Linda Evangelista
“Vogue” shoot after botched cosmetic surgery
Linda Evangelista at an event in 2015 before she disappeared from public view.
© imago/ZUMA Press
Former supermodel Linda Evangelista poses for British Vogue with her face held up with tape and an elastic band.
Linda Evangelista (57) graces the cover of the September issue the British magazine “Vogue”. The special thing about it: The face of the Canadian supermodel of the 1990s, the jaw and the neck were partly fixed and partly covered with adhesive tape and rubber bands, like the 57-year-old, according to the British media reveals himself in the accompanying interview.
“We create dreams”
“That’s not my jaw and neck in real life — and I can’t go all over the place with duct tape and rubber bands.” But with photos, she thinks, “we are here to create fantasies. We create dreams. I think that’s allowed. All my insecurities are eliminated in these pictures”. This way she can do what she loves to do and go about her work.
For the past six years, the 57-year-old has been living “in secret” after suffering a rare reaction to a procedure called CoolSculpting (cryolipolysis). Actually, her fat cells should have been reduced, but they enlarged instead.
Evangelista admits that she was lured into the surgery by both the publicity and her own vanity. “If I had known that side effects can include loss of livelihood and that you end up so depressed you hate yourself… I wouldn’t have taken that risk,” she says today. The mental burden of the botched cosmetic procedure is apparently still great. She is still trying to “love herself”.
The beauty surgery
In September Evangelista had made it publicthat she was “permanently deformed” and “brutally disfigured” by the cosmetic procedure. This treatment led to a paradoxical adipose hyperplasia. Since then, she has had two liposuctions to correct the problem.
With CoolSculpting, the fat is cooled in such a way that the frozen, dead fat cells can be excreted from the body via the liver.
The lawsuit in New York against Zeltiq Aesthetics, CoolSculpting’s parent company, has now been settled. In a statement to Vogue, a representative from Zeltiq said: “We are pleased to have resolved the matter with Ms. Evangelista.”