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Angela Lindvall, one of the world’s most famous supermodels, is in the shower when I arrive at her Topanga Canyon home. When she emerges, Lindvall, 33, is wearing a silk dashiki and no shoes. She looks like some sort of golden sylph. The Lindvall ranch is a mountainside utopia.
It’s easy to see what lured John Phillips here to record Wolf King of L.A. in 1970. “The first time I came out here was to visit [his daughter] Bijou,” Lindvall says in a husky voice that still holds a drip of her native Kansas City, Missouri. “I thought ‘Oh my God, I’m back in the country!’” An organic garden blossoms in front of us, and in the yoga studio she built on her property, her yoga teacher is giving birth.
Her yelps punctuate the thrum of bees and the susurrus of apple trees rustling in the warm mistral. This is what 19 years at the top of the fashion game gets you: a chance to check out.
Lindvall, who has graced all the big covers and booked more campaigns than General MacArthur, has severely stemmed her modeling commitments. “Sometimes,” she says, “you need to take a step back to discover what is truly important to you.”
Though she commands an astonishing day rate, Lindvall devotes most of her time to training to become a Kundalini yoga teacher, creating the line of sustainable jewelry with John Hardy that debuted in October, working for charities like the National Resources Defense Council, and raising her two sons, William and Sebastian. And, like many beautiful Los Angeles people, she’s trying to break into movies and television.
She’s off to a good start. She’s had cameos in Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere and her brother Roman Coppola’s two features, CQ and A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III. Last season, Lindvall starred as the judge in the hit Lifetime show Project Runway: All-Stars. “It was really difficult to step into Heidi Klum’s shoes,” she admits, “but I had a terrific time.”
Lindvall will not appear in the next season, but her explorations on the small screen aren’t finished yet. “I want to do a television show where my boys and I travel around the world, eating worms in Thailand and having crazy adventures.”
In fact, Lindvall’s story illustrates how irresistible the siren call of television is to the fashion world. When Project Runway began in 2004, participation in a television show was considered a fatal mistake. Now, upstart designers, as well as established icons, are clamoring to appear.
We at BlackBook aren’t immune, either. The shoot in which Lindvall appears was styled by Taylor Jacobson, a contestant on a television program called Hollywood Unzipped: Stylist Wars on Oxygen and was filmed as part of their finale. Lindvall, meanwhile, was adamant that the article not be a simple fashion spread in which she is treated as a model, which it isn’t, but rather a feature on her as an actress, or at least something else, which it is.
“There’s definitely a shelf-life to being a model,” she says.
“I’m lucky that it’s even lasted as long as it has. Now, it’s time to focus on my true passions: being a mother to my children and addressing environmental issues.” And if part of that happens to be televised, all the better. Chez Lindvall, everything seems possible.
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