


Her beloved dog Bianca was sick, and she was carrying the dog in a basket on her way to a phone to call a vet when an American photographer spotted this bit of California walking down the street and demanded she stop by the offices of the top modeling agencies. In 1973, Brinkley, just 18, had moved to Paris to study art, and she had already married an arty Frenchman, an illustrator named Jean-François. I love living here.”īrinkley’s all-American face was discovered in an unusual setting. “Look at the coastline!” Brinkley says, with feeling. The buckle of the belt that’s slung mid-hip across her tight, dark jeans is a peace sign, and the water glasses from which she sips chilled bubbly water have peace signs on them, too, as well as a slogan: back by popular demand. During the trial, it was stated that Brinkley once dropped by that house to find a long, dark hair on a rumpled bed.īrinkley is wearing a pair of diamanté peace signs in her ears.

I just want to be here.”Ī curious choice, considering that big white house factored quite prominently into the divorce: It was where Cook liked to bring his teenage girlfriend, the one he hired away from her job at a toy shop with one thing in mind. “I just want to be here,” she says, sighing. Tower Hill has a frog pond, a skateboard park, a campsite, a snowboard hill, and a path on which she and the other mothers from the Ross School like to cross-country ski. She’s planning to make it her full-time home as soon as she unloads Tower Hill, the 20-acre Bridgehampton estate she has listed for $30 million. Isn’t it cool?”Īcross the street from this (by Hamptons standards) modest house is a big white colonnaded Greek Revival Tara that Brinkley bought in 2003 but has yet to inhabit. Isn’t it painterly? Look at the brushstrokes. “ Woooow,” she exclaims, “look at the sky. She can talk through the smile-which reveals both top and bottom teeth at all times-almost like a ventriloquist. She speaks in the breathy, enthusiastic delivery of a librarian reading aloud to someone in the third grade, and she smiles almost constantly. “Isn’t it wonderful?” Brinkley says, throwing her arms wide. She’s got plans: an organic farm outside and a “homework club” upstairs. She’s filled it with framed portraits from her modeling years: a platinum copy of “Uptown Girl,” herself on the cover of Redbook, and so on. She bought this house last year for almost $10 million, with the intention of putting up her parents, but the stairs proved difficult for them, so she plans to move them to yet another of her houses-one in town-and decided that this house, with its streaming light and views and wide plank floors, should be her office. Across the water are the rooftops of the village, a village she is hell-bent on preserving from condos and chain pharmacies. “Can you believe this place?” Brinkley is saying, as she wanders the yard of the boxy Colonial whose lawn ends on the quiet, sandy edge of Sag Harbor. It’s as if she’s absorbed the well-organized beauty of her surroundings through her pores, as if she’s a natural extension of the blue sky and its fluffy clouds. She looks like she slept really well last night, and every night for her entire life, and as if she’s fortified herself with only the most local, organic, and expensive of foods since before she was born. She’s a month past her very public, very ugly court divorce from her equally tanned, equally gleaming ex-husband, the architect Peter Cook, but Brinkley shows no strain. One wrist is wrapped with an uncomfortable-looking amount of beads and baubles and charms and two leather bands in Rasta colors that demand, STOP GLOBAL WARMING NOW! Her teeth are gleaming, her waist is narrow, and she’s dressed like the popular girl from your high school: tight red tank top, tight dark jeans, groovy purple sneakers laced up in some complicated unlaced way, and sporty Oakley shades.
Christie brinkley dress from uptown girl video skin#
Her hair is thick and golden, her skin is tanned but only just. It is also perfect, on this Saturday afternoon in August, for regarding Christie Brinkley. Much has been made of the light in the Hamptons: It is perfect for painting, it is perfect for sunning, it is perfect for illuminating the shingled houses, the electric-green lawns, the hedges and the pools and the soft clay courts. Fashion assistants: Doria Santlofer and Eve Bertin-Lang. Manicure by Elisa Ferri at See Management. Emerald-cut diamond and platinum stud earrings, $65,000 at Tiffany & Co., 727 Fifth Ave., nr. Long wrap dress, $7,000, and braided belt, $840, at Hermès, 691 Madison Ave., at 62nd St.
