Christy Turlington

• 1. Introduction

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  Grace Coddington, the long-time creative director of American Vogue, once called Christy Turlington "the most beautiful woman in the world." Turlington was born on the 2nd of January 1969 in Walnut Creek, California. She rose to fame as a supermodel in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

  Yet the face that sold fragrance and cosmetics for decades later pointed her toward something far from the camera. This documentary asks how a teenager noticed on horseback came to anchor a whole era of fashion. It asks what a frightening day in a delivery room changed for her. And it asks what a lung scan, a yoga mat and a marathon have to do with any of it.

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• 2. Spotted on Horseback

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  A local photographer named Dennie Cody first noticed Turlington while she was riding a horse in Miami, Florida. Her father, Dwain Turlington, was working there as a training captain for Pan Am. Her mother, María Elizabeth, was a flight attendant from El Salvador. Christy was the middle of three daughters. The sisters were raised in their mother's Catholic faith, and Turlington kept practicing it into adulthood.

  Modeling began after school when she was 14 and continued until she was 16. She also worked during summers while attending Monte Vista High School in Danville, California. At 18 she moved to New York City to model full-time. She finished high school afterward.

  In 1994, Turlington went back to school. She graduated cum laude in 1999 from the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University. Her Bachelor of Arts concentrated on Comparative Religion and Eastern Philosophy, subjects that would come back in her daily life through yoga.

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• 3. The Face of an Era

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  In 1989, at age 20, Turlington signed a record-breaking million-dollar contract as the new face of Calvin Klein. The arrangement ran until 2007. She appeared in the Eternity campaign that same year and returned to it in 2014. In 1992 she also became the face of Maybelline, a brand she still represents.

  In 1993, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York named her the "Face of the 20th Century." The museum went further and created a line of mannequins based on her likeness.

  Her client list reached across the fashion calendar. It included Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent, Marc Jacobs, Donna Karan, Prada, Valentino and Versace. Louis Vuitton, Bally, Jason Wu, Max Mara, Escada and Michael Kors hired her as well. Magazine pages carried her face too, among them Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Elle, Marie Claire, L'Officiel, Tatler, Glamour, Cosmopolitan and Allure.

  She is often grouped with Naomi Campbell and Linda Evangelista under the label "Holy Trinity" of supermodels. All three were among the original supermodels, whose fame reached well beyond the fashion industry. Frequent campaigns, covers and runway shows tied them together and lifted models to the status of international celebrities.

  Peter Lindbergh's January 1990 British Vogue cover showed Turlington, Campbell, Evangelista, Cindy Crawford and Tatjana Patitz together. Singer George Michael drew inspiration from it for his "Freedom!" video. The clip featured those five women alongside five male counterparts, all lip-syncing the song. Michael later showed the video during his 2008 concert tour while he sang.

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• 4. Beyond the Runway

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  In 1986, at age 17, Turlington appeared in the video and on the album cover for "Notorious" by Duran Duran. Fellow model Yasmin Le Bon had persuaded her husband, band member Simon Le Bon, to feature the young newcomer.

  The 1990s brought film work. She appeared in Unzipped, a documentary about fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi, and in Prêt-à-Porter, a fashion mockumentary directed by Robert Altman. Director Robert Leacock made Catwalk, a documentary about her own life on the runways.

  In 1993, Turlington and Naomi Campbell had their navels pierced together. They then showed off the piercings at a London fashion show. Turlington and Alicia Silverstone are credited with introducing navel piercing to mainstream culture. She also became the fourth model investor in the now defunct Fashion Cafes, after Elle Macpherson, Campbell and Claudia Schiffer.

  In the 2000s, Turlington became a partner in Sundari, an ayurvedic skincare line. She also joined clothing lines made by Puma, including active wear and yoga wear for women.

  Her byline appeared in Marie Claire, Yoga Journal, Teen Vogue and the Huffington Post. In early 2002 she served as a guest correspondent for NBC's Today Show. One report covered the state of girls' education in Afghanistan. Another was an interview with the Dalai Lama at his home in Dharamshala, India.

  In 2015, Turlington was among the initial product testers for the Apple Watch launch. She took part in the press conference. Apple filmed a segment of her using the watch to train for a marathon.

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• 5. A Career That Keeps Returning

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  In 2008, casting agent James Scully said of her: "The greatest model of all time! You could combine every model to this day into one person, and they wouldn't come close." That same year, the September issue of V magazine ran fourteen covers. Each showed the headshot of a famous model, drawn from the new crop or the supermodel era, photographed by Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin. Turlington was on one of them.

  W magazine marked her 40th birthday with a collection of notable images from her career, running from late-eighties runway shots to the present. She starred in the Bally spring/summer 2009 campaign opposite Oriol Elcacho.

  In 2019 she closed the Autumn Winter show for designer Marc Jacobs. That September she was one of fifteen women on the cover of British Vogue, whose guest editor was Meghan, Duchess of Sussex.

  On the 20th of September 2023, Apple TV+ premiered The Super Models, a four-part docuseries. It features Turlington with Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell and Linda Evangelista. Roger Ross Williams and Larissa Bills directed it.

  In February 2026, Lancôme named her a global ambassador. The brand cited her "innate femininity, proactive advocacy, and spirited outlook." That middle word points to the work that now fills much of her life.

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• 6. A Difficult Birth

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  Complications during her own childbirth in 2003 changed the direction of Turlington's life. Afterward she learned that more than 500,000 women die each year in childbirth, and that 90 percent of those deaths are preventable. The figures inspired her to pursue a Master's degree in Public Health at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.

  In 2005, she began working with the international humanitarian organization CARE and became its Advocate for Maternal Health. She is also an Ambassador for Product Red. Her mother, Elizabeth, had long supported CARE through World Wings, the organization of her former flight attendant colleagues, and that example influenced her.

  The travel followed. In 2005 she visited El Salvador for CARE, and in 2008 she went to Peru. In May 2007 she traveled to Swaziland for Product Red. In September 2010 she joined a CARE Learning Tour to Ethiopia to study efforts to reduce maternal deaths.

  One CARE effort is the FEMME project, which joins CARE, Columbia University and local government. It brings health-care practitioners together to find better ways of serving women who feel too intimidated to visit a clinic or a traditional hospital.

  Turlington also serves on the Harvard Medical School Global Health Council. She advises the Harvard School of Public Health Board of Dean's Advisors. She belongs to the White Ribbon Alliance for Safe Motherhood and to Mother's Day Every Day.

  In 2015, she signed an open letter gathered by the ONE Campaign and addressed to Angela Merkel and Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma. It urged them to focus on women as they led the G7 in Germany and the AU in South Africa, ahead of a UN summit that September.

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• 7. Film, Charity and Marathons

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  The 2010 documentary No Woman, No Cry marked Turlington's directorial debut. Its 60 minutes follow four cases of maternal health, from Tanzania, Bangladesh, Guatemala and the United States. The film had its world premiere at the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival. Its U.S. television premiere aired on the new Oprah Winfrey Network on the 7th of May 2011. It earned her a nomination for the Do Something With Style Award from the VH1 Do Something Awards.

  As the film debuted, she launched Every Mother Counts, a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to making pregnancy and childbirth safe for every mother. It informs, engages and mobilizes new audiences to take action and raise funds. Its supported programs span Haiti, Uganda, Malawi, Indonesia and the United States.

  In 2011, Turlington completed her first New York City Marathon, running with Team Every Mother Counts. She ran the 2013 ING NYC Marathon with the same team. She also took part in the 2013 Hood to Coast Relay, which appears in her documentary film Every Mile, Every Mother. A short film series called Giving Birth in America followed, released a little before May 2015.

  Music helped raise money as well. In 2011, a compilation album named Every Mother Counts went on sale exclusively at Starbucks, with a share of proceeds going to CARE and the charity for maternal health programs in coffee growing countries. A second album in 2012 set aside U.S. $8 from each CD sold in participating Starbucks stores.

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• 8. Marriage, Smoke and Yoga

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  Christy Turlington Burns and Edward Burns tell the story of their first meeting differently. Burns told HuffPost that they met when she appeared on a taping of Entertainment Tonight, where he worked as a production assistant, and that he fetched her a cup of coffee. In 2020, she told Grazia UK they first met at a basketball game at Madison Square Garden in the late 1990s, while she was in another relationship. Their real connection began when they met again at a charity event in 2000.

  According to Burns in a 2007 interview with Elle, they were engaged within about two months. They planned to marry in Milan in October 2001 but postponed after the September 11 attacks. After a period apart, they reunited in late 2002. They married in June 2003 in San Francisco, and she wore a dress by John Galliano.

  Cookie magazine reported that, contrary to many accounts, Bono did not give her away. She said: "He was there, of course, but I gave myself away. I mean, I was 25 weeks pregnant at the time." Burns, she added, "met me halfway down the aisle." Their children are Grace, born in 2003, and Finn, born in 2006. Her sister Kelly is married to Edward's brother Brian Burns.

  Her father died of lung cancer in 1997, and Turlington has since become an anti-smoking activist. She began smoking at 13 and was smoking a pack a day by 16. She quit in 1995, at age 26. In 2000, at 31, she underwent a lung scan to raise awareness about medical technology. The scan diagnosed early-stage emphysema.

  Yoga has been part of her routine since 1987, specifically the Jivamukti style. In an article published on the 15th of April 2001, she said she practiced three times a week in the morning. She credits yoga with bringing her closer to her Catholic faith.

  Her book Living Yoga: Creating a Life Practice first appeared in 2002 and reached a third edition, with editions in 2002-2003 and 2005. The first edition carries a foreword by Robert Thurman. She also helped edit the January-February 2001 issue of Yoga Journal.

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