15 minutes with Helena Christensen

One of the first shoots was in the desert in Los Angeles, me with a white horse, and I was wearing a long white dress, and we were in the middle of a salt lake. It was just visually so beautiful and so stunning and so mind-blowing. One second, I was a teenager with a bad perm; the next, I’m in the desert, with a horse, with this incredible team of people, and I end up on the cover of Vogue. Peter Lindbergh was so essential in shaping my career, because he booked me constantly for about a year or so after that. And I’ve worked with him many times over the years, and I think those are some of the most inspiring stories that I’ve done.

Sometimes, moments just happen to coordinate and work out. But I do think that if I was to say anything, we were allowed to just be ourselves. Each one of us had a very unique look in the sense that we looked different. There was no conformity about our look—and our personalities too, we had very different personalities, and emotionally and mentally we were different—but I think that that put together created this strong force of women. And no one told us to be any different. No one ever came up to me and said, “you need to reshape your body, to lose weight, or to be more outgoing, or less outgoing”. We were just allowed to be us, and I think at the end of the day, isn’t that the whole point of being a human being? To be allowed to be yourself, to be accepted the way you are? Ironically enough, in a business where a lot of styles and looks are dictated in some way, from the point of view of the media