In HARPER’S BAZAAR’s May 2025 Beauty issue, Linda Evangelista shares the powerful story behind her return to the spotlight—and the journey to self-acceptance that’s reshaped her life.
In a candid conversation with Linda Wells, Evangelista opens up about surviving a double mastectomy, enduring a series of surgeries, and the unexpected consequences of a cosmetic procedure that changed the course of her career. Now, approaching 60, she’s no longer hiding. “I’m alive. I’m alive. I’m alive, and I’m going to do what I have to do. I’m going to fight because I don’t want it any other way. I’m not done.”
Reflecting on decades spent as a beauty icon, Evangelista speaks openly about aging, motherhood, body image, and learning to embrace herself exactly as she is. “I’m doing the work,” she says. “I’m trying to get to the place where I like myself, flaws and all.”
On being a breast cancer survivor and owning her scars: “My double mastectomy, I’m fine with it,” she tells me. “I did put in very small implants. What they took out, I put in, cc-wise. I’ve had all those lung surgeries, oh my God, and my keloids and all the chest-tube scars and my C-section scar. There were a lot of surgeries. I’m cool. I’m fine with those. I won. I’m here. I won.”
On finding purpose and joy in her work: “I loved working,” she says. “You never heard me complain about my job, never. I thought it was the greatest job in the world.”
On the infamous $10,000-a-day comment—and what she really meant: As everyone knows, she didn’t get out of bed for less than $10,000 a day. It was a statement she came to regret for its arrogance. I see it as a declaration of worth. Is it so offensive to know your value? Evangelista considers that. “There’s different ways of saying ‘I value myself, and I command this for my services because I’m worth it’ than the way I said it.”
On never being told she was beautiful during her years modeling and giving to others what she didn’t receive: During the supermodel reign of the 1990s, Evangelista became an avatar of beauty, possessing all of its power. And yet, she says, “I didn’t walk around thinking I was beautiful. The attention was for the work, not for the person. I was never told I was beautiful. I was told, ‘Oh, your hair looks great.’ Or ‘The foot is working. The foot is good.’ But no one ever said, ‘Linda, you’re beautiful.’”
She now tells everyone she can what she never heard herself, as if to right a wrong. “I make a point … I tell my nephews, I tell my friends, and I especially tell my son how beautiful he is because I think it’s important to hear it.”
On no longer feeling watched—and feeling fine with that: For years, she says, “I felt like the eyes were on me. I don’t feel them on me any longer. And I’m fine with that. That wasn’t sustainable, whatever that was back in the heyday, and I’m sure glad I’m not living that life.”
On how her view of beauty has changed: After what she’s been through, Evangelista is reassessing the whole concept of beauty. “I really think beauty is something you earn. I think of my grandmothers’ faces and what the war did to them, the toll it took on them … just wearing their hardships. They wore it, and they were so gorgeous. It had nothing to do with perfection or youth.” At this, she starts to cry, and I ask if she’s okay. She demurs, saying the tears are happy ones.
On struggling to face her reflection after a CoolSculpting treatment left her body with permanent damages: It’s hard to imagine. It’s unimaginable. For someone whose beauty was her career and her identity, now “I have to go through therapy to like what I see when I look in the mirror, and I still don’t look in the mirror. I didn’t want to see myself because I didn’t love myself or like myself.”
On navigating the contradictions of aging: Aging well—if there is such a thing—is a tightwire act: Love yourself, but endure the pain. Don’t let yourself go, but don’t go too far. Exercise all your power, but never let the effort show. Keep up the Botox injections, but dissolve the filler, as Evangelista did, because, she says, “I wasn’t looking like me.”
She’s beginning to find some peace, and maybe that, too, is an upside of aging. “I don’t care how I age. I just want to age. It doesn’t have to be gracefully. I really, really, really don’t want to die. I have still so much to do. I’m finally getting comfortable with myself and with everything, and now I want to enjoy it.”
HARPER’S BAZAAR’s May 2025 Beauty issue, on newsstands May 6.
[Photo Credit: Anthony Seklaoui for Harper’s Bazaar Magazine]
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