Claudia Schiffer

The contract that broke the market

Michel Levaton spotted a seventeen-year-old girl dancing with her friends at the Checker Club in Düsseldorf. She was 1987. Claudia Schiffer had no intention of becoming a model, since her life plan was to study law at her father's firm. But the persistence of the Metropolitan agent led her to Paris for a test shoot that ended up on the cover of the French edition of Elle.

Karl Lagerfeld called her shortly afterward to make her the face of Chanel. The designer was looking for a mix of aristocratic distance and teenage approachability that would remind people of Brigitte Bardot. She signed a multimillion-dollar exclusivity contract that changed luxury industry pay rules forever. And the gamble paid off.

She was the first to earn money like a rock star.

Her ability to reinvent her image led to work with photographers such as Richard Avedon and Ellen von Unwerth. In 1989, she starred in the Guess campaign that made her a mass-market star in the United States. Those black-and-white photos defined the advertising aesthetic of an entire decade. Yet she kept a German-style discipline that clashed with the erratic lifestyle of some of her fellow models.

The producer behind the scenes

In 1994, she tried to break into film with a small role in Richie Rich. Critics were cold about her performance. She quickly realized that her value on the big screen lay in her physical presence rather than in building complex characters. She appeared in Prêt-à-Porter by Robert Altman and later in Zoolander, playing herself with a touch of irony.

She married director Matthew Vaughn in 2002, and her career took a technical turn away from the spotlight. She was not seeking the limelight in front of the camera but financial control behind the scenes. She has served as executive producer on much of her husband's filmography through the company Marv Studios.

She prefers the anonymity of the boardroom.

In 2010, she was credited in the production team of Kick-Ass and repeated the feat in the Kingsman franchise. Her job involves overseeing production design and securing international distribution deals, drawing on her contacts in Europe. Her name still opens doors in markets where British action cinema needs outside financing.

The nineties archive

She curated a fashion photography exhibition at the Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf during 2021. It featured more than 150 objects and works by artists such as Juergen Teller and Corinne Day. She also published a book with Prestel that serves as a historical record of the aesthetics of the 1990s. In this way, she established her legacy from a curatorial perspective, not just an aesthetic one.

She has never hidden that managing her personal wealth is a priority. During her most active years, she appeared on more than a thousand magazine covers around the world. Her estimated fortune exceeds sixty million dollars, thanks to diversified wealth management in real estate and contemporary art collecting.

She lives in a Tudor-style mansion in Suffolk. The property dates back to 1574 and has fourteen bedrooms spread across more than two hundred hectares of land. Maintaining the main structure requires an annual investment in the six figures for specialists in historic building conservation.