Lauren Hutton

We have to be able to grow up. Our wrinkles are our medals of the passage of life. They are what we have been through and who we want to be. I don't think I will ever cut my face, because once I cut it, I'll never know where I've been.

I hope to do modeling till I am 100. There is a chance. My mom just turned 96.

I feel a bit like a fantastic granny to all the gap-toothed models today. There's this British one, Adwoa Aboah, who founded Gurls Talk (2016). She's deeply beautiful. She's the most wonderful, shocking beauty to come around in a long time.

[her beauty advice] Drinking as much water as you can. Eight glasses a day. Sleep. Taking pleasure for yourself, being your own good mother -- mother yourself. With the forces of life, we often neglect ourselves too much. I try to go out and see movies I care about. An awful lot are worth it. I like to read and see my friends and my sweetheart. Take time for what moves you and what will make you happy.

Parasite (2019) -- I saw it three mornings in a row, at Sixth Avenue. That movie, every word was important. You see both sides very equally. You see where they made terrible divergences and why it happened. I would like to see that movie for the rest of my life. I love that movie because I learned something, and that's what keeps me young, as long as I can keep doing it.

[on making American Gigolo (1980)] Everyone knew it was great, that it was ahead of its time. Paul Schrader had been trying to get it made for ten years. He's a genius idea man, and a genius producer. He was one of the first people to use popular music the way he did in that film, with Blondie. Originally, John Travolta had the lead role. He was fresh off of Saturday Night Fever (1977) and Grease (1978), which together had made a quarter of a billion dollars. There were entire rooms in Paramount stuffed with his fan mail. What happened was, two weeks before we were to start, John's mother died. He was just a 24 year-old kid. He was in real agony, and we became very close friends. Then his dad had a heart attack. So John asked for a two week extension so he could pull himself together emotionally, and also lose some of the weight he'd put on during this time. And they wouldn't give him an extension. Everyone was going to sue him. It was just a mess. So what John had to do to get out of it, was give Paramount a deal where they chose his movies, and he had no say. And prior to that, John had what no other actor in town had, which was final cut. Plus, John was very romantic. If John had played the role, it would have been much more romantic and you would have seen the gigolo kiss. With Richard Gere, you never really see the gigolo kissing. You see everything leading up to it. You see his expertise in dressing, more than his expertise at romance.

When I was 47, I returned to modeling and I asked that my photos shouldn't be retouched. Women stopped me on the street and told me that for a long time they felt ignored and invisible and seeing me in magazines made them feel that they weren't invisible anymore.

[on the culture of sexual abuse] It's always stunning. There's something made in men to believe that they're desperately wanted and they're not.

[on the taboo of sex at her age, 74] I am having sex at my age, and have no intention to stop. Boy, I love it, it was always my favorite thing, right up there with my best travel, and maybe higher. It was the most interesting thing to me, and the most joyful, and the most fun, and the most everything. And age only helps you drive a vehicle better.

The first time I was in Paris was with Irving Penn, shooting the Paris collections. They asked me to put on a real leopard coat. I was twisted up because you can't refuse -- I was only 24. But I'd made my first trip to Africa and knew leopards were disappearing at the speed of light. So I told Irving Penn and he decided that we wouldn't shoot it. Then Diana Vreeland heard about it and soon made it a policy at Vogue that they wouldn't shoot leopard. Then, much later, she told me she would talked to friends in Washington, and some years later they made a law against it in America.

Aging is the point of life, if you're lucky. Hopefully, it's growing up. You get to be wise. That's the point. You read, you talk to the smartest people in the world and listen to them.

[on landing the Vogue Italia cover a month before she is 74] I had never felt prouder in my life, and right now I feel even prouder. I've had a record, 27 covers of American Vogue, and I've had 13 other Vogue covers, but this is the most important I have ever done, the one that has made me feel most useful. I've been thinking about it for a while, but it took Vogue Italia's courage to make it true. This is a cover that can change society, because it shows a woman who is vibrant, attractive, who still laughs, and who for the first time is a woman my age.

Burt Reynolds is one of the best directors I've ever had, without question. One of the greatest things he ever did in Gator (1976) was, he tricked me. There was a part of the script, at the end, where I was supposed to laugh and cry simultaneously. I had no clue how I was going to do that. So you remember the big scene at the end where we're in love, but we part ways, and he goes home and I go off to New York to become a big anchorwoman. So we kiss at my porch, and I'm crying and he walks out of frame. And as soon as he gets behind the camera, he goes into this Groucho Marx walk and grins back at me, and I just scream with laughter! So that was very clever. He's a very good man, a very good actor, and a spectacular director.

[on the children she never had] One of the things that scare me the most is a thing that I saw in print about myself: "She has it all"" -- the career