Ready To Wear: She was always the strangest of the Trinity

Linda Evangelista on the cover of the latest issue of LOVE magazine

How great is it to see Linda Evangelista on the cover of the latest issue of LOVE magazine and to read her first interview for eight years for that matter? In their time anyone now over the age of 20, let's say, and even remotely interested in fashion, has indulged in an obsession with this, over and above all the other supermodels, after all.

One friend (male) still has a Linda scrapbook which he made in 1991 while at university. "In the beginning God created woman," he wrote in it. "AND THEN HE CREATED LINDA." The rest of us may more likely be divided into those who fixated on Linda Evangelista when her hair was brown, black, red or (most commonly and following a swift yet rigorous fashion desk survey) platinum. In the aforementioned exclusive she talks about her first day as a blonde spent filming the video for George Michael's "Freedom"...

"I remember we were drinking a lot of red wine on set. The producer actually took the wine away because we were drinking too much and Georgie got mad and found the wine. So we were saved."

Red wine. Georgie. Linda Evangelista as a new-born blonde. Excuse me while I pause for an uncharacteristically dewy-eyed and nostalgic sigh.

Linda Evangelista never really talked to journalists about the racism inherent in the fashion industry, for example, or yoga and she remains all the more intriguing for that. The only thing she was known to have said was that she wouldn't get out of bed for less than $10,000, and that turned out to be among the quotes of the 1990s. Even then she denied it – or at least pointed out with patrician hauteur – that its meaning had been misconstrued. To this day she questions the supermodel moniker.

"Somebody told me recently that if you're known by your first name you can be comfortably called a supermodel. That's not my words, though." Whatever, she was also always the strangest of the Trinity, a far cry from the honey-locked, blue-eyed, snub nosed ideal of beauty that dominated – and still does, more often than not.

Her appearance as a cover girl is all the more resonant given the fact that she is well into her 40s. Not bad for a girl who was told her career would last a maximum of three years – an inspiration, in fact, to us all.