Helena Christensen on philanthropy, mortality, and why we should all believe in mermaids

It was the end of the summer 1999 when Helena Christensen’s sister took her to look at a beach house on the northwest coast of her native Denmark. “It was a very stormy day – almost hurricane level – and I remember we ran through the garden and in the front door. I must have been seven or eight months pregnant but as soon as I stepped in, the feeling inside of it was magical,” she says.

Christensen graces the cover of Vogue Scandinavia a full 31 years after she first appeared on the cover of a Vogue magazine. That first cover was shot by the iconic fashion photographer Peter Lindberg, with a fresh-faced Christensen standing on the sand beside a white stallion in the Californian desert. Eighteen covers later, she stands on the sand once more, as captivating as in that first shoot, but this time much closer to home.

The beach she’s on today is outside her beloved summer house, where she and her family have spent every summer since those stormy days of more than 20 years ago. Christensen tells me that her summer routines create a little story, where the memories all blur into one as years no longer matter. “It’s the same little story that unfolds every summer and that's what's so precious about it,” she says. “It's like time stops when you're here – back to exactly how it was 21 years ago.”

The day I speak to Christensen, she tells me about her morning in the cool Baltic Sea. “I was swimming in the empty ocean when a dolphin came and swam with me. It was so incredibly magical that I almost fainted with joy. I was making sounds on the water to communicate with it and it stayed with me for half an hour,” she says. “Then later when I looked out at the ocean, it came back with its baby.” Christensen’s house has 180-degree views of the ocean – ideal for dolphin spotting – and retains a very boho Danish beach style. “It absolutely has the beach vibe to it. I just bring things in from nature – branches, rocks and seashells, anything I can push through the door. It used to drive my mum crazy when I was little, but it's very apparent in any home I've ever been in that nature is as much inside as outside.”

The house was built in 1929 and Christensen has kept many of the original features, including the round windows that look out across the water. An early renovation was carried out to add further light and allow a sea view from every room. “I wanted the house to feel like it was almost a place that a mermaid could live in,” she says. Christensen sounds quite genuine when she talks about a visit from a mermaid and we talk more about the fact that fairytale writer and author of Little Mermaid Hans Christian Anderson was from Denmark. “If you think about it, who first thought of writing stories about all those magical creatures that live in the sort of realm of imagination or reality? We don't know. It could be imagination, but it could also be that some one actually saw something at one point. I mean, we never really for sure know anything but that's what's so cool about life: you can imagine anything and it might as well be real.”

I’m discovering a lovely Scandinavian trait in which fantasy versus reality really doesn’t seem to matter. Whether it's fairies in Iceland, trolls in Norway or mermaids in Denmark – they are not merely part of the folklore but part of the culture.

Christensen is wonderfully relaxed, talking to me from her car – casually carrying out an interview for a Vogue Scandinavia cover story as if it’s no more than arranging a Tuesday morning coffee date with a friend. Her American accent oozes cool but that Danish hippy vibe seeps through – both in the way she speaks and the subjects she focuses on. I like to imagine she’s driving barefoot. “During very hectic, intense periods, I go into the ocean and imagine exactly how much is down there,” she says. “I try to put myself in the brain of a whale and think they're out there right now swimming and think of the sounds and what they're experiencing. That's something I really love doing, just sort of pulling myself into the ocean in my mind – kind of like a mental escape."

“Being near the ocean, being near water is something that's very important to me. It's like it's a physical yearning and I need that. I need to be near bodies of water. And, you know, whenever it rains, I'm out there. I put on my raincoat and my wellies and then I just go out. Everyone else goes in and I go out there running around.”

Christensen has always done things slightly differently. From day one, she wanted to be behind the camera rather than in front of it. “When I started working,” she says, “I gave it literally a week, and then I gave it a month, and then I gave it a year, because I wanted to be a photographer. And I figured, I can travel, maybe make it work, and then I can shoot at the same time.”

After being on the March 1990 British Vogue cover, she almost quit modelling. “It was never going to get any better than that,” she laughs. “So there it was. I nearly had a beautifully short career. Well, we know how it went – I'm still here.” And here she is indeed. Whilst the industry has sucked many in and spat them right back out, it has only made Christensen stronger, clearer in her goals and ambition. We talk about the changing fashion industry, which she suggests hasn’t actually changed that much over the years. It all goes in circles, she says. “Obviously the relationship between models and photographers has changed more than anything,” she says. “For the reason we all know.”

We touch on the news that Victoria’s Secret has axed their angels – three decades after Christensen first wore the white wings – saying they are no longer culturally relevant. “Well, there were so many different opinions. You know, one side was saying ‘we're losing the angels, that's horrible,’ and the other side was asking, ‘are we ready for a completely new way of doing campaigns with new people?’ You know that it was such a black-and-white way of seeing it in so many people's approach.”

People, she argues, are still so set in their ways about so many things that drastic changes rarely work. Age, we agree, makes those changes even more difficult. When we reach a certain point in our lives, the paint dries, she says, and it's hard to change much after that. “Then we look at older people as if they're so stubborn – but they’ve lived an entire life experiencing all these things that have made them that way,” she says.

As we discuss the older generation, the conversation comes back to her own family. A very close family who spend a lot of time with each other. I ask about this strange stage in life where we notice our children growing into adults – Christensen's 21-year-old son Mingus is starting to forge his own career in music and film – whilst we notice our parents becoming frailer. Mortality, she says, “is something I've always thought about since I was in my early teens. Even as a 10-year-old, I have felt everything a lot, and I think a lot, and that is both a beautiful gift, but it is also very intense and very draining and exhausting at times.”

She explains that she has always had what she describes as morbid thoughts, and has also had “extremely vivid, dark, heavy, intense dreams every single night of my entire life.” It’s shaped her very dark sense of humour, she claims. She talks about her quiet Danish father and her Peruvian mother who is an “explosion of emotions” and says that it feels like they are never going to die. But she still tries to spend as much time as she can with her family, seeing them almost daily over the summer.

“My parents are extremely young-looking. My mum is so youthful and so alive. I think, ‘oh my God, when is she ever going to seem old?’ Do I have to get used to the thought that she’s just going to drop dead in the middle of being this alive?” Unlike so many voices in the entertainment industry, Christensen speaks with refreshing honesty and maturity. She doesn't seem bothered or swayed by trends and fads but sees things from a much broader perspective. This probably comes from having spent over three decades at the forefront of the fashion world, working in nearly all aspects of the industry from publishing (as the co-creator of Nylon magazine) to design. But it’s photography that really gets her excited.

As an established photographer with credits from some of the biggest titles in fashion, she uses her talents to document some of the issues that concern her today. Gossip and fashion insider news don’t interest her anymore. Instead, it’s current affairs and politics that she’s engaged in. In October, Christensen travels to Africa where she is going to work with Vetpaw, who protect endangered animals. “I'm going to stay with them for a while and just try to experience daily life, to be there to learn about and capture their story.”

As a UNHCR ambassador, she also works to highlight the plight of refugees. Having travelled to refugee camps all over the world, she shoots documentary-style, capturing the stories of other people. Christensen says she tries to use her photography to “really capture the heartache, the pain, the joy, the hopefulness of refugees.” This, she says, is what she enjoys doing the most. “Because of social media, we live in a time where images have an even more powerful effect, and I think it's fine that people are finally realising what a global heartbreaking issue the refugee crisis actually is,” she says.

We talk about the consequences of the recent Taliban takeover of Afghanistan and how another refugee crisis looms. This, combined with the constant news of the Covid pandemic, has perhaps increased our awareness of how interlinked the world actually is. “In a strange way, all the horrible things that are happening may have actually made people feel closer and more open towards the needs of refugees,” she says.

Perhaps the pandemic has made people shift the focus of their attention. Perhaps we can all become a little less selfish, a little more globally aware and more understanding that the world is a single unified existence. Perhaps the transmission of this disease is a visible example that only by working together – for the greater good of the community – can we grow stronger. Perhaps we all could benefit from spending a little more time underwater, clearing our minds, putting things into perspective – and hanging out with the dolphins and the mermaid.