B Y  L A I A  G A R C I A – F U R T A D O
April 13, 2023

Amber Valletta is prone to sighing and delivering an emotional “ooh,” when faced with images from her early days of modeling. Like her cover for the February 1993 issue of Vogue, her “very first” for the magazine. “I was with my best friend Shalom,” she quickly remembered. (It won’t be the first or the last mention of her model icon BFF, a.k.a. “Miss Saucy,” and the other half that makes up the “Shalamber” moniker.) Another “Ooooh!” escapes her lips when she comes across a photo of herself on the runway at Jil Sander’s fall 1993 show. “I loved working with her,” Valletta explained. “She was just such an interesting, powerful woman. Ahead of her time.” 

As Valletta revisits different moments from her life, she is keen to offer quick anecdotes of the many different industry luminaries she’s been privileged work with; from the photographer Peter Lindbergh (“Peter really allowed me to express myself, so if I was feeling strong, or moody, he’d let me be that person”); to Karl Lagerfeld (“I just thought Karl was so magical and interesting and witty…he knew something about everything”); to opening Tom Ford’s legendary Gucci fall 1995 show (“He gave us sex back, which I think we had been missing for a bit in the ’90s”). She also reveals the costar of a “difficult shoot,” her own son Auden, who appeared on the cover of the magazine’s July 2002 issue with her when he was 18 months old. “He really didn’t want to model…he wanted to walk and run around the property,” she added laughing. From wearing the Versace dress “before” J.Lo, to embodying Alber Elbaz’s essence when she closed the spring 2022 AZ Factory show that paid homage to the designer, Valletta’s personal fashion story is deeply intertwined with the fashion history of the last three decades. She ends her Life in Looks journey saying, “I hope maybe we continue this book, maybe we have more chapters ahead of us together.” We do too. Click the link for her full story.

Filmed at: Hôtel Barrière Fouquet’s New York
https://www.vogue.com/article/life-in-looks-amber-valletta