Marpessa Hennink

[La Parisienne]

I'm Marpessa and I'm soooo surprised to have stumbled on this thread!

[La Parisienne]

ELLE France September 1984

Photographer: Steven Silverstein

Stylist: Carine Roitfeld

Image Credit: automne-roi20.livejournal.com

[brazilianaffair]

for "Dolce&Gabbana", from Vanity, july/august 1988

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Vogue España, May 2013

SUMMARY: They called her "The Catwalk Contessa" and she roamed it with an aristocratic gait during the 80s and 90s. Later, she retired to Ibiza. The eternal muse of Dolce & Gabbana, at the splendid age of 48, Marpessa Hennink makes a return to fashion as the ambassador of their couture line.

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from Man About Town Magazine, S/S 2013

wearing of course Dolce & Gabbana

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Lessons from the Stylish: Marpessa Hennink
49 year old model, and face of Dolce & Gabbana Alta Moda, Marpessa Hennink is the very model of balance.
BY Lisa Armstrong | 06 August 2013
 
When a 49-year-old whippet-thin model tells you her big passion is cooking, your spam filter kicks in. But in Marpessa Hennink's case these two seemingly mutually exclusive conditions are probably down to her hitting pay dirt in the gene lottery. Even more radically, she still smokes, but although she manages to sound marginally remorseful about this unzeitgeisty state of affairs, her heart doesn't seem to be in it. Those looking for a nicotine-tinged moral will be disappointed. She looks fresh-skinned and clear-eyed. No one said life is fair.
 
Before there was Cindy and Christy and Naomi - and for a while, during - there was Marpessa. An olive-eyed, gravel-voiced Amsterdammer whose mixed-race lineage left her feeling an outsider among her strapping, fair classmates but also made her endlessly versatile for fashion shoots, and one of the great catwalk prowlers. "Modelling made me so much happier about myself. Before that, I was like a black sheep and then all of a sudden in Milan it was 'Ooh bella'.''
 
For a time, she was ubiquitous. Then, in 1993, she bowed out. "Grunge killed it for me," she says, waving her cigarette as if to brush away a pesky fly. "I wanted to be in fashion to be beautiful and elegant, not to walk around looking like a junkie."
 
You can feel her agent's anguish even now - walking away just as the big money began to cascade down the model chain. "Don't worry, I made plenty," she cackles.
 
I get the impression she made plenty more "in retirement" in Ibiza, where she had her daughter Ariel, now 10, and established an idyllic-sounding life of haute hippiedom and lucrative property development.
Doing up homes for affluent would-be bohos is sweet revenge for a model who for 12 years never had time to unpack, let alone hang a picture. Her life seems to have been a constant process of balancing and amendments. "My mum was quite a hippie and into sewing things and studying homoeopathy - and this was Holland in the Seventies, we weren't exactly at the vanguard of fashion. So when I got to Paris I really went for it, clothes-wise."
 
She reckons she was the first model to dress the part off duty. Not that they were ever really off. By the late Eighties the supermodel culture was fomenting nicely; theirs was the fame that only requires a first name. She and Linda (Evangelista) were fashion-obsessed, trotting around in their Alaïa leggings and Chanel jackets. "We wanted to look as good off the catwalk as we did on. Before us models didn't dress nicely at all," she reports disapprovingly. "It's not supporting the business is it? I won't mention names but some, especially the American girls, wore the ugliest cotton knickers even to their fittings."
 
Marpessa, for the record, wore La Perla and Hermès. "I invented the It bag," she laughs. She almost had an Hermès bag named after her - there was a collaboration in the offing but Ibiza got in the way.
 
She is an intriguing contradiction of laid-back and fastidious. But so is her parentage: her mother, the world's "strictest hippie", her father, a tailor "who used to go mad if he saw me up a ladder paint-stripping a wall in a Chanel jacket".
 
Which would have been quite likely. She has around 17, at least two couture. She had "a particular relationship with Karl" when she was modelling. She doesn't mean anything romantic, unless you count the creative connection that flourished between the big models of the Eighties and Nineties and the designers. She was in at the beginning, when Versace escalated the fee wars by paying models $50,000 to do one show and Dolce & Gabbana paid the models in clothes. "Models had much more input then than now," she says. "The designers would listen to what we had to say during the fittings and sometimes they'd change the clothes because of it." And sometimes they wouldn't. "Then you'd have to wear something hideous on the catwalk and just pretend it was fabulous."
 
Apart from her hair, which she says she can never get right herself, she's abnormally low-maintenance - no exercise, no special beauty tips, apart from total sunblock 364 days a year and one intriguing exercise she shows me to lift your boobs (smile downwards, flex your cheeks upwards, ladies, and feel the burn). She's a compelling argument for not messing around with injectibles. In Ibiza she floated around in sun dresses (by her friend Yvonne Sporre who also decamped to the island) and lots of antique gold jewellery.
 
She's wonderful at making things look effortless and as if they don't matter very much - it's the Chanel jacket-up-a-ladder philosophy. Secretly I think she worked quite hard in Ibiza, buying and selling real estate, as she calls it, engaging in the odd spot of modelling (she's been in Vogue more this year than at any other time in her career) and ensuring friends like Valentino and Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana had a good time whenever they came to visit.

And then, last year, when Dolce & Gabbana launched its Alta Moda (haute couture) line, it offered her a job in Milan. When I ask her title she looks at me pityingly. "We don't have titles." If they did, hers would be something like "Person Who Takes Care Of Clients And Makes Wearing Alta Moda Look Easy". Because amazingly, wearing lace dresses worth tens of thousands of pounds without looking like a museum piece can be quite tricky. So can those clients, even though she diplomatically insists they're a breeze. Perhaps they're simply in awe.
 
Describe your style
Anything from the Twenties, Thirties, Forties and Sixties. In the house That means Bauhaus and Bloomsbury. I get most of my furniture online. Clothes-wise I love romantic, feminine, flattering and I like to have my arms covered because they're a bit scrawny. A three quarter-length sleeve is ideal. What I don't like is extreme minimalism. It's extremely boring.

School-run uniform
White shirts from Banner in Milan and Capri pants - my favourites are by Alberto Biani.

What I've learnt
Dress to flatter. I like to look covered. There comes an age… but also it's about shape. I see a lot of young girls wearing miniskirts and they shouldn't because they don't have the right legs or bum for it.

Sentimental hoarder?
I used to be but then I began to get rid of things. I didn't want my daughter to be preoccupied with my past but then one day she came back from school and asked if I used to be a model - some of the mothers had Googled me. She's quite proud of my work now.

Best buys
Jackets. The one I wear most is by Dolce & Gabbana, the kind that gives you hips and curves. You can wear it to a big party or with jeans.

Oldest items
I hate the throwaway culture so I don't buy much high street. I've got cashmere going back 30 years. I spend money on it and look after it - in the machine at 30 degrees, lie them flat and iron the reverse. I'm a very good ironer.

High or low maintenance?
Apart from my hair, which requires professional first aid when I go out, very low. My big thing is tending my eyebrows and my must-have beauty products are Estée Lauder 's Daywear BB cream and a mineral sunblock. I'm very relaxed about growing up.
 
source

[clo_fashion]

Marpessa at the Dolce&Gabanna Autumn/Winter show on 23rd February. Source: vogue.it

[clo_fashion]

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Here's Marpessa at the Spring/Summer 2012 Alberta Ferretti show. She looks lovely!

 

 

[clo_fashion]

Something has gone wrong. How do I embed images here?

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Something has gone wrong. How do I embed images here?

Clo, I don't think Bellazon allows embedding of images.

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On the runway for Lanvin Haute Couture, S/S 1991


VogueSpirit scans

[clo_fashion]

Marpessa front row at Dolce&Gabanna Spring/Summer 2015.

Source: vogue.it

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^Thanks Clo. There are so many interesting people in Milan this week.

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Front row at Dolce & Gabbana's S/S 2015 show

 

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Atelier Versace S/S 1991

 

[clo_fashion]

Here is Marpessa's latest editorial for Elle France, issue no. 3606, February 2015.

Sorry but one pic is not HQ. I do hope you like the editoral, I think she looks stunning!

[MissMonde]

Here is Marpessa's latest editorial for Elle France, issue no. 3606, February 2015.

Sorry but one pic is not HQ. I do hope you like the editoral, I think she looks stunning!

Thank you dear! xx Marpessa

[MissMonde]

Vogue España, May 2013

SUMMARY: They called her "The Catwalk Contessa" and she roamed it with an aristocratic gait during the 80s and 90s. Later, she retired to Ibiza. The eternal muse of Dolce & Gabbana, at the splendid age of 48, Marpessa Hennink makes a return to fashion as the ambassador of their couture line.

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Thank you!!! 

[brazilianaffair]

Gianni Versace, autumn/winter 1991

  

[brazilianaffair]

Chanel, autumn/winter 1992