What do you see as your biggest achievement?
Bringing forth Pauline! Which resulted in the birth of Boas, my grandson of 2 years old! It makes me intensely happy, more so than when I was on the cover of the Italian Vogue in 1978…
What do you regret most in life?
1. My marriage didn’t go as I had always dreamt of…
I had the romantic idea that people in a marriage can fight down and triumph all obstacles, through thick and thin, to ensure the family stays one.
Apparently not…
In the meantime, I’m coming to understand I need to be grateful for that failure. It has created new perspectives and has incited me with trial and error to become self-regulating and independent, that wasn’t always easy… Freedom is an important lesson you must learn in life, but sometimes it takes a lifetime to discover…
‘Every man is his own prison’ said Buddha. ‘But every man can obtain the right to escape. Never stop struggling.’
2. I have a talent for drawing and painting. I regret I never went through with it. I’d have loved to go through life as an art painter. There’s still a chance to get back into it again, one day, who knows…
Tell me something about your career.
When I was 21-years-old, I was scouted at a defilé of Yvette Lauwaert, a Ghent-based designer. Not much later, I was working in Amsterdam, London, Milan, and Paris. In those times, they still had the budget to fly over a whole team to Guadeloupe, Senegal, Norway, or the Ivory Coast. I’m very fond of these memories. The difficult part though was saying goodbye to the team after a week of intensively working together. Sometimes I fell into the so said ‘black hole’, which lasted until the next job. At the age of 35, I became a mother and I deliberately quit my career as a model.
I had found peace with the idea that my time as a model was over. But, 4 years later they asked me again! I started over, part-time this time. Next to that, I worked as a sales assistant in a ‘Belgian Lifestyle’ shop with clothes of Belgian designers, such as Martin Margiela, Sofie D’Hoore, Dirk Bikkembergs Nathan, etc., and I organized exhibitions at the annex art gallery.
(In the meantime,) A lot has happened, (including trials and tribulations), but, I still work and I truly enjoy it.
Your oddest recent midnight thoughts.
A few nights ago, when I finished the book ‘Anna’ by Niccolo Zayer in bed, it caused a little pondering that lingered in my mind. What if a virus broke out here, that would exterminate all adults. The electricity malfunctions. Food and water are scarce. Fire destroyed a large part of the country. The surviving children must savage themselves and each other, defeat and conquer, which causes a hierarchy between the strong and the weak… Something like that should happen for real! More than once these fatal situations have occurred in history, and even right now…
For us, this scenario perhaps seems unlikely, but look at for example drought, people are getting burned alive because of it, terrorist threats, an unpredictable American president, and a few more of those crazy world leaders who are playing with fire. Also, the occurrence of social media. That isn’t always as constructive as it ensures and makes us fail to enact real human contact: solitude and depression dawdle around us… then I fell asleep!…
Yes, those thoughts are probably not even that strange, but rather realistic… Fortunately, gloom thinking generally isn’t for me.
If you had a warning label/tag, what would it be?
Scorpio. Beware!
What is your age?
I’m 66.
