Nearly 25 years later on the set of the VIOLET GREY photo shoot in Los Angeles, Cindy is still every bit the consummate professional, game to climb atop cherry pickers and don wool suits under the California sun in the name of a beautiful photograph — and look amazing doing it.

The supermodel, who turns 50 next year and is celebrating the occasion with a Rizzoli book of photos and essays from her storied and lengthy career, was the original “Model, Inc.” And by that we mean she was a pioneer of the branding era. She attached her name to delightfully retro workout videos with Romanian celebrity trainer Radu, a skin-care collection (Meaningful Beauty by Cindy Crawford) and a line of furnishings (Cindy Crawford Home). She was also the first to teleport into living rooms across the country, delivering style missives with her signature Midwestern accent and a wholesome directness through the MTV show. She pulled back the curtain on the clandestine workings of the high-end fashion world and introduced the eccentric personalities within it to a wider audience. She had those dark features and a memorable mole; a strong, athletic sexiness; and, counter to the reputation of her peers back in the day, she seemed grounded and, well, nice. 

“I was lucky because House of Style was like my Twitter,” she says, with a laugh. “I got to be more than just a picture. Because of social media, so many of the girls today, like Coco Rocha, Lily Aldridge, Georgia May Jagger and Cara Delevingne, are brand-building. When I started modeling there was no language for that.”  Her MTV gig wasn’t the only thing that differentiated the Illinois native from the pack. While some of the other “supers” were sipping Cristal and stalking the runways in Paris, Cindy was following a different path.“Fortunately, we weren’t expected to be a size 0 or 2 in my era. Christy and Linda and I, we weren’t so tiny. But I was still voluptuous even in that group. Sometimes it was hard at the fashion shows,” she says. “But because of the way my body was, I had some different opportunities, like my swimsuit calendars.”’’

 Photographers like the late Herb Ritts, who was known for shooting serene black-and-white images on the beach in Malibu, drew the young model west to Los Angeles. It was at Ritts’ house where she met actor, ’80s-era heartthrob and future husband, actor Richard Gere, when she was just 21 (he was 38). She and Gere were fixtures on the red carpet in the mid-'90s, and a particularly revealing red Versace dress she wore in ’94 regularly makes all-time-best lists during Oscar season. The pair divorced in ’95, Cindy remarried in 1998, and the once bicoastal model put roots down in Malibu. It’s the ideal place for a woman who has spent the better part of her professional life in a tank suit in front of a camera and who feels most comfortable in jeans and minimal makeup. On set for her VIOLET GREY shoot on the back lot of Paramount Pictures, Cindy revisited her Helmut Newton days with a menswear-inspired, gender-bending wardrobe and tousled, unapologetically sexy hair (courtesy of stylist Serge Normant). “It felt like we were doing old Hollywood film stills,” she said afterward. “It was fun, and it was comfortable. I don’t always get to wear gigantic pants.”