd go to Paris. And I did.

19. Do I like the idea of traveling? Yes. The reality, no - the hours at the airport, the awful way the airlines treat you. I am just so grateful I got to see the world when it was all still prop planes and it took 24 hours to get from New York to Paris.




20. For the second time in my life, I've lost all of my life savings.

21. And I look at it now and think, I was actually really thin! How is it possible that I felt so uncomfortable in that body?

22. My mother taught me how to sew, how to upholster, how to cook, how to wallpaper, how to count the pennies. Our rent was $30 a month, and we'd often be a few dollars short, so at the end of the month, we would sometimes have to pawn the sewing machine, which was a tragedy.




23. I never wanted to be part of any kind of movement - and if you're over a certain age, you better keep your bra on because nothing's worse than saggy duds. Women have it harder than ever now because they've changed the dialogue, and men don't know what to do when they can't marry their mothers.

24. I'm the least fashionista person in the world. I'm part of this business because I enter a room like a silent actress, and listen to the photographer, the art director, the client. If I'm lucky enough I'll have a stylist like the old days, like Baron de Gunzburg or Scully Montgomery or the people who had developed taste. Today is picture by committee. I think it has been watered down, the individuality. It's hard for these young girls to develop a real sense of self because the world conspires against the individual.

25. There's no way I would have got to see so much of the world, with my humble background, without modeling. We were penniless and hungry for most of my youth. I washed the sheets in the bathtub in my bedroom and hung them out of the window on the clothes line, which in winter was difficult as the sheets would freeze and get stuck to the line.

26. I moisturize my skin with anything that comes to hand, but nothing on the outside is going to make a blind bit of difference unless you take care of the inside. I drink water with lemon juice in the morning, and eat plenty of probiotic yoghurt.




27. In business, I didn't always know how to take advantage of events and opportunities that were right in front of me, so I missed that boat a few times. Then, over the decades, a few men of great substance wanted to marry me, but alas I was not in love with them, so my lifestyle in the end stayed happily in my hands.

28. For me things picked up again in the early 1980s when I was 49. I hadn't been working very much just modeling flannel nightgowns for Macy's and such, and one day Norman Parkinson showed up. He said: "You know, for an old bag, you don't look so bad. How about some pictures in Paris." Those pictures were in French Vogue and they were wonderful.


29. These young models are taught to walk a certain way - it's all about sex. There is a lack of refinement, there is no romance. Everything is a vulgar description of life - it is so sad.

30. (being asked how to define her individual style) Kind of a nothing casual. Comfort first, affordability second, event third. I have a collection of things that I've liked since 1945 that fit any occasion. Occasions, they're always different. Trying to find out where am I going, what are they doing, what do I want to be part of? Not to offend, of course. And not to stand out in a bad way, but not to be a wallflower. To keep a balance, and to not make a fool of myself at 80.

31. Sure I might feel more secure with my little fortune at my disposal in my old age, but the loss of it doesn't change who I am as I never changed my lifestyle. How many beds can I sleep in in one night? How many roofs over my head do I need? I don't need that much. I do want to live every day though, rather than fear the inevitable.

32. (on using fillers) If your ceiling was falling down, wouldn't you fix it? I apply the same principle to myself.

33. I have come to realize that love is not the narrow thing I thought it was. If you can find it all in one lovely person with marriage and sex and lust, that is fabulous - and I came pretty close with my last husband. But when one of my oldest friends died recently - we had been friends for 60 years - I realized that you can find your soulmate in friendship, too. There is nothing I didn't tell her - good or bad - and that is real friendship. 

34. It took me half my life to find satisfaction. I have been there for a while now, though I can't pinpoint it exactly. And satisfied is the word. Happiness is a quiet indulgence I do on my own.

35. I came across an older picture of me that someone had posted on Facebook and I totally remember squirming and feeling very fat while I was shooting it.

36. Being on the cover of Vogue at 15 meant nothing to me.

37. The whole world can be wrong, and you can be right. That's a hard lesson to learn. That'll teach you to stop someone to talk.

38. I never married unless I was in love. I am an incurable romantic. These days, everyone wants a formula, and a list - they want this, they want that, yadda yadda yadda. People today have their list of demands, and they miss connections, they miss empathy. Life is chemistry.


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