At 18 Josie Borain’s beauty catapulted her from suburbia to international fame as South Africa’s first supermodel. In 2023 she celebrated her 60th birthday. This milestone birthday came a year after she launched her third act by quitting her city life in Cape Town to settle permanently in a remote rural hamlet. I spoke to her about this big move, and her thoughts on ageing, aliens and a lot more. The article was published in Fair Lady Magazine in March 2023.
One of the first things you intuit about Josie is that despite the blinding glamour of being an ex-supermodel, she’s clear-eyed about what really matters in life. You perceive a woman who has experienced her portion of heartache and anxiety. Married and widowed by 25; remarried and divorced in her 40s; parent to three children; financially self-reliant… it can’t all have been one perfectly-lit bokeh closeup. Not that she’d complain. Although she shares her ideas openly, she seems far too polite to publicly bewail her struggles, or for that matter to brandish her significant triumphs. Being spotted by an agent at 18 was a springboard to success, but what she made of that exceptional opportunity is down to her talent, work ethic and financial savvy.
Married and widowed by 25; remarried and divorced in her 40s; parent to three children; financially self-reliant… it can’t all have been one perfectly-lit bokeh closeup.
At 17, after leaving high school in Johannesburg without finishing her final year, she followed her boyfriend to Cape Town where she took up modelling to pay the bills while hoping to land a job in fashion. That never happened because by 21 she was designer Calvin Klein’s muse in New York City. She landed the role at a time when the CK’s star dominated the fashion galaxy. With Josie headlining a new androgynous look, the brand’s famous billboard campaigns featured smouldering imagery that scandalised authorities and electrified audiences. Even in today’s digital era, scoring a CK billboard can supersize a model’s career. In the 1980s that power was hypersonic. Looking back, she’s surprised at how casually unaware she was. “I saw my face plastered all over Times Square and I only took one photograph.”
I saw my face plastered all over Times Square and I only took one photograph.
During her modelling career, Josie was photographed by the likes of Irving Penn, Peter Lindbergh, and Steven Meisel. She was the lead in TV ads scripted and filmed by Richard Avedon for the hit fragrance Obsession, murmuring “Save me” in her soft accent. Her milieu was inhabited by couture and media creatives. Around this time she married the French photographer Pierre Houlès, who was 18 years her senior. He gave Josie her first Leica. They divided their time between homes in Paris and New York where Josie worked and hung out with the first supermodels, names like Ines de la Fressange, Christy Brinkley, Linda Evangelista, Cindy Crawford, Paulina Porizkova and Jeny Howorth. During breaks at shows and shoots she’d snap photos to pass the time.
I didn’t like to sit around chatting and smoking cigarettes waiting for the show to start. Instead I’d pick up my camera and photograph the crew or the models doing their makeup.
She discovered she preferred working behind the camera than in front of it. Houlès encouraged and coached her. By documenting candid moments backstage in the pre-camera phone era, she unintentionally became a pioneer of reportage photography. Her images are now archival material revealing famous names off the catwalk in their early careers. Her hobby developed into a love affair with the medium. She would later honour her artistic talent and study directing and filmmaking at the prestigious New York University Film School. Meanwhile, her personal life was blindsided by tragedy. In 1986 Houlès died on a Parisian boulevard while out for his morning run, leaving Josie widowed and heartbroken at the age of 24.
In the years that followed she dated a number of high-profile men including Phil Joanou, director of Rattle & Hum, a rockumentary about U2. The couple shared a house with Bono and Ali Hewson in Dublin for the duration of the filming. “They’d just had their first baby, and it was cool. I’m pretty sure they don’t remember me. The last time I saw them was at Iman and David Bowie’s wedding.”
She went out with Charles Spencer, brother of the late Diana, Princess of Wales, and was with him at the time of Diana’s death. She attended the funeral. “There were only three non-family members on that island – the butler, the chauffeur and me.”
There were only three non-family members on that island – the butler, the chauffeur and me.
Her second marriage, to actor Langley Kirkwood, lasted until their divorce in 2012. Regarding her current status she says, “If I met someone it’d be okay, but I’m not really looking to be in a relationship.” Decamping from Cape Town to live on a farm in the back of beyond supports this assertion.
Moving to the sticks
Vermaaklikheid in South Africa’s Western Cape Province is 300km from the Mother City and lightyears from the stratosphere Josie once occupied when she was one of the most-photographed and highly-paid women in the world. The village is guarded by fynbos-covered hills on a river that melts into the Indian Ocean near a protected marine reserve. To get there you brave a tertiary road that bumps along for 35km into a valley loosely strung with holiday houses, fishing shacks and little else. Initially she moved to be near her ailing father who had retired to the family property. “We used to come here on holiday when I was a child. My children had left home and I thought why not?”
She formalised her relocation by opening a shop simply called Josie’s General Store. “It’s not a sexy kind of shop. It’s mostly coffee. I sell, like, clothes and sewing needles and Polyfilla. And I’m a hoarder so I’ve got a lot of my own stuff to sell… I also sell new stuff that I buy, so it’s kind of entertaining. It’s a general store.”
As a coffee lover, her store stocks a good bean. It also offers her other great love, croissants. Telling me about it she half-swallows the word with pronunciation worthy of a Parisian native.
I used to source the croissants internationally but now I’ve found a Cape supplier. I like the idea that in Vermaaklikheid, in the middle of nowhere, people can stumble on great coffee and a croissant. It’s incongruous to the environment. It’s amusing.
Leaving Cape Town seemed like the right thing to do at the time so she just did, in much the same way that she departed the fashion world when she hit her 30s. After 15 years at the top of her game she sashayed off the runway and never threw it a backward glance. Not all her contemporaries had the savvy to jump before they were pushed. Which brings us to the conversation about ageing. Ageing usually ends a modelling career (unless you’re Elon’s mom) but unlike Josie who bowed out early, some models have to be steered gently but firmly towards the exit. And then there’s Paulina Porizkova, the former model who rather famously declined to leave quietly, if at all.
Paulina Porizkova
In her fifties Porizkova was separated from her husband, Ric Ocasek, lead singer of The Cars. Despite their split, she had helped care for him until he passed away from cancer, only to discover he had disinherited her and left her destitute. At around the same time she began to feel the effects of the ‘invisibilty’ that comes over women after a certain age. Understandably wounded by what amounted to a perfect storm of events, she turned to posting social media videos of herself weeping and venting. She quickly became known as “the lady who cries on Instagram.” As her following grew so did the tenor of the topics she addressed. She called out the fashion and beauty industry, the media, Hollywood, and society at large for preferring younger models. The dating game after 50 was not kind to Paulina either. To her surprise and fury men her own age or older were interested in women far younger than themselves. To show how mistaken they were she whipped off her tack and posted showstopping images of herself accompanied by the hashtag Sexy Has No Expiration Date. She posed in the ocean in the tiniest bikini, in her bedroom wearing lingerie, in nothing at all. She posed and posed. For a couple of years she ranted and wept and posed, purportedly on behalf of all us woman of a certain age. And we were so grateful for the light she shed on our invisibility plight. We followed her in our thousands and commented and liked and shared and cheered. It worked out really well for Paulina. She won over a million IG followers, a smattering of magazine covers, a book deal. She also got a boyfriend. Josie knows Paulina. They’re around the same age and Josie is familiar with the machinery that made them both famous and wealthy.
“Yea, I follow Paulina on Instagram. She became quite active during lockdown, when she started really using her voice. I enjoyed her transition from not being very active on IG to where she is now. Still, I don’t think her crusade will make any difference to men in terms of who they want to date and so on, in fact I think it could sometimes have the opposite effect. I think a lot of men could find it offensive, because although she’s accurate, she puts it out there quite forcefully. But if having a role model like Paulina or Christy Brinkley or whoever helps women gain their confidence then that’s great.”
Is invisibility as women age really a thing?
“When I was younger I noticed people looking at me. You know, in the supermarket or in a restaurant, just out of the corner of my eye. Around the age of 44 I noticed people stopped looking at me. It was weird. It wasn’t painful or upsetting but it was apparent. Then I read Vanessa Raphaely’s article about how she felt she’d put on an invisibility coat after a certain age, and it made absolute sense to me because I felt like I’d become invisible. It was an interesting transition, maybe it was made more acute because a few years later my husband and I got divorced, and I think that added to my sense of invisibility.”
“When it comes to the media and fashion, I can’t see that much will change in the long term and I don’t think it should have to. I like to feel inspired creatively by beauty when I see fashion shows and magazine spreads. One magazine recently used an old, very wrinkled woman on the cover and it was fine, it was interesting, but it was like a cover of National Geographic. So sure, they’ll use the occasional old woman on a cover, and she’ll be on the runway, and it’ll be a fad but in the long term I don’t see things changing.”
A fashion magazine recently used an old, very wrinkled woman on the cover and it was fine, it was interesting, but it was like a cover of National Geographic.
Dating as a mature woman
“The men I’m attracted to aren’t attracted to me! But truthfully I don’t want to be with a man my own age or older. When I was younger I went out with and married a man who was 18 years older than me and that was fine, but now I wouldn’t want to start dating a man that much older than me. First of all he’s going to die and I’ll be brokenhearted, and secondly he’d be… well, old!”
How she feels about her own ageing
“I really don’t care very much. I’m quite lucky with my skin and hair. My biggest regret If anything, is weight gain, but I carried three children. And then your metabolism slows down… I’m not fat but I’m not thin the way I used to be. I used to wear those loose men’s pants and they would hang really nicely, but now I have hips so pants don’t hang on me. I look at Paulina for example and she’s done an amazing job with her body. But she’s worked really hard at that and to me that’s far too much work, too many hours in the gym… it must be exhausting for her. I’m not going to start counting calories and working out. The danger is that if you get too thin you look much older. So I will eat the croissant. I enjoy good food and I just live life. Speaking of role models for ageing, I also follow Jeny Howorth on Instagram. We were modelling around the same time. She’s great. Very funny and she’s completely herself. I like that.” British model Jeny Howorth initially took to IG during covid as an outlet to share the pain of losing her mother. Jeny is always barefaced, with her sun damage on full display, and spares us the pretence of turning the absence of makeup into an act of valour on behalf of all womankind. She really couldn’t care less about ageing, and her followers clearly love her for it.
What she wishes she’d known at 30
“That everything actually sorts itself out, although maybe not the way you want it to. Things find their destination and you have very little control. They play themselves out and become what they were going to be anyway. I noticed this with my children when they were babies and they had that toy where a shape fits into the right hole. There’s the star and the circle and the square, you know? I’d sit with them and watch. It took ages and sometimes it was bloody boring, but eventually they’d get it. I think life’s a bit like that. Eventually things do work themselves out.”
“I don’t try to control things or change outcomes as much as I used to, I think what will be, will be. After I had children I became terrified of flying for some stupid reason, but now I think ‘Josie if the (expletive) plane crashes, then so be it. Just get over it and get on the (expletive) plane.”
Who she’d invite to her 80th
“I’m a bit starstruck on Mohammed Ali so I’d have him there. I like boxing, and I loved his banter and his intelligence. I enjoyed seeing his growth as a boxer during his career.”
“I’d invite Jacques Cousteau because I really admire the work he did and the films he made which I remember from when I was little. I’ve always loved the ocean. When I was a kid I wanted to be a marine biologist, but then I didn’t finish school so that was never going to happen.”
“Then, I feel like inviting somebody who doesn’t really exist, like God. Or Jesus? I get the two mixed up. Anyway he or she could finally put everyone’s confusion to rest.”
On being labelled ‘Former Calvin Klein model’ in everything she’s done since the ’80s?
“I never really think about it. It’s not who I am. But it’s not a bad one as labels go, not like shooting your girlfriend in a toilet or something.”
Food
“All the men in our family are really good cooks so I’m very lucky. I’ve always been quite adventurous in my eating but as I’ve gotten older I’ve realised there are things I don’t like and that I don’t have to eat them. Now if I don’t like something I don’t touch it, like gooseberries and butternut. I don’t like sweet food. I don’t like the taste of alcohol so I only drink occasionally. I love coffee. I’d say I am a bit of a coffee snob.”
Tattoos
“Love tattoos! I’ve only got two. My daughter Willow has a lot. I’ve told her the one place she can never tattoo is her face or neck because she has the most beautiful skin. I think people can go too far, but if they’re done well tattoos can be beautiful, like graffiti.”
Life on other planets?
“I hope there is. It’s a big world out there, it’s so vast and infinite that I can’t imagine that there’s not something else. There must be more.”
Reincarnation?
“Truthfully no, I think it’s a fairytale. But I like the idea of it and it’d be wonderful if it were true because I love the concept. But then it would also be really nice of we could remember some of it.”
What should kids be taught?
“I moved to Paris when I was about 18. Obviously it was a foreign country, I didn’t know anyone and I didn’t speak the language. I rented an apartment and literally used to thank the universe every time the toilet flushed because if it had stopped working I wouldn’t have known what to do, how to fix it, or who to call. I would have been completely stuck. We should be teaching kids how to literally survive, and I don’t mean with bank cards and computers, but with practical skills like plumbing and planting vegetables, how to survive in snow and that kind of stuff. One of the things about moving to the country is that you have to know how to do things, which is why I love farmers. They can always make a plan to fix something even if they have to use, like, a stocking.”
On earthly happiness
“I’d take that down a level to contentment.”
“I think it’s yin and yang, so if you strive for happiness you also have to experience the opposite to know what happiness is. I think achieving contentment is a way to establish a balance.”
“I’d rather aim for a restful, non-anxiety-ridden life … I don’t have any of this by the way I’m just saying it would be nice. So yeah, contentment is the goal, even if it might sound a bit boring.”
The environment
“Mother Nature is stronger than us and I think she will sort herself out. She’ll survive even if we don’t. I came across coverage of the Met Gala on IG and I watched a bit of it. It’s just so sad that that’s what some people aspire to. They are so removed from reality. The excess of it all, the huge waste, is just unbelievable. But there are a lot of things we can still do to help the environment. For instance using human waste. Yes I mean poop. See? I’m back to toilets. But seriously, it’s a huge commodity that we’re just throwing away. It could be used to make domestic biogas, to regenerate arid soils … lots of uses. I’d like to see something done around that on a mass scale.”
I hope my family will remember me and especially my grandchildren, if I get to meet them, as a really awesome, cool granny who let them be completely themselves around me with no restrictions.
This article was published in Fair Lady Magazine (edited), March 2023 read it here
Images: Josie Borain
