Pat Cleveland is the original Supermodel – don’t let anyone claim otherwise.
Cleveland conquered Paris with Karl Lagerfeld and Antonio Lopez in tow; walked the Yves Saint Laurent, Valentino, and Stephen Burrows runways, and became fast friends with Andy Warhol and Donna Jordan. She danced the nights away at Studio 54, Regine’s, and on the railing of Halston’s mezzanine balcony, the latter with a bunny mask and Sterling St. Jacques by her side.
Then there is the walk. It’s exaggerated, theatrical and over-the-top. It’s free-spirited and 100 percent Pat.
“Do you want to dance into the moonlight?” she said of her runway signature during a conversation in early April. “It’s such an honor to wear a designer’s clothes. It’s like you are being lifted onto Cloud Nine. You feel like you are on top of the world, and that sensation gets into your body.
“I got that walk from listening to music, loving movement, and feeling the fabric, chiffon being my favorite,” she added. “It’s like those moments when everything opens in the universe and you’re floating. That’s I how I developed my walk.” And she’s been working it ever since.
Born in Roosevelt Island and raised in East Harlem, Cleveland saw the evolution of New York style first-hand. In the 1950s, she recalled how “there was only one type: pretty, glamorous and elegant. Women wore white gloves, hats and petticoats.”
The Sixties, she said, were all about “release, freedom, movement, dance, and English people coming over. It was unisex, as if everybody was one sex and people dressed accordingly. Free love… psychedelic…rainbow colors.”
By the mid-Seventies, R&B music perfectly spoke to the cultural Zeitgeist and the loosening of silhouettes. “That freedom of the body, the feeling of the Sixties but in disco lights,” is how Cleveland put it. “The style went along with the sensation that we were evolving. The things we wore, the scents we smelled, the food we ate…Mrs. Vreeland in her red room…Stephen Burrows with his rainbow world… Fernando Sánchez, Giorgio di Sant’Angelo… Lingerie during the day…Halston with his jersey on the bias…. Everything cut on the bias. Everybody was wearing asymmetrical and avant-garde and going downtown and roller-skating.”
One of her favorite disco looks of that time was a metal chain dress Burrows, her close friend, had made for me. “I wore it to the ballet in London and it ripped up my stockings,” she said. “I would often test drive his dresses and if they held up the night, we knew it would work for everybody.”
Of Halston, who anointed her a Halstonette, she likes to remember his distinct, beautiful voice. “’Darling, can you turn for me?’ He was so elegant, and very handsome,” she said. “One day, he opened the closet in his house. I said, ‘Halston, all these clothes are the same.’ He said, ‘It’s a uniform.’ He had the same outfit, and changed it every day. Cashmere turtleneck, cashmere slacks. I learned so much from him.”
In her career, perfectly chronicled in her recent memoir Walking with the Muses, she has worked with “the great houses of America,” – think Halston, Burrows, Norma Kamali, Bill Blass, Oleg Cassini, and more. “I did them all,” she said. “Bill once said, ‘Who do you like better, Halston or me?’ ‘Don’t ask me that question,’ I said to him. ‘You all love each other.’”
In recent years, daughter Anna Cleveland has become a successful model in her own right. She has not just inherited her mother’s good looks, but also that walk. When it comes to advice for aspiring models, Cleveland has plenty. “Keep god in your plans and cleanliness is next to godliness,” she said. “It’s just so important to stay healthy. Being an international model is a big challenge. Not everybody is in business class. And don’t forget to eat. When you see food, get it. There is no time for food, so you have to make the time to nourish yourself. Physically, and spiritually.”