Carmen Dell'Orefice

The one and only. :-)

Carmen Dell'Orefice is a legend in the modeling trade, having become a supermodel long before the term was even coined.  Born in New York, she began her career as a teenager, appearing in 1947 on the cover of Vogue at the age of sixteen, making her one of the youngest females to be featured on a Vogue cover.  Her career really took off in the fifties, and she went on to work with all the esteemed photographers from Irving Penn to Francesco Scavullo to Richard Avedon . . . and everyone in between.

Carmen - as with Cher or Sting, a single name can suffice - retired from modeling in the late fifties, but returned to the profession in 1978 at the age of 47.  Nowadays, it's common for fashion and beauty models to continue working past the age of forty or for other models to come out of retirement past that age.  But Carmen pretty much did both first.

In September 2012, she walked the runway during Fashion Week in New York at the age of 81.  She modeled clothes from the Norisol Ferrari Spring 2013 collection.  Her age didn't matter - she still has the look. :-)

Looking back at her career recently, Carmen reflected on the perks of modeling, noting that she had bought  herself a husband. (Her quick wit suggests that if modeling hadn't worked out, she could have been a comedian, though she probably wasn't joking.)  She was in fact engaged to talk show host David Susskind, but he died before they could be married.