Vice Style

Vera Valdez left Brazil as a teenager and began a career in Paris in the 1950s as a model for surrealist designer Elsa Schiaparelli. By the middle of what is one of the most important decades in the history of fashion, she was traveling the world presenting Christian Dior, and eventually serving as the favorite model of Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel, who had just returned to postwar France to resume designing her line. Vera sat for Helmut Newton, Richard Avedon, Willy Rizzo, and Frank Horvat and had sex with many famous and marvelous people, including filmmaker Louis Malle, who, along with director Bernardo Bertolucci, helped her flee Brazil after she was sent to prison on drug charges and tortured during the military dictatorship of the mid- to late 60s.

In Paris just after the war, though, Vera reigned over the nightlife scene, smoking opium with Jean Cocteau, forging a deep friendship with French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, and loving on everyone from a millionaire baron to actor Maurice Ronet. As the figurehead of the legendary Les Blouson Chanel gang—a pack of roving Chanel models—she flittered amid the celebrity social circuit looking pretty, raising spirits, and doing everyone’s drugs. She was famous and posing naked for magazines before famous people knew they were supposed to do shit like that, and later she tinkered in drug dealing and worked as a bootlegger.

Today she is 75, one of Brazil’s finest stage actors, and is among the most spry and charming people we’ve ever talked to.