‘The first supermodel’
Gia Marie Carangi
Born: January 29, 1960 and died: November 18, 1986, aged 26.
The real Gia Carangi away from the camera.
“When you’re young, you don’t always…y’know…it’s hard to
make the difference between what is real and what is not real.”- Gia
After watching Gia (1998) which starred the beautiful and
talented Angelina Jolie I have been captured by the tragic beauty.
Gia's only UK Vogue cover. Photos by Alex Chatelain.
After arriving in New York City at the age of 17, she
quickly rose to be the iconic supermodel she was famous for. She was a favourite
model of various famous fashion photographers, including Francesco Scavullo,
Arthur Elgort, Joseph Petrellis, Richard Avedon, Denis Piel, Marco Glaviano,
and Chris von Wangenheim. By the end of 1978, Carangi was already a
well-established and in demand model. In an interview with 20/20, Carangi noted
that, "I started working with very good people...I mean all the time, very
fast. I didn’t build into a model, I just sort of became on’
Leading photographers like Arthur Elgort and Francesco
Scavullo were captivated by her dark, sultry features. Gia was different. She
was gay, and off duty she DE accentuated her enviable curves “There was
something she had . . . no other girl has got it. I’ve never met a girl who had
it,” Scavullo said. “She had the perfect body for modelling: perfect eyes,
mouth, hair. And, to me, the perfect attitude: ‘I don’t give a damn.’”
Working with Gia could be chaotic and hectic however, and
her antics are legendary: riding off, for instance, on the back of a stranger’s
Harley-Davidson still wearing clothes from a shoot and it taking days for the
clothes to be returned. Gia had this desire to shock, to be extravagant and
wild. This soon was aggravated by drugs, with them getting more dangerous which
led to her unfortunate downfall.
Gia sadly eventually contracted AIDS and died in 1986 at
the age of 26. ‘The actress Angelina Jolie, who played Gia in a 1998 HBO
biopic, later told The New York Times, “When she’s free and just being herself,
she’s unbelievable; that’s the tragedy of her story. You think, ‘God, she
didn’t need drugs—she was a drug.’ ” ’
"I don’t know what killed her… but I know that there
was sadness. There was something that was eating her inside always. And that
one thing maybe took different form. It was a certain emptiness at first and
then the emptiness turned into the addiction and then the addiction cured and
it became a disease. So there was something inside there that was stronger than
all of the rest and that somehow was eating her" - Diane Von Fürstenberg
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