Veruschka

There's a version of Veruschka's story that gets told as a straightforward 60s fashion biography — German countess, extraordinary height, Richard Avedon, the covers of every Vogue simultaneously. That version is true but it misses the point.

She described herself as an anti-model. Which is an interesting thing to be when you are, by any measure, one of the most photographed women of your decade.

Born Vera Gottliebe Anna Gräfin von Lehndorff-Steinort in Königsberg in 1939, her father was executed when she was five for his involvement in the plot to assassinate Hitler. The family were held in camps until the war ended. She arrived in fashion from a considerably more complicated starting point than most.

By the early 60s she was working in Europe, and it was her collaborations with photographers like Avedon and Franco Rubartelli that established the template for how she'd be seen — dramatic, feral, not quite containable within a conventional frame. At her peak she was earning $10,000 a day and appearing on the covers of all four major Vogue editions. She also appeared in Antonioni's Blow-Up, playing, essentially, herself.

The more interesting chapter starts when she gets bored. "I was always being different types of women. I copied Ursula Andress, Brigitte Bardot, Greta Garbo. Then I got bored so I painted myself as an animal." The body painting work — first in fashion contexts in 1966, then as a serious artistic practice throughout the 70s and 80s with photographer Holger Trülzsch — was genuinely radical. They painted clothes onto her body as an ironic critique of fashion itself, using recognisable icons whose gestures were fixed and legible. The project was about understanding how media creates personalities. The fact that it became successful rather than scandalous was itself, she noted, a comment on how easily capitalism absorbs critique.

She left Vogue in 1975 after clashing with incoming editor Grace Mirabella. "She wanted me to be bourgeois, and I didn't want to be that." That line tells you most of what you need to know.

She's been in and out of fashion ever since, on her own terms — showing for Giles Deacon at London Fashion Week in 2010 at 71, appearing in the Acne Studios lookbook in 2017. The fashion world keeps returning to her because she never quite belonged to it in the first place.

On a similar trajectory — read our piece on Donyale Luna.