Elle Macpherson at 55: 37 years as a model, two grown sons and still ‘The Body’

Vogue

We’ll have what she’s having, please. Elle Macpherson, in a swimsuit and low-slung Off-White track pants, is perched on the kitchen workbench extolling the virtues of a plant-based diet. “Greens, greens, greens,” she says with a grin, hamming it up for the cameras. But make no mistake: Macpherson takes these very seriously. Whether it’s her latest obsession, micro sprouts (she swears by her Miami sprout dealer), the raw vegetables she’s feeding into the juicer right now or the hero ingredients in her cult WelleCo Super Elixir, greens, she believes, are the secret to her vitality.

Along with the hair, cheekbones and legs-for-days, she’s always had a rare incandescence. Thirty-seven years after she started modelling it’s undimmed. And just who, at age 55, has the waist she had at 18? It makes you stare. Apologies for going on about her body – Body – but the extraordinary fact of it, just how lithe, toned and radiant she is in person, simply the first thing that hits you when you first meet Elle Macpherson.

Then her sons walk in, and you think, aha! So it’s not just the greens or the mind-body-spirit work she does so diligently, but that other ‘g’ word: genetics. Some people have all the luck.

Macpherson hops off the counter and strides over to sons Flynn, 21, and Cy, 16. She ruffles Cy’s blond mop and his smile is the mirror of hers. “Nice work, Mum,” says Flynn. He is as tall as she is, with an angular jaw and his financier father Arpad Busson’s dark hair.

Mother and sons are holidaying together in Macpherson’s home town of Sydney, for the first time in a while. Flynn, who was born in New York, is at university in Boston studying finance and real estate, and hasn’t visited Australia since 2012. Cy, born in London, was here last year, on a working holiday at Belltrees farm, Scone in New South Wales’s Hunter Valley. The property is owned by the White family of international polo players and horse breeders, and Cy adored it, despite the gruelling schedule. “It was early mornings, late nights, but an incredible experience,” he says. Macpherson is often back and forth between Australia and the US. She nipped over for a WelleCo media launch at Bondi Icebergs in November. However, Coral Gables in Coconut Grove, Miami, is home these days.

Theirs is a privileged life. Coral Gables includes gated communities of large villas with swimming pools, and, according to , the Macpherson residence has 6.5 bathrooms and a climate-controlled wine storage room. Then there’s the house in the Bahamas, which Flynn in particular is attached to. “I was an unhealthy kid,” he says. “The pollution in London meant that I’d get sick with asthma and chest infections, but when I’d go to the Bahamas all that cleared up; it was so clean. I was always so happy [there]. That’s where my love for the beach came from.”

Flynn’s number-one passion, though, is flying. He learnt at 16, got his private licence at 18, then his commercial one. And while he comes across as genuinely down to earth, his Instagram feed brims with private planes, skiing holidays, black-tie parties and Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc.

It all seems a long way from Macpherson’s middle-class childhood in Killara. The teenaged Eleanor Nancy Gow (Macpherson is her stepfather’s name) had a Saturday job in a pharmacy. She started modelling to pay for school books. Asked how she keeps everyone grounded, she says: “Good question! It’s a delicate line, and we certainly have opportunities as a family that I didn’t have as a child. There’s no use pretending we don’t live like that. You know, the kids fly to Europe regularly, they went to good schools in England. We are an international family … but I have to say the most beautiful moments really are the simplest times when we’ve been brought together, things like road trips.”

She fondly recalls going camping around America when was Flynn was 11. “And renting a little apartment here, in [Sydney’s] Cronulla, getting a dinghy and going fishing in the mornings. We were just talking about that the other day: we spent a month, ate Paddle Pops and fish and chips on the beach, went waterskiing.”

A 2005 profile described Macpherson as “still just a regular Aussie beach chick at heart”. But is she? “Well, I’m hardly a girl, am I? I’m the mother of two young men. But I am definitely someone who feels comfortable in nature, and being with my children and friends is what’s important to me now; simplicity, back to basics.”

That quintessential Australian refusal to have tickets on yourself has rubbed on the kids, too. Flynn says he works hard to centre it: “Being humble and not a show-off-y person is very much a quality that I strive for and that I look for in other people who’ve been lucky enough to come from a similar background. I don’t have a magic key to it, I just try and remind myself in every situation to put myself in other people’s shoes, to take myself down a notch, to understand scenarios from different points of view.”

“Roots are important,” says Macpherson. “They shape your values. I’ve travelled a lot, but I still consider myself to be profoundly Australian.” She was still a teenager when she flew to New York to give international modelling a crack. “I’d never even taken an aeroplane before. I had a few hundred dollars in my pocket, no return ticket and a sort of naiveté.” Early footage reveals a young woman shy about her looks, but she soon learnt to work the camera. “I realised early on that I was never going to have the waif-thin fashion body. I was six-foot tall, 36 hips, 36 bust and broad shoulders from swimming all my life. I just needed to embrace my uniqueness.”

“She’s a real-life goddess,” says her personal stylist, former fashion director Anna Bromilow. “Those proportions – the long limbs, the narrow trunk – you could put her in anything and she makes it look cover-worthy.”

After New York, Macpherson went to Paris, where she met her first husband, photographer Gilles Bensimon. They married when she was 22, and divorced three years later. It was another life. Although she was always slightly more commercial – she did five covers – Macpherson was part of the original supermodel tribe: Naomi, Claudia, Christy. The four of them fronted the ill-fated Fashion Cafe in 1995.

She met Busson at a Valentino party in 1996. Although they split in 2005 when Cy (full name Aurelius Cy) was two, they remain close. Their father is clearly a towering influence in the boys’ lives. No-one mentions Jeffrey Soffer. Macpherson’s recent divorce from the Florida property developer, whom she married in 2013, is not up for discussion. Nor the perennial gossip about who she may or may not be dating. All she says is that she’s happy now.

Macpherson does talk about “growing into myself” and says her strongest attribute is “a willingness to learn … from everything, the mistakes and the failures”. She continues: “Appreciation for where you’ve been and how far you’ve come is important. That’s something I’ve come to learn in later life, the importance of taking time to remind yourself of what you have achieved.”

This exclusive cover shoot is a way of honouring such milestones. “The boys are coming of age, and WelleCo is turning five, and I’m 55, so it’s sort of this seminal moment in our lives. is an iconic brand, and we knew we’d be treated with respect. We’ve been asked for years,” says Macpherson of being shot as a family. They always said no. “We kept the children out of the public eye. It was a decision that their dad and I made. We didn’t think it necessary for them to be recognisable in public. Of course,” she sighs, “you can’t stop paparazzi.”

Little do we know that those relentless privacy thieves are lurking in the bushes at this moment, because stolen snapshots from our shoot are later published by a tabloid. It hits home just how intrusive global mega-fame must be. “We had one experience where a family shot was used on the cover of a magazine without our permission, and at the time it felt terrible, but actually I am strangely grateful now because it’s so beautiful.

“Now, with Instagram, the boys are public and they make their own choices,” she continues. Anyway, Macpherson wants to take them out and about. “Well, they are amazing company. Who wouldn’t love taking them places?” She took Flynn to Milan fashion week last September, posting on Instagram: “Thank you for being the best traveling partner – loved spending time together in Milan and on the road. P.S. Don’t forget to take your greens.”

“She is the best mother in the world, and I know everyone always says about their mum, but it really is true,” says Flynn. “My mother has always been so incredibly devoted to me and my brother. It has shone through everything from the way she chooses her jobs to the way she cooks dinner. I always knew we were her number-one priority, and I think that it’s a very … I don’t want to say it’s a unique situation, but just from the conversations I’ve had with friends, I know that she’s special, in the way she prioritises us. Mum was always there picking me up from school. And even now, the stuff she does, even if it’s literally just: ‘You look tired. Drink more water.’”

“Drink more green juice,” Cy pipes up. (They have separate fridges. Elle’s “smells of green”.)

“As much as, you know, that’s annoying,” Flynn says laughing, “it does show the level of devotion, right? But seriously, even when things haven’t been easy, she put us first. I look up to her. My mother is a perfectionist, I don’t think that’s a secret. It’s one of her greatest qualities, everything she does has to be up to scratch.”

In 1997, Elle Macpherson posed for a Australia cover while pregnant with Flynn. Asked how she felt about becoming a mother, she said: “Oh, beside myself!”, admitting to nerves only with regards to telling Busson, who was thousands of miles away. “I wasn’t sure what his reaction would be. I was in New York and he was in Switzerland,” she said, but, of course, Busson was “delighted” and “over the moon”, too. Macpherson at 33 was thinking she “might focus exclusively on being a mother”.

That’s not how it panned out. Flynn was born on Valentine’s Day in 1998, and by the following year Macpherson was on the small screen in . She appeared in five episodes of season six as Joey’s house-mate, Janine Lacroix. While living in London meant she declined to film more, she hardly gave up work. Macpherson is a serial entrepreneur who has made millions from branding her image in allied product categories: underwear, swimwear and now wellbeing. Her Elle Macpherson Intimates lingerie line with Bendon, one of the first of its kind, endured for 25 years. Elle Macpherson Body, a joint venture with Simon de Winter, followed. Five years ago, she went into the plant-based health supplements business with Perth-based Andrea Horwood. WelleCo is stocked by Selfridges, Barneys and Net-A-Porter, and in 2018 Horwood told the sales had risen by 50 per cent in 12 months. Just before Christmas, however, news of a court case surfaced and at present Macpherson and Horwood are in the throes of a complicated break-up.

In 1999, Macpherson posed for another Australia cover, this time along with Kylie Minogue to celebrate the magazine’s 40th anniversary. Flynn, according to journalist Vicki Woods, was at this time “a roguish tot of 17 months, whose pale gold curls are charmingly set off by his lemon-coloured shorts, a present from Paris given by his doting papa”. Macpherson said she wanted to make more movies. She’d starred in and parts in and a movie followed. “But you know in 10 years’ time I’ll say one of two things: I wish I’d made this movie or I wish I’d spent more time with my child,” she said. “One of those things is really gonna hurt me. The other won’t hurt me so much.”

Today, Macpherson defines success as “being able to navigate the ups and downs of life with grace and humour, and learn from the experience, and apply what you’ve learnt”. She tries to instil a spirit of adventure into her sons, but also to allow them to find their own way.

“My aim is to guide them so that they recognise the importance of being self-responsible and self-reliable; I don’t want them to be dependent on me. I feel like the best gift I could give them is the freedom to grow and learn.”

Who taught her this? She fires back: “Life!” Not a life ? “I have worked with people along the way, for sure. I went to parenting classes when the kids were very young, because I didn’t know how to do it. I wanted to do a good job and understand what that means. The kids laugh, but it helped me. Things like: stop telling them what they’re not doing well, because if you focus on the problem, the problem gets bigger. If you focus on the solution then the solution gets bigger.”

Asked what she wishes she’d known when she was the boys’ age, she says: “I wish I’d had someone say to me: what you put inside, how you nourish yourself, not just food, but the people you surround yourself with, the books you read and the love you have, is what determines the quality of your life.”

If this all sounds a bit Goop-y, it probably is. Macpherson and her friend Gwyneth Paltrow have much in common. (“I’ve known her since she was dating Brad.”) Both have focussed on wellbeing and self-growth as they’ve gotten older. Recently, they’ve been working together – Macpherson joined the In Goop Health summit in New York in March. She says the audience was “just working women like you and me – everyone wants to find their purpose”.

Flynn and Cy are playing with a Weimaraner puppy on the lawn as the clouds roll in over the bay. “I hope I didn’t come across as too earnest,” says Macpherson as we wrap up the interview and she sits down to lunch with the crew. “I do think we need to fight against that, to try to be real and honest, you know? More than ever, because there’s so much pressure from Instagram and a sort of expectation of polished perfection. I’m more interested in the realness of life and the beauty of imperfection, aren’t you? It’s the not-perfect stuff that touches my heart.”

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