When Steven Meisel shot the supermodel Linda Evangelista for the September 2022 issue of British Vogue, she hid many of her features beneath a series of hats and scarves. The year before, she had filed a lawsuit after a cosmetic procedure left her “disfigured,” she said, and reluctant to venture outdoors.
Ms. Evangelista, 58, seems far less shy these days. She has since been on other Vogue covers and in a television series, and has talked openly about being treated for breast cancer twice. This month, she flaunted her face, frame and a mastectomy scar on the cover of Zeit Magazin, a sister publication of the German weekly Die Zeit, which has an English edition.
In the magazine, Ms. Evangelista appears in photos by Cass Bird looking not much older than she did in the ’90s, when she bragged that she would not get out of bed for less than $10,000 a day. On the cover, she looks sultry in a denim jacket unfastened to the waist, and inside she appears positively coltish, her skin as youthful as a girl’s.
“I try to love myself as I am,” she said in an interview with Claire Beermann, a writer and the style director at Zeit Magazin. (Ms. Evangelista declined to be interviewed for this article through a representative.)
Visible scar aside, the photos tell a different story. In the interview, Ms. Evangelista said her features had been pulled taut with rubber bands and tape for the photo shoot, explaining that fashion is about selling illusions. One may be her sense of self-love.
Near the end of the interview, she and Ms. Beermann posed for a selfie, the writer recalled. Ms. Evangelista closely inspected the result. “Oh, God,” she lamented to Ms. Beermann. “In this bright light, you can see every pore.”
