Cindy Crawford is the real American dream. Tall – 5’9” – with brown hair, brown eyes and a prominent mole on her upper lip, the corn-fed Miss Crawford was discovered in 1982 in small-town Illinois. Valedictorian of her class, she studied chemical engineering at Northwestern on a full scholarship, but when she started modeling – and made runner-up in the Look of the Year contest – she left to pursue her career. A modeling contract and a move to Manhattan later, she landed the first of seventeen Vogue covers – and before she knew it, she was the most in-demand model of the 1990s. And that’s not all. She married (and divorced) Richard Gere, hosted MTV’s House of Style, did a duet with Little Richard, and Prince penned an ode to her, aptly titled “Cindy C”. In 1988, she became the first mainstream model to pose for Playboy magazine, and her monochromatic pictorial set the precedent for Stephanie Seymour’s in 1993. If blondes have more fun, then brunettes have good business sense – dubbed ‘Cindy, Inc.’ by Vanity Fair, she’s made an empire on her good looks and Midwestern manners, and with a career spanning three decades, Cindy Crawford is here to stay.
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