Lauren Hutton in Sydney for David Jones’ Beauty Awards

Supermodel Lauren Hutton is living proof that beauty, charm and professional skill should never be capped by age.

Lauren Hutton is in Australia to front David Jones beauty Awards on Wednesday. Picture: Richard Dobson

Supermodel Lauren Hutton is living proof that beauty, charm and professional skill should never be capped by age.

Directing Confidential’s photographer, an attendant holding a wind machine, and making edits to her own mood-boosting playlist (‘Play Fever by Peggy Lee’), the 79-year-old barely breaks her camera-ready smile.

“Sorry for my little outburst,” she said to nervous-looking David Jones publicists after yelling for help adjusting a rogue nipple tape.

This is the woman who inspired some of photographic master Richard Avedon’s best work, starred in self-described “s**t movies” including Little Fauss and Big Halsy alongside Robert Redford, American Gigolo opposite Richard Gere, Once Bitten and Zorro, The Gay Blade.

“I had stopped modelling with Revlon in the mid-eighties because no model was over 28, anywhere, and there never had been. At that time I was 47”.

American model and actress Lauren Hutton still knows how to work a room. Picture: Richard Dobson

“We were in the Supreme Court, we were corporation heads. Women were everywhere except in their actual images. That was all girls. I thought this is absolutely stupid, as usual, of society.”

Hutton can’t recall the exact year, but marks the time because: “I judge things by my loves and at the time I was in love with Malcolm McLaren.”

McLaren, manager of the Sex Pistols, “was a wonderful, wonderful man,” she said. “But where were we?”

“Oh yes, I had a big loft on Bowery (in Lower Manhattan), really big. Like 3000 square feet. For $350 a month. I hunkered down and I just made phone calls. For months I called every editor I had or hadn’t met, all over the Western world, and said ‘Listen: I’m Hutton, you’ve seen me in Vogue. I’d done 26 covers at the time or something.

“You don’t have to use me, but you sure have to use someone because girls have nowhere to grow up to.”

Surprisingly, Hutton said she met little resistance from editors, most of whom were in their fifties.

Lauren Hutton on the 1970 August cover of Vogue. Picture: Supplied

Hutton on the 1968 November cover. Picture: Supplied

“Next thing I know, I was being booked again. I started working, and it started all the older women modelling.

“Now we see these women in print and images, being who we are, and that’s the thing I’m most proud of doing in my life so far, actually.”

Totally unfiltered, cheeky, and still decades ahead of her time - she hasn’t been able to indulge in her favourite pastime, scuba diving in the Solomon Islands, “since ‘65”.

She’s simply too booked and busy.

The record-holding Vogue cover girl has appeared on 27 covers of US Vogue, and 40 covers of Vogue worldwide, but arrived in Sydney fresh off shooting for upcoming Italian and German editions.

Following an appearance at David Jones’ 2023 Beauty Awards on Wednesday morning, Hutton is due for a Saint Lauren ad campaign shoot in New York, her niece’s wedding, “and at someone else’s wedding at Martha’s Vineyards.”

Lauren Hutton in a shoot for US Vogue September 1, 1975.

“I’m made up like a h**,” she said with a wry smile when The Daily Telegraph complimented her Ginger & Smart suit and Stuart Wietzman pearl heels.

This is Hutton’s second stint working for David Jones, having appeared in campaigns from 1997 until the arrival of store ambassador Megan Gale in 2001. She’s a fan of Australians’ humour and laissez-faire lifestyle.

“Sydney was kind of dowdy looking, little white-clapboard houses every where when I first came with Revlon in ‘94,” Hutton said.

“I thought ‘wow this doesn’t look like anything’.”

Hutton famously broke modelling’s reflective glass ceiling in 1973, by signing a $250,000 a year contract with the cosmetic behemoth for 20 days of work.

“Then I came back for David Jones in ‘96 and it was a miracle; buildings were all different colours and there was serious architecture. There was serious architecture. It was blooming and one of the best cities in the world. I immediately wanted to move to Sydney. Unfortunately, my lover was in New York.”

That said, she’s “seriously thinking over” a Harbour City base for her bimonthly sojourns from work.

“The only problem is work and the flight, but believe me it’s turning in my mind. Please, suggest some neighbourhoods?”