Natural Instincts

If there’s one person who knows luxury, it’s a veteran supermodel who has worked with the best brands in the industry. Mariacarla Boscono chats with Charmaine Ho about her relationship with the House of Cartier and shares her hopes for the year ahead

“It took me a while to realise that the beauty of fashion is more than just looking pretty—it’s about inspiration, transformation and art,” Mariacarla Boscono once intuited. Funnily enough, the exact same words could be used to describe the Italian supermodel.

Famed for her distinctive walk that sees her strutting down runways like a gazelle on tippy-toes, Boscono is equally acclaimed for her chameleon-like ability to effortlessly transform from a leather-clad Hitchcockian heroine to an avant-garde vision enveloped in black tulle. The long-time muse of Riccardo Tisci, who was also the late Karl Lagerfeld’s favourite model, sees her work as a performance. And like any actress worth her weight in awards (coincidentally, she’s a three-time theatre thespian), she has an innate talent for embodying any character she takes on with every atom of her being. This perhaps explains how, for the past two-and-a-half decades, she has managed to stay at the top of a game known for going through its roster of It girls.