What is it about Lauren Hutton that has managed to capture hearts for nearly six decades? In 1964, the surprisingly fresh-faced, gap-toothed 22-year-old began posing for the likes of Bert Stern and Richard Avedon, quickly charming her way to the cover of Vogue (a feat she achieved not once but a whopping 27 times) and a lucrative million-dollar modeling contract with Revlon (an industry first). In recent years, between her scuba diving sojourns around the world, Hutton continues to enthrall designers, be it The Row’s Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen or Valentino’s Pierpaolo Piccioli—and with good reason: At 77, Hutton is more beautiful than ever.
As for how she does it? There’s the usual weapons—Pilates and powerful skin care (she’s been the face of StriVectin since 2019)—but mostly an unbridled joie de vivre. “I always thought it was just plain dumb—even as a kid—that because someone was 65 they were supposed to be put out to pasture,” Hutton, at home in Venice, California, tells Vogue in her signature deep Southern drawl.
Here, she sounds off on modeling in a changing industry, meeting Princess Diana, and her ultimate beauty secrets.
Lauren Hutton: Hey Zoe.
Zoe Ruffner: Hi Lauren, thanks for calling. How are you?
You know, walking and talking. Still walking and talking. This has been a tough year.
It certainly has been… Where am I catching you right now?
You’re catching me in LA where I have been for 11 months. I got back here on Christmas Day. [At the time] I was reading The New York Times everyday, and you could tell that [COVID] was just getting bigger and bigger, so I just stayed here and sort of isolated. I’ve never been very social anyway, unless I was out, you know, living with people, like pygmies or something. They’re very social. Every night you’re around the fireplace dancing and singing and carrying on and having fun.
I know that you’re known for taking these extraordinary adventures…
Yeah, I used to be…
So what have you done during this time to try to occupy yourself?
First of all, I’ve had to postpone my trip to the Solomon Islands three different times in the past year. I’ve been trying to go there because they’ve got really, really interesting people and fantastic art, which I first came across in 1975 when Revlon sent me to Australia. I was in a museum, a little small rickety sort of one-room wooden building, and there was this mask in it that was about three-feet tall. It was from the Solomons. I was so taken by it that I decided it wanted me to steal it and return it to the Solomons. I’m generally pretty law-abiding actually, but I went and hid in the bathroom of this little place and put my feet on the toilet seat, so if anybody looked in the bathroom [it looked like] there was no one in there! In the end, I didn’t steal it, so I must have talked myself out of it, saying it was a vicious, savage thing to do, but boy, did I believe in it. I’ve been wanting to go to the Solomons ever since. First to dive because it’s got great seas around there, and then I was going to go inland and see if there was any art left anywhere and see what people there were.