Next to his Mercedes GL 63 (which has a power-saving start/stop engine) she drives a Tesla, a competitor that’s surely putting pressure on energy-saving competitors like Benz? “Absolutely, and they should!” Valletta says, exercising her unswerving no-nonsense approach. They manufacture an electric smart car already, but it’s too small for the gruelling traffic Valletta has to brave in Los Angeles where she lives with her boyfriend Teddy Charles, a hairdresser.
This season, she and her 6’5 tall, 17-year-old model son Auden McCaw – whose father Chip McCaw Valletta divorced in 2014 – feature in Mercedes-Benz’s #MBCollective 2018 campaign for Concept EQ, the automobile giant’s new electric car. A wild child in the 1990s, she’s been sober for nearly 20 years and has devoted her spotlight to the struggle for sustainability in the fashion industry and beyond. I’m obliged to do it for work, but if I wasn’t obliged, would I do it?” As you’ll quickly come to realise, Amber Valletta isn’t one for fluff. “Listen,” she says, “those girls are hard workers and all that social media stuff is a talent in itself. It doesn’t feel like the life experience is there, even though it might be.” With an Instagram following of 312,000, Valletta isn’t a stranger to social media, but contrary to the new generation of models, she limits her activity to work. It definitely affects how we feel about people, because you see these kids don’t have much going on except for selfies and going to parties or whatever. “That’s one of the problems with social media: there’s no mystery left in anything. I think there was more character because there was more time to develop these women, but it was also that you didn’t see them on a constant basis,” she points out. There was only, let’s say, 50 girls who were working all the time, and then you had the top 20. “I do think we felt like there was more character then, because there was. Whereas the new generation of household name models are largely children of celebrities with a knack for social media, supermodels like Valletta were created out of nowhere. “It’s like a classic automobile, or a house like Chanel: those things don’t go out of style,” Valletta quips. Much like her famous peers, from Christy Turlington to Lauren Hutton – both of whom she name-checks – it runs through her veins. When Valletta returned to modelling a few years ago following a break to focus on her acting career, you couldn’t call it a comeback. “You can wear glitter in Milan in the day,” as she points out. Fair-skinned, blonde and built like a racehorse, she somehow fuses grace, sophistication and sex appeal in one all-American package, dressed head-to-toe in sparkly Isabel Marant, whose show she also walked last season. At 43, age-appropriate is hardly something she needs to be concerned about. “I wouldn’t normally be running around with a bunch of 20 year olds trying to get into every fashion show, but everything I did last season was appropriate,” Valletta asserts.
The week after, in March, she led an ensemble cast of models from the 1990s down Dries Van Noten’s catwalk to mark his 100th show, fronting a new wave in fashion where models are once again encouraged to be more than just mannequins. Amber Valletta, of course, already walked Versace last season. The day before Donatella Versace would reunite four of the original supermodels on her September runway, I am at the Baglioni in Milan having lunch with another member of that exclusive club.
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