Twenty years after her heyday as one of the original supermodels alongside Naomi Campbell and Cindy Crawford, Helena Christensen invited Porter magazine to her fairytale idyll – a weekend mountain retreat in the American Catskill Mountains – to discuss her life as a model.
“I am more grateful now for that time than I was then.”
“I am still friends with my group of models and we try to keep in touch, even if we’re rarely in the same room, let alone country, at the same time.”
“It’s amazing because we were that little group of girls in the same boat. I don’t think anyone would be able to understand what it was really like. We don’t need to explain anything, we just get together and laugh.”
As she has grown older, Christensen has adapted her love for and history of modelling into a new passion; stepping behind the camera and discovering a penchant for photography.
“When I work as a photographer, I get so excited and exhilarated I forget to breathe.”
“I don’t ever once talk about stopping for lunch as a photographer, but as a model I want to stop for lunch like an hour into the shoot.”
Mother to one son, 13-year-old Mingus, Helena also openly discussed those dating rumours surrounding herself and Heath Ledger. “There’s a long list of guys like that. It’s like, ‘Yeah, that one was actually my cousin and those are my two best friends’.”
“I helped [Heath] furnish his apartment in New York and we were out shopping in a store that was full of the most beautiful furniture.”
“I was looking at them [a pair of mid-century Danish chairs], I guess a little too long. Next thing he had bought them and said, ‘Thank you for helping me with my place’.”
To see the full interview with Helena Christensen buy the latest issue of Porter on sale globally on Friday July 31.
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