Cindy Crawford doesn’t look back fondly on her interview with Oprah Winfrey nearly 40 years ago.
In “The Super Models,” out Wednesday on Apple TV+, Crawford reflected on her 1986 appearance on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” alongside Elite Model Management founder John Casablancas.
The talk show host asked the then-20-year-old to “stand up [for] just a moment,” telling her studio audience, “This is what I call a body.”
The docuseries showed a clip of the moment as Crawford stood up and smiled.
Looking back, the supermodel, now 57, said, “I was like the chattel or a child, be seen and not heard. When you look at it through today’s eyes, Oprah’s like … ‘Show us why you’re worthy of being here.'”
She acknowledged that “in the moment, [she] didn’t recognize” this.
“Watching it back I was like, ‘Oh, my gosh, that was so not OK really,'” Crawford noted. “Especially from Oprah!”
In the show, which also features Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista and Christy Turlington, Crawford opened up about struggling to get her parents on board with her job.
“My dad really didn’t understand that modeling was a real career,” she said of John Crawford. “He thought modeling was, like, another name for prostitution.”
While Cindy initially wanted to be “a nuclear physicist or the first woman president, the two biggest jobs [she] could think of,” she pursued modeling after posing for a local photographer as a teen.
“Doing this first shoot changed my life,” she explained to Vanity Fair in 2016. “The photographer encouraged me to go to Chicago to try to find an agent.
“I went to Chicago, ended up signing with Elite, and from there started doing catalog shoots as well as working with Victor Skrebneski — the most important photographer in Chicago,” she continued. “This one photograph opened my eyes to a whole new world and started me down the path of modeling.”
Cindy, who is now one of the most famous models in the world, has graced the covers of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and more magazines and taken part in many runway shows and fashion campaigns.
In 2000, Cindy retired from full-time modeling.
She had welcomed son Presley, now 24, with her husband, Rande Garber, by that time. Their daughter, Kaia, now 22, was born the following year, and both children have followed in her footsteps.
