Mariacarla Boscono

Out of the blue, Mariacarla Boscono reveals that she made love for the first time decidedly late, when she was already a fully fledged woman. A model in high demand, she posed nude with unbridled nonchalance, but she had never been with a man. Modelling lingerie was what made her feel awkward, or even vulgar. Incidentally, it wasn’t so long ago that she conquered that inhibition, when she was photographed for La Perla. Then she speaks of her parents, who in the 1970s lived between Phuket and India selling coloured fabrics to Fiorucci. As a couple of slightly hippyish entrepreneurs, “for them just about everything was legit…” she says, adding a poignant ellipsis suggesting that for her, as a girl, it wasn’t strange to see them smoking a joint in the evening. Jumping topics, she then asks: Do you know how drunk certain models of the new generation get? And hear this: to feel light-headed without absorbing the calories, she swears they soak their tampons in vodka before going out clubbing. Mariacarla laughs

and trips over her words. She turns serious when speaking about her five-year-old daughter Marialucas, and her father, who isn’t very well at the moment. She mentions her new companion Guido, who works for the legendary DC10 club in Ibiza, and whom she met at Isla Blanca. She sums up their two-year-young romance by stating: we eat, we laugh, we make love. She leads the conversation for hours with her inclusive, irrepressible and sincere vitality. Next 29 September, in Paris, she’ll be inviting all the key people of her career to celebrate 20 years as a protagonist of the fashion world. Her friend Riccardo Tisci will be there, whom she met when the future art director of Givenchy was still studying at Saint Martins in London. From that day, not a moment has passed without them seeing or speaking to each other, especially now that Tisci is contemplating his future. He looks so great he’s unrecognisable, declares Mariacarla. He’s relaxed and enjoying life, after 12 years of getting little to no sleep, she says. The party guests will also include Piero Piazzi, the booker who discovered her and who symbolises her pain and fear of not making it, her unfounded conviction of not being up to the mark, her will to believe, her persistence and successes. There will also be Mert & Marcus and Peter Lindbergh, the most important photographers of her career. Particularly Lindbergh, whom Mariacarla describes as a mirror, the one who showed her the precise extent of her fragility in his immortalisation of her. No doubt there will also be a few gatecrashers, because, as Mariacarla admits, she loves infiltrators and facilitates their incursions. Karl Lagerfeld may also be attending. She swears she had an exchange with him in Roman dialect 20 years ago. She was still a girl, and he was already him. She was doing a fitting for Fendi, and Lagerfleld was a bit heavy-handed with a pin. Ah Karl, said the cheeky teenager, che m’hai preso er culo? (Which roughly translates as, “Hey Karl, did you stick the pin in my butt?”) And Lagerfleld, who speaks French like a Frenchman, and Italian like an Italian, answered, Nì, nun te preoccupà, c’est pas grave. (Or rather, “Kinda, but don’t worry, it’s not serious.”) She says she wants to thank all these people for being her guardians. I’m a daughter of fashion, she declares. I’m a product of fashion, she reiterates. It taught me how to read people, to comprehend psychological intrigues, hierarchies, to appreciate what we have, to understand what we’d like, but also the tangles that constrain us. Born in Rome 35 years ago and now everyone’s muse, she grew up in the Kenyan village of Klifi, between Mombasa and Malindi. The only living creatures to keep her company were a mongrel named Pippo, an iguana that appeared at the window every morning, her tutor who visited for private lessons, and then Bati, a 17-year-old Muslim girl who worked as her nanny. She says she has to thank this childhood experience for her great performing ability that everyone acknowledges – her talent to encapsulate a state of mind in the fraction of a click. Sure, she also went to the Lee Strasberg acting school in New York, but above all it was solitude that taught her about introspection. By ten years old she had already read all of Isaac Asimov. She spent years just talking to herself. And now, she says, her imagination is beyond. She even risked her life in Africa. Like the day when she didn’t listen to some Indian friends of the family who told her not to drink the water at dinner. She was better off with the beer, they said, because the water table was contaminated. But she insisted: I want water. And she spent the next week in bed vomiting, almost completely dehydrated, with the nearest hospital miles away. Or the time when Bati the housemaid found a black mamba curled up in a corner of the bathroom – one of Africa’s fastest and most poisonous snakes, nicknamed “the shadow of death” because it bares the blackness of its mouth when it opens its jaws. This is why it’s amusing to hear Mariacarla’s stories about Tanzania, when she returned there for the Pirelli Calendar photo shoot in 2009. Of all the other top models, she was the only one aware of the hidden dangers in that uncontaminated nature. The others acted like they were in an exotic fun fair where they could do as they pleased, with all their shouting, shrieking, selfies and quirks. She remembers Malgosia Bela dangling from the tusks of a gigantic elephant, swaying back and forth as if riding on a swing, with the handler terrified about the animal’s evidently dwindling patience. Or at night, when everyone wanted to stop and photograph a lion cub while crossing through the forest. It was Mariacarla who said No, if there’s the cub, there’s the mother too. In an instant they found themselves surrounded by about a dozen lionesses, obliging the park wardens to shoulder their rifles to defend her, Lara Stone, Isabeli Fontana and Daria Werbowy. Mariacarla’s travels have always been like this, at least until five years ago when she gave birth to Marialucas. An authentic single mother, she even asked for her daughter’s father to remain unnamed. She went to Mongolia alone, and ended up marooned in the desert for three days by a ramshackle coach, drinking beer and nothing else, because food wasn’t on the menu. She came back from that trip weighing 46 kilos. It was my best ever season on the runways, she jokes. But she isn’t kidding when she says that upon returning to New York, the first thing she did was spend the night in a strip club, to feel like Mariacarla again, because her essence is made of the wind, but also of strobe lights and red sofas. She was the only one who dived into the Amazon – home of the anaconda – when she was convinced into jumping first by a group of men who then didn’t have the courage to jump in after her. Or there was the night when she was still pregnant and drank ayahuasca with a shaman in Brazil, the natural hallucinogen that is said to heal the spirit. Up to here we’ve tried to describe Mariacarla. The alternative is to let her describe herself, following her mental meanderings without interspersions. Sitting in a restaurant in Rome, she orders the most underdone of hamburgers while we drink water and wine, both of us drifting along with her continuous flow of things and bright confusion. I still love fashion, she says, but I realise it’s all starting to come to me too easily. So I write all my ideas in a notebook, because it’s the only way I can channel this energy – all the things that my mind sees and registers, my desire for challenges. I make up fashion collections, and lately I like mixing 1930s nightgowns with sequin-covered shoes. I also dream up new travel magazines. And I write down ideas about how to make the most of Rome. I’d really like to get involved with that on a tourism level, organising and promoting events that can help this amazing city to get back on the world stage. There’s lots of stuff buzzing around my head. Because if it’s true that we only get this life, I want to live until I’m 90, and live 90 lives in one. She admits she doesn’t have time right now, but she’s convinced she’ll create something new one day. I can feel it, she says, my moment is just around the corner. • original text page 528