“My name was Vera when I met Johnny Moncada,” supermodel Veruschka writes of her first encounter with the legendary fashion photographer. “It was the early ‘60s in Rome, at the very beginning of my modeling career. I was in my twenties, but felt like a little girl who did not yet know how to cope with reality. It was this incapacity to accept things as they were that propelled me to enter the fashion world, which was in itself a very strange universe. It was an escape into a new life, using my body as an instrument—an avatar for metamorphosis.” It was in the 1960s that a young, German-born Vera transformed into the exotic, internationally-recognized model Veruschka. Following a brief cameo in Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blow-Up, Veruschka quickly won the hearts of many of fashion’s biggest names of the time, including Diana Vreeland, Irving Penn, and Richard Avedon, who called her “the most beautiful woman in the world.” In her tenure as an international model, Veruschka posed for Salvador Dali, covered thirteen issues of Vogue, and graced countless of catwalks. It was her stick-thin physique and mysterious allure that made her so unique, and seemingly became a starting point for the Twiggy’s and Kate Moss’s of the world to follow. In a new tome by Rizzoli (out in March), Moncada’s unpublished photographs of the model in her heyday are brought to life, capturing the essence of Italy’s la dolce vita. The thousands of negatives discovered “serve as an invaluable source of inspiration to aficionados of 1960s style, and also present a rare glimpse of the soon-to-be legendary model, transforming in front of Moncada’s camera into the icon of Amazonian perfection that we came to know simply as Veruschka.”
Johnny Moncada
Johnny Moncada
Johnny Moncada
Johnny Moncada
Johnny Moncada
Johnny Moncada
