Omega’s Aphrodite: exclusive interview with Cindy Crawford

Luxury watchmaker Omega derives its name from the 24th and final letter of the Greek alphabet. The open ‘O’ shape has numerous meanings in the various schools of science, one of them being the absolute limit of a sequence; fittingly, the symbol is an enduring emblem for the Swiss brand – one that suggests the ultimate in quality.

Classic themes run deep at Omega, and not only when it comes to watch design. Today, for example, visitors to its London flagship are greeted by the brand’s very own pair of majestic goddesses, not sculpted out of marble like ancient caryatides but clad in vivid red gowns, in the form of Omega ambassadors Nicole Kidman and Cindy Crawford. Supersize portraits of these famous muses, shot by British photographer Damon Baker to promote the Omega Constellation Manhattan collection, flank the entrance of the glass- fronted Regent Street site.

Cindy Crawford first partnered with Omega in 1995 and is the brand’s longest-serving ambassador. “I have so many Omega memories,” says the statuesque model, describing her alliance with the watchmaker. “I joke that I’ve been married to Omega longer than I’ve been married to my husband – and we’ve never had a fight.”

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Cynthia Ann Crawford was raised in DeKalb, Illinois – a city located around 60 miles west of Chicago and named after Baron Johann de Kalb, a major general who served in the American Revolutionary War. “When I was in high school, my jobs were working in the corn elds, babysitting and cleaning houses,” says the model of her early life in northern Illinois. Crawford's career trajectory reads like it was scripted by a Hollywood studio.

At the age of 17, Crawford entered and won second place in the inaugural Look of the Year contest, staged by Elite Model Management, which at the time represented industry-leading names including Christie Brinkley and Lynn Kohlman. After graduating from high school in 1984, Crawford enrolled onto a degree course in chemical engineering at Northwestern University on a scholarship, but her time there was short-lived; by 1986 she had made the decision to ditch academia for modelling, and she left Illinois for Manhattan. “I really looked up to beautiful women like Marilyn Monroe, and I loved Jane Fonda,” Crawford recalls. “But I also liked strong and professional women. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a nuclear physicist. My mother was more of a housewife and then she started working a little bit, but I knew I didn’t want that. I wanted a bigger job; I just wasn’t sure what it was yet.”

It would be an understatement to say that Crawford’s career blossomed in the Big Apple; before long, the model was a fixture on the global fashion circuit, with a long list of magazine covers to her name. In 1992, she and her then-husband Richard Gere made history as the first couple to grace the cover of American Vogue, and when the late John F. Kennedy Jr launched the pop-politics magazine George in September 1995, Crawford was on the front, posing as the bewigged first US President George Washington. Luxury maisons and fashion designers including Hermès, Oscar de la Renta and Chanel have cast Crawford for their campaigns; Richard Avedon captured her dancing acrobatically with a group of male models for Gianni Versace’s Spring 1987 collection.

On film, Crawford starred in the 1995 Isaac Mizrahi documentary Unzipped. Footage filmed backstage at the American designer’s New York City fashion presentation shows Crawford dressed in a sequinned mini dress; a model princess, her crown a blush pink headband. On television, Crawford presented MTV’s House of Style for six years (1989-95). A 1992 episode of the show follows her to Paris, where she interviews Jean Paul Gaultier and sits down with fellow supermodel Linda Evangelista for a bistrot-style lunch. Previously, the pair had starred together in the black- and-white music video for George Michael’s hit Freedom! ’90, alongside Christy Turlington, Naomi Campbell and Tatjana Patitz. “I feel lucky,” Crawford reminisces today. “When I came up in fashion, it was the late 80s and I feel like it was such a great time, for the models, for the designers, for the photographers. There was so much excitement around fashion.”

In 1995, Omega partnered Crawford with renowned American fashion photographer Herb Ritts. Frequent collaborators, the duo had previously worked together on commissions including Gianni Versace’s couture campaign in 1990, the December 23, 1983 cover of Rolling Stone, and the 1994 Pirelli calendar. Ritts also directed Crawford in the video for Jon Bon Jovi’s 1994 rendition of Please Come Home for Christmas. For her Omega debut, Crawford modelled the brand’s Constellation ’95, a design update to 1982’s Constellation Manhattan timepieces with their signature quartet of ‘claws’ clinging to the bezel, echoing the Omega symbol. Late last year, the watchmaker introduced the latest iteration of the Constellation: 101 new designs featuring fine-tuned details including faceted indexes, bracelets with polished ‘mid-bar’ links, and a new crown with half-moon guillochage. “They appreciate my growth into a woman,” says Crawford of her ongoing collaboration with Omega. “It’s not so focused on just being the new hot young thing.”

Crawford, now 53, has turned her work with the brand into a family affair: for its 2017 campaign, shot by German photographer Peter Lindbergh, the model was joined by her husband Rande Gerber – a serial entrepreneur whose businesses have included a mini-chain of cafés in Giorgio Armani’s US stores, and the tequila brand Casamigos, co-founded with actor George Clooney – and the couple’s two teenage children, Kaia and Presley. “My kids have been part of the Omega family since they were little,” says Crawford, remembering promotional trips to the Beijing Olympics in 2008 and the Vancouver Winter Olympics two years later. “It just became obvious to all of us that it was the right time.”

More than 30 years after she left America’s Midwest for Manhattan, Crawford’s career shows no sign of abating. “You know, I have [this] saying: there’s this idea of Cindy Crawford, and it’s a thing,” she says. “I work for Cindy Crawford. And [with] anyone who comes to work with me, I’m like, ‘Look, we all work for Cindy Crawford.’”

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