Carmen Dell'Orefice Opens Up About Her Ageless Style (2024)

Carmen Dell’Orefice was just 13 years old when she was discovered on a crosstown bus on New York’s 57th Street, some 73 years ago. Now, at 86, she’s still at it, which makes her the longest-working model in history. That’s her story and she’s sticking to it. And why not? It happens to be true.

I’ve known Carmen (she goes by her first name only) for more than 20 years. But even today when I am in her company, I cannot take my eyes off her. That’s how strikingly beautiful she is. She’s also one of the sweetest people on the planet. There’s not a diva’s bone in her five-foot-nine-inch body—though she’d be the first to admit that her bones are a bit more brittle these days. Her relationship with Harper’s Bazaar began sporadically in the early 1950s, following her career at Vogue and an ongoing campaign for Vanity Fair—the lingerie company, not the magazine. When she seriously caught the eye of Diana Vreeland, Bazaar’s extremely particular fashion editor, she was already 26, nearing retirement age for most models at the time. Mrs. Vreeland wanted Richard Avedon to bring Carmen to Paris to shoot the collections for the September 1957 issue, but Avedon was resistant. “Diana twisted his arm,” says Carmen. “At the time he was besotted with model Suzy Parker, who was a close friend of mine and a year younger.”

Avedon relented with a caveat: that he’d bring Suzy along as a backup in case Carmen didn’t work out. “He was being forced to use me, and I knew it,” she laments. “He focused on everything he thought was wrong with me, including the length of my hair. I didn’t have much of an ego, so I never said a word.” Luckily, it all went beautifully and both models appeared in the feature. “We shot on the streets of Paris—a famous one is of me in midair under an umbrella—and at the Folies-Bergère.”

Eventually Avedon felt more comfortable in Carmen’s company, and she in his. “I felt most at ease with him in the studio when he would play music—Cole Porter and others,” she recalls. “He’d dance around and gesticulate. That meant I didn’t have to interpret his signals.” Working with Lillian Bassman was an altogether different story. “She was very slow and very quiet,” Carmen says of posing for the pioneering female photographer, whose images were laced with a furtive eroticism. “When she was shooting she would half-close her eyes.” For Carmen, a tightly cropped black-and-white photograph of her lacing up her own corset says it all.

There were other Bazaar photographers Carmen did stories with, like the eccentric Gleb Derujinsky. “Gleb was rather a bad boy and not at all reliable. The truth is that he was far more interested in gliding. If it was a good day weatherwise, he’d just as soon be up in the sky as holding a camera in his hands.” In the photo he took of Carmen in a Paris bistro for the April 1957 issue, she wore a Chanel suit that she fell in love with but couldn’t afford. When she got home she took some drapery fabric and, excellent seamstress that she was, made herself a copy of the suit—shades of Scarlett O’Hara.

As for the floating shot of Carmen by Melvin Sokolsky in the October 1960 issue, she explains: “Mel had a bicycle seat attached to a pipe positioned halfway up the wall. It went through the gray seamless paper and was solidly affixed to another wall behind it. The back seams of my garments had been opened to accommodate the following maneuver: I had to climb up a ladder, with an assistant on another ladder, until I could position myself on the seat. I had only my well-exercised thighs and Cleopatra’s Clutch muscles to keep me balanced—all in order to live out Mel’s fantasy.”

In the past couple of years, Carmen has shot campaigns for Sephora and H&M and closed an haute couture show for Guo Pei. She is also the subject of an upcoming documentary, Carmen Dell’Orefice: The Legend Down the Hall, instigated by her longtime friend, fashion illustrator David Downton. He convinced her to let photographer Tim Petersen follow her almost everywhere she went, including the operating room for one of her hip surgeries, and most recently on assignment in Beijing for a mere four days. Of Carmen, Petersen says admiringly, “Five years ago, I set out to document ‘a magic carpet ride’ of her life and ended up on a fascinating roller coaster of galas, hospitals, couture, first-class suites, and drag queens—all in the omnipresence of real star power.”

But even with all of the highs in Carmen’s life and career, it’s her onetime strained relationship with Avedon that sticks with her. “Fortunately, it has a nice ending,” she says. “Many years later, I was to be part of a TV commercial he was directing. It was a huge production with all of this unnecessary busyness. Dick came onto the set and asked, ‘Do you mind if I sit next to you?’ By all means, I replied. Pull up a chair. He paused for a few seconds, then out came these words: ‘Remember those wonderful days? I only wish I knew then what I know about you now.’ ” If only.

This article originally appears in the April 2018 issue of Harper's Bazaar.

Lead image: Carolina Herrera blouse; Chopard jewelry.