Christie Brinkley was probably the most popular blonde fashion model of the 1980s whose name wasn't Kim Alexis, yet, after nearly thirteen years of running this blog I'm featuring her only now. Well, better late than never!
Anyway . . . Christie Brinkley - whose surname comes from her stepfather, TV producer Donald Brinkley - didn't set out to be a model. She was an art student who went to study in Paris, and a photographer happened to discover her. The rest is history.
She has had a career that has just about covered every facet of modeling imaginable - five hundred magazine covers, including Vogue, Glamour, Newsweek and even Rolling Stone, ads for Cover Girl, Chanel, Breck, Revlon, Danskin and too many others to list . . . but her biggest claim to fame may be her numerous appearances in Sports Illustrated's annual guilty-pleasure swimsuit issue.
She appeared on the covers of three consecutive annual Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issues beginning in 1979, without any guilt. And equally guilt-free teenage boys bought them.
She dabbled a bit in acting in the 1980s, including a bit role in the first National Lampoon's Vacation movie, but she became even better known for being singer-songwriter Billy Joel's second wife. Joel was in fact her second husband. A muse for his songwriting, she also designed the sleeve for his River of Dreams album. She remained interested in acting, though, and in 2011 she would make her stage debut as Roxie Hart in the New York production of Chicago.
After nine years of marriage to Billy Joel, which produced one daughter - Alexa Ray Joel, who went into her's father's line of work - they divorced, and in 1994 Ms. Brinkley married real estate developer Richard Taubman and had a son by him, named Jack. She remarried later on, in 1996, to architect Peter Halsey Cook and had another daughter, Sailor. That marriage lasted twelve years. Sailor Cook is also a model like her mom.
Any attempt to show a comprehensive collection of Christie Brinkley's collection here would take up as much bandwidth as this blog already has taken up since I started it in 2006. Consider these pictures a down payment on an overdue bill. I promise there will be more in the future.
Christie Brinkley's other endeavors have included her own jewelry line, a line a of skin-care products, and a line of eponymous eyeglasses. But she's still best known as a model, and she has continued modeling into her sixties. And in case you wonder if she still has it . . .
. . . uh, yeah, she does. :-)
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