Supermodel Elle Macpherson on peak physical, emotional and spiritual health at 60
As she toasts 60, Elle Macpherson reflects on her ‘rock n roll’ years, health battles and mantra for ageing.
“Hi angel,” coos Elle Macpherson and I immediately sense something is different with the artist formerly known as The Body. Even her voice – as smooth as Manuka honey, tinged with a Bondi twang and slight European lilt (she became fluent in French within six months of meeting her first husband, fashion photographer Gilles Bensimon back in the 1980s) – seems lighter, relaxed, but most of all she seems serene.
Given she is the high priestess of green juice and the Commonwealth’s version of Gwyneth Paltrow, thanks to her booming wellness company, WelleCo, it’s understandable Macpherson, at the very least, glows and appears chilled out. Her vitamin-rich powders, aptly called The Super Elixir, new The Evening Elixir and Sleep Welle Calming Tea, promise to boost health, deliver radiant beauty, a healthier gut, and promote quality rest.
Today, on the eve of her 60th birthday Macpherson seems more comfortable, more relaxed and more at peace than ever. She’s an empty nester now that her two sons – her “greatest achievements”, Flynn, 26 and Cy, 21 – are out in the world carving their own paths in business and academia in Europe and the US. She is in a newish relationship with American musician Doyle Bramhall, and her metrics for wealth these days involve how full her heart is.
“Love is what it’s all about anyway and love for self, love for other human beings, love for nature, love for the planet, just love in general is what we’re here to experience, I believe. We just go about it in different ways through different phases of our life,” Macpherson tells WISH.
“We identify love in romance, we identify love in loving our children, but it takes time for us to identify love within ourselves and to find a sort of a universal love, an unconditional love for all that is. I have been on that journey throughout my life. My life has been a journey from my head to my heart and living that has been my greatest teacher.”
It’s the internal work that counts most these days for the supermodel turned wellness entrepreneur.
Macpherson’s cup runneth over. In fact, she is practically bursting with affection for the world. Even on set for her cover shoot for WISH, she is graciously guiding and teaching us all about hitting angles, good lighting, offering parenting advice and most importantly, her favourite flavour of Tim Tams (she’s a fan of the occasional classic single coat. Fitting for the original “influencer”).
Don’t be fooled by the lithe limbs, that incredible bone structure, and the smile that could light up an inky sky; this globetrotting beacon of health is still a sucker for her Aussie culture. Her usual homecoming routine used to involve recalibrating herself with a banana Paddle Pop ice cream. “I got a Paddle Pop this time and as I opened it up I was sort of disappointed at how small it was. I did like banana but now I’m into chocolate. There’s something about a synthetic banana taste which just doesn’t do for me … ” Macpherson says.
Authenticity is now non-negotiable. Not that it wasn’t before, it’s just now she’s found the time and space to be still to focus on what, and who, matter most.
Despite the occasional ice cream and a few vegan pies from Bondi Beach institution Funky Pies, the concept of a detox is inherent to her life and her business – WelleCo was reportedly worth more than $300 million last year. Clarity is what Macpherson champions. She craves it. Just like she used to crave the sugar, coffee and other crutches that left her feeling terrible until she started focusing on her physical, emotional and spiritual health.
Macpherson admits that over the years she has struggled with ageing. She found herself “addicted to sugar, addicted to coffee and exhausted” due to myriad personal and professional hurdles, including a short relationship with disgraced doctor and prominent anti-vaxxer Andrew Wakefield, but is finally in the “most Zen space” she’s ever been in.
When she turned 50 she sought medical advice about why she was feeling less than incredible. “Everything felt like it was falling apart”, she says, and despite her best efforts and having access to “everything”, Macpherson was still coming up at a loss.
“I was speaking to a doctor and he said, ‘It’s just age, it’s just what happens, genetics only get you so far’ and I was like, ‘Uh no’,” she laughs, poking fun at her naivete.
Menopause for women is a lot like air travel. No matter who you are and where you are sitting, we’re all on the same journey. It’s one of life’s great levellers. Macpherson sees it – like she sees all of the changes in her life – as a gift.
“Motherhood, menopause, I see them as just new phases. It’s important to not see them as this sort of brokenness in any way. Menopause is an incredible [experience]
for women to go through, where they are gradually no longer tied to the phases of the moon for periods, ovulation, when to time birth control, pregnancy. It’s a new phase of relaxing into being a new expression of yourself. If it’s embraced emotionally and spiritually, it can be a really empowering time, where you’re not there for other people anymore, you’re no longer having to just be a mother or a procreator, you’re there for yourself,” she says.
“It’s really this recognising of the beauty and the depth within women rather than just sort of looking at the outer shell and focusing on what women look like. Ageing should be approached as a quality, not a quantity of years.”
Macpherson is one of a plethora of older women now making headlines for their later-in-life achievements, including actor Naomi Watts for her work on destigmatising menopause and The White Lotus star Jennifer Coolidge sweeping up a slew of professional awards at 61. She is more than ready for her next trip around the sun.
“It’s wonderful to see women in the public eye being recognised. It says a lot for our communities and society that we are longing to see something deeper. The interest in pure superficiality seems to be decreasing. People are looking for and appreciating deeper things. That’s where the real beauty is. We’re all working up to that phase of our evolution where we have a deeper perspective of life.”
Macpherson isn’t alone in being admitted to the sexagenarian club in 2024. Eleanor Nancy Gow, born on March 29, 1964 in Sydney, shares a birthday with The Australian newspaper. Both Australian icons have gone on to witness and experience great transformations.
In 1964 Robert Menzies was well into his second decade in office, everyone was relaxing into the post-war years and the Boomers were of age and beginning to challenge everything. A revolution of youth was on. You could hear it and you could see it even in the pages of the nation’s broadsheet which dedicated a section to “the world of women” edited by Ethel Brice. Pants suits, boots and tunics were in vogue and women were learning how to arrange camellias and be experimental in the kitchen.
“Today women’s horizons are wider – and widening. Her influence and interest penetrate to national affairs, business, art, civic movements, education, medicine, law – while her ancient and honourable roles of mother, pillar of the home, domestic manager have broadened in scope,” Brice wrote at the time.
She introduced the women’s pages by paying homage to the woman “who knew her place” but then set a new course for greener pastures. The type of greener pastures that Macpherson would seek out and conquer just 20 years later and beyond.
“My lifestyle now is unrecognisable in some ways,” Macpherson says. “In the 1980s I was discovering what it meant to move from being a teenager to a woman. And the ’90s, well yeah, they were pretty rock’n’roll,” she laughs.
“In the 2000s I was raising two boys, and they were my priority. And I think my spiritual journey, or let’s say, beginning to focus within, probably started in about 2010. I had more freedom when the boys left home. I had more time to explore moving out from a world where I was a corporate wife at one point, a mother of two boys and building businesses while trying to figure out what my purpose was, and I was living my purpose to the best of my ability as I knew how at that time, I just couldn’t articulate it. Now it’s really about this concept of moving from my head to my heart and finding that balance. My life, when you look at it now, really has evolved in 10-year cycles,” she tells WISH.
Change has been the one constant for Macpherson ever since she burst onto the modelling and fashion scene, all six feet of her. She was fit and fresh, determined and driven; personality traits which have not diminished with age.
When it comes to personal brands, she was one of the pioneers, knowing early on in her career that she had to capitalise on her “unique” image among the waifs with which she was competing at fashion castings in the 1980s. Her trajectory is similar to that of fellow supermodel Cindy Crawford, who also was never afraid to dip her pedicured toe into different worlds like entertainment, with MTV hosting gigs, and more mass-market ventures such Pepsi and Playboy.
Macpherson dominated Sports Illustrated for years – she is a five-time cover star – before going on to launch a brand portfolio ranging from skincare to lingerie and then wellness, while also picking up cosmetic contracts with Revlon and Australian-based ModelCo along the way. She landed high-profile acting gigs, including a role alongside Hugh Grant in sleeper hit film Sirens, hosted the UK iteration of Next Top Model and was cast as “the hot girlfriend” on Friends when the sitcom was at the zenith of pop culture in 1999. It was a role showrunners wanted to expand but Macpherson declined as she was homesick for the London-based family she had built with her then partner, financier Arpad Busson, and their two young sons.
“The Body” has always had a good head for business on those broad shoulders.
By the mid-1990s she was earning about $3 million a year but her most lucrative years were still to come. Back then, as she neared 30, Macpherson began laying the foundation for her next chapters. “I have never been satisfied with just pretty pictures in magazines. It doesn’t rock my world and it doesn’t make me financially independent,” she told Forbes at a time when she was newly into what would be an almost 25-year long association with New Zealand heritage underwear brand Bendon.
According to financial reports, the Elle Macpherson Intimates venture saw her earn six per cent of net wholesale sales, estimated to be about $25 million. The businesswoman earned about $1.5 million per year from Bendon alone at the time for her work designing and modelling her eponymous line, which was a revelation when it first launched in 1990. “New Zealand brand Bendon approached me to be the face of their brand as they wanted to break into the Australian market and I said, ‘You can’t afford me’ as I was working for Victoria’s Secret at the time. So instead
I suggested we work together as I was obsessed with French lingerie but it didn’t really work for this six-foot Aussie with a 36-inch bust so we created something new. I think I made like $16,000 that first year but I was just thrilled and so passionate about creating something,” Macpherson says.
While she ended the agreement with Bendon in 2014, she went on to establish pioneering ingestible-wellness brand WelleCo. It was, and continues to be, a pursuit of helping people, “as deep down that was what I have always wanted my career to be about”, she says. Her vision for WelleCo now is extending the privileges she has earned and experienced to other people, via their health and lifestyle journeys. It’s a point of difference from other wealthy personalities who treat their health as an extreme science experiment, such as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Twitter mastermind Jack Dorsey, who have helped popularise the phrase “biohacking”. Macpherson recoils at the thought of any made-for-TikTok fads, such as the recent “75 Hard”, a $300 program touted as a “tactical guide to winning the war with yourself” where participants must drink almost four litres of water and exercise for 90 minutes a day.
Macpherson, like with many things, did it first. She admitted back in 2015 to carrying a pH tester in her handbag to ensure she remained in an alkaline state, saying at the time, “I believe that most ailments come from having an acidic body”. She has proved herself nothing if not consistent and continues to practise what she preaches, regularly imbibing ancient herbs, such as frankincense (a natural astringent), and enjoying rather than enduring things such as cold plunges and Russian banya steam baths and saunas.
“I’m really interested in ancient bio-tweaking, because I never liked the word, or concept of, biohacking. As if we can hack the magic of the body,” she scoffs.
“The Body” may have been her trademark for more than 40 years, but it’s Macpherson’s heart – full and fit – where her magic lives now in a perfectly aligned state as she enters her seventh decade.
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