Carmen Dell'Orefice, the 82-year-old model reveals the secrets to her lasting success

Being on the cover of Vogue at 15 meant nothing to me,’ confesses Carmen Dell’Orefice. She doesn’t mean to sound ungrateful; it was more that she was baffled by it all.

‘I never really understood what it was they were looking at, what they saw in me,’ she shrugs. Whatever it was, she’s still very much in possession of it; Carmen has been modelling – albeit with a few brief attempts at retirement – for almost 70 years now.

At 13, she was spotted by the wife of a photographer, getting off a bus in her native New York City; the following year, she sat for Salvador Dalí – who gave her a painting in addition to the $7 she officially earned for modelling for him – before going on to work with the most celebrated photographers of the 20th century, including Cecil Beaton, Norman Parkinson and Richard Avedon.

And at an age when many of her contemporaries are long forgotten or sadly deceased, she is still fronting campaigns for luxury brands such as Rolex and walking the runway for Gaultier, Galliano and Mugler.
On a scorchingly hot summer’s day, we meet in the suitably elegant surroundings of the Carlyle hotel on Manhattan’s genteel Upper East Side, where the dining room is populated by ladies who lunch (and, it would seem, see the plastic surgeon with some frequency, too), and where Carmen is a regular. While in photographs she projects a haughty imperiousness, in person she is warm, charming and thoughtful, with passionately held opinions on politics and economics (‘I can’t talk about fashion,’ she says dismissively over the cobb salad and lemon sorbet).

She’s still incredibly striking: tall and slim, with her trademark silver hair tied back in a neat, low bun, high, smooth cheekbones and tight, firm skin – not a sagging inch of neck or jawline.

She openly admits to having enhanced her god-given bone structure with regular silicone injections for decades, and undergone a fearsome-sounding ‘medical dermabrasion’ almost 50 years ago to banish wrinkles and sun damage, but that is all she is willing to discuss until she writes her memoirs.
She refuses to be frail; in spite of a painful double-knee-replacement operation just three months ago, she wore high heels a few days after we meet, for her 82nd birthday.

But more than her looks and her impressively lengthy and illustrious career, it’s Carmen’s personal life that should surely have Hollywood scriptwriters salivating.

The only child of an Italian immigrant father and Hungarian mother, Carmen modelled initially only to help support both her impoverished parents, who lived apart but never divorced. She herself has been married three times: first, at 21, to Bill Miles, after five years of dating and three illegal abortions.

Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/you/article-2355862/Carmen-DellOrefice-82-year-old-model-reveals-secrets-lasting-success