We are so happy to be seeing Cindy Crawford everywhere lately!
From playing Headmistress in Taylor Swift‘s Bad Blood to reuniting with her fellow supermodels for a nostalgic shoot, the 49-year-old makes us feel like the ’90s never ended!
[ Related: Cindy Reunites With Fellow ’90s Models ]
Now the mom of two covers Elle Canada’s October issue, looking as gorgeous and powerful as ever in a sexy embellished Fausto Puglisi dress slashed up beyond her thighs.
The pictures are hot, of course, but we love the accompanying interview and Cindy’s candor.
The model finally addresses that viral “unretouched” photo of her that ultimately turned out to be fake, stating that it made her feel almost bullied to have it out there without her permission –especially since it wasn’t even real:
“I felt that [the journalist who released the photo] was inauthentic because she acted like this was great but she didn’t check if I wanted this out or if it was a real picture. Why would seeing a bad picture of me make other people feel good? I felt blindsided. I was very conflicted, to be honest. The story had run a year and a half before, and the picture of me in that outfit was from the bust up. I know my body, and I know it’s not perfect, but maybe I have a false body image; maybe I think I look better than I do. I think that most women are hard on themselves. We think we look worse than we do. So I assumed I fell into that category, even though that picture didn’t reflect what I saw when I looked in the mirror├óΓé¼ΓÇ¥even in the worst dressing-room lighting.
“We spoke to the photographer, and he was very upset because he didn’t put it out there. He said: ├óΓé¼╦£Cindy, I’m going to send you the real one and it’s nothing like that. It’s clear that someone manipulated that image to make whatever was there worse.’ It was stolen and it was malicious, but there was so much positive reaction [to the image]. Sometimes, the images that women see in magazines make them feel inferior├óΓé¼ΓÇ¥even though the intention is never to make anyone feel less. So somehow seeing a picture of me was like seeing a chink in the armour. Whether it was real or not isn’t relevant, although it’s relevant to me. I don’t try to present myself as perfect. It put me in a tough spot: I couldn’t come out against it because I’m rejecting all these people who felt good about it, but I also didn’t embrace it because it wasn’t real├óΓé¼ΓÇ¥and even if it were real, I wouldn’t have wanted it out there. I felt really manipulated and conflicted, so I kept my mouth shut.”
She ended up using the incident as a lesson for her teen daughter Kaia Gerber:
“This is exactly the type of thing that I wouldn’t want my daughter to do to another girl online. It’s social bullying. I’m a big girl and I can handle it, but I used it as a teaching lesson for my own daughter because my kids were like ├óΓé¼╦£Mom, you don’t look like that!’ They wanted me to go down to the beach in a swimsuit so the paparazzi would take a photo of me, but that would be playing into it. How do I rise above the situation? What do I do? Go on Good Morning America and pull up my shirt and say ├óΓé¼╦£I don’t look like that’? That didn’t seem like the right response.”
The living legend also talks about the nature of photo editing:
“I can have no makeup on and do a selfie in great lighting or ugly lighting. If I choose good lighting, is that bad? It goes back to what is real. If someone wants to wear makeup and that makes them feel good, fantastic. If they feel great with nothing on, that’s fantastic too. If someone wants to use a filter, that’s fine├óΓé¼ΓÇ¥I would! Even some of those people who say ├óΓé¼╦£Hey, I love my lines’ probably took five pictures of themselves and chances are they picked the one that they think looks the best. To me, that kind of editing is the art. And putting on a filter is an art├óΓé¼ΓÇ¥just like hair and makeup. Do I think that sometimes retouching is abused? Yes, but if an artist paints a woman who has acne and he chooses not to show that, is that inauthentic? Is that not art anymore? To me, it’s the same with photography.”
Interesting perspective!
See the spread shots in the gallery (above)!
[Image via Elle Canada]