Ex-supermodel Paulina Porizkova fights ageism in beauty culture, cannot help but cave in to it

NEW YORK – Former supermodel Paulina Porizkova, 57, wants to talk about beauty. Its contradictions. And how her life has been shaped by an accident of genetics.

Sitting in the garden of her Chelsea apartment in New York City, dressed in an oversized cardigan, tousled ponytail and no make-up, she warmly sets out two glasses of kombucha. Ludwig, her deaf Cavalier King Charles spaniel with big, sad eyes, offers his own welcome.

The Czech-born Swede spent last year working on a series of essays that became her book, No Filter: The Good, The Bad, And The Beautiful, which was released last Tuesday.

When The New York Times last caught up with Porizkova, she had been stepping out on the town with American writer-director Aaron Sorkin in 2021, whom she is no longer dating, and was emerging from grief after the 2019 death of her American rock star husband Ric Ocasek of The Cars, with whom she shares two adult sons. (She believed they were in the process of separating amicably, but when he died, she was shocked to find herself cut out of his will and left with sky-high debt.)

Now, she is coming back into the world full force, thinking about her past, the transformations of age and the surprising benefits that time brings.

Beauty, she says, has been her “entire life”. She is critical of every element of beauty culture – how “shallow it all is” and the way it separates and isolates women. Before she was scouted at the age of 15 and sent to Paris from Sweden (to which her family had fled from Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia), she was, she recalls, bullied by her classmates for being “geeky, gawky and weird-looking”.

“I’ve spent 40 years thinking about being called ugly, then beautiful, without changing one inch. Then judging myself against other women. ‘She’s prettier, she’s got better legs’– all the horrible shaming comparisons,” she says.

She takes little pride in her beauty or success in modelling. Becoming a model was a stroke of luck, she says. “It has nothing to do with who you are.”

She is especially passionate about fighting ageism in beauty culture, insisting on the need for more representation of women over 50, and their social and erotic viability.

“You need to be able to find yourself out there. You need to be able to look at a picture of a woman who’s your age and go, ‘She’s hot and no, she does not look 39.’”

She adds: “Ageing is so much fun. The insights we get with age. It’s like getting a present every day.”

Her joy feels authentic but can Porizkova really be a poster woman for pro-ageing activism? While she often eschews filters in her social media posts, allowing smile lines to show, her face and figure are hardly those of a typical woman her age. Keeping herself this fit is, she admits, “a lot of work”.

So isn’t she participating in the problem? She shares her views on ageing and how it aligns with her continued adherence to the very strictures she denounces.

Your book is called No Filter. You’re going to be transparent, straightforward.

I’ve carried so much shame through my life. For being pretty or not pretty enough. For having money when I didn’t deserve that much money. For not being the child my parents wanted. Everything in my life, I’ve been ashamed of. My husband was also full of shame. But he erected barriers. He clad himself in armour. And while we were married, I was learning from him. I was the kid and he was the grown-up. So I was like, ‘Oh, this is how you deal with it – you just wall it out.’ It didn’t get better, only worse. You let shame sit in that dark corner and it grows mushrooms all over the place.

You have been really candid about your marriage, the aftermath and Ric’s death. It will probably strike a chord with a lot of people, particularly with women who discover things they could not imagine after separation or death. Did you get a lot of feedback?

Well, I feel the second leg of my life started by sharing this on Instagram. Before that, I was a model and tragedy humanises you. For a moment. Until it seems like you start doing better again and that bubble kicks in again.

There was a pandemic, and I was desperately lonely and grief-stricken and really struggling. And I had nowhere to go. No one to talk to. Most of the things in my life were absolutely unpremeditated. Things just happened. I say something and it leads to another thing. So I went on Instagram to just try to connect with somebody, anybody. Maybe there was one other person who felt like I did? And it turns out there were a lot of people who did.

Grief ages us and ageing comes with its own contradictions. There is a lot of reversal of ageing we are supposed to perform. You are honest in your book about having dabbled in anti-ageing procedures.

I’ve done lasers. They don’t make you look any different. It’s terrible. It sucks. I do that with the knowledge it’s not going to make that much difference. It’s crazy, I’m completely contradicting myself. I still buy the stupid cream that says it’s going to plump and firm my skin even though I know it’s impossible. And, unfortunately, my face is still my business. I go to photo shoots and I’m desperately trying not to feel bad about myself.

It’s training, if your picture is wrong, It’s your fault.

So when you show up to a shoot, are you presumed to have done things to “youthify” yourself?

I’m always slightly confused about that. I come on the shoot and they have the board with what they want to do and it’s always women in their 20s and I’m like, “Guys, you know I’m not going to look like that.” And they’re like, “Oh no, no.”

But when you get older, this part starts dropping. (She gestured towards her lower face). But if you smile, it lifts the face. (She demonstrates.) It’s not that I am so happy.

You can’t do 40 years of that and not have learnt something. So yes, I know what my best light is and my best angles. And I know how to fake it.

But this is also a contradiction. How do you reconcile how you write about the beauty and viability of older women with your need to conform to these ageist standards?

I’m not sure they’re reconcilable. As one woman, can I change thousands of years of culture? It’s a group effort.

Talk about pushing a boulder up a mountain. So, I’ve been given this body and this face. And I’ve been put in this situation of promoting the very thing I’m trying to stand against. I’m using what I was given. That’s the only way I can merge it together. NYTIMES