“I know I can have sex any time”: Paulina Porizkova on why middle-age is the best era yet

Paulina Porizkova wants a bran muffin. “Dating in middle-life, as a woman, it’s like a breakfast buffet at a hotel,” she says. “It starts at seven in the morning, middle-aged men get in at, like, nine and middle-aged women get let in at 10.55, five minutes before it closes down.” By then there’s just leftovers: cold eggs, sausages. According to Porizkova, that’s what’s available to her as a single 57-year-old woman at the smorgasbord of life. That, and so-called bran muffins. “The good-for-you stuff at the breakfast buffet, like the bran muffins, nobody ever touches those,” she says. “People just ignore them for the flashier stuff. So I’m looking for my bran muffin.”

It’s morning in Los Angeles and Porizkova is in her hotel room clad in a plush, white bathrobe, her hair swept up in two top buns, accentuating the streaks of white and grey around the temples. Let’s get the obvious out of the way: Porizkova, a literal supermodel, is totally, outrageously, impossibly beautiful. Yet, unlike some of her supermodel contemporaries, she hasn’t taken radical steps to preserve the face that made her famous. She has a complicated relationship with ageing (show me a woman who doesn’t) – one that she has been candidly vocal about. She doesn’t ‘love’ her wrinkles, but she tenuously accepts them. Besides, it would be criminal to dull her facial expressions.

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Being candidly vocal is kind of Porizkova’s thing. Lately, at least. In No Filter: the Good, the Bad and the Beautiful, Porizkova’s recently published book of personal (like, super personal) essays, she lays bare – sometimes bluntly, sometimes with unexpected humour – her most gut-wrenching, soul-shaking moments. One such moment, the most notable moment, being the death of her husband, Ric Ocasek, frontman of the Cars, with whom she shared a life for some 35 years (Porizkova found his body, lying in bed).

At the time, the couple was separated and beginning divorce proceedings but remained “best friends”, also sharing two adult children. It wasn’t until he passed that a grieving Porizkova discovered Ocasek had written her out of his will, citing “abandonment”. “My house blew up and was razed down to the ground,” she says. “I had no alternatives. I could kill myself or I could reach out for help.”

Unfortunately, at that exact moment, there was the small matter of the global pandemic. Porizkova lives in New York, she couldn’t just go over to a friend or family member ’s apartment to seek the support she so desperately needed. So she turned to Instagram. “I was drowning,” she says. “I was so hopelessly isolated and sad and broken in every possible way.” The posts began as “little messages” that, at their core, read simply “help”. She cried, she wrote long (poetically constructed) captions about grief and betrayal. About love and loss. “And people found me,” she says. “They held my hand and told me they were drowning as well. And I held their hand.” As she recounts that last part, her eyes well up with tears.

Long before she met Ocasek (while starring in one of his music videos, natch), Porizkova experienced an other world-rocking experience: at nine years old, she moved from Czechoslovakia to Sweden as a political refugee. Her parents, Anna and Jiří Pořízka, had made the move a few years prior, intending to settle into their new lives before sending for their daughter, who, in the meantime, was left in the care of her grandmother. When Czechoslovakian authorities would not allow a young Porizkova to join her parents in Sweden, the couple staged a hunger strike on the steps of the Czech embassy. The story gained national interest, with Swedish papers emphatically lobbying for the reunion of the Porizkova clan.

Eventually, armed with a fake passport and pregnant with her second child, Porizkova’s mother returned to Czechoslovakia with the intention of bringing her daughter back to Sweden. The plan went awry and, after a brief detainment, Anna was placed under house arrest. Eventually, Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme stepped in, pressuring the Czechoslovakian government to allow the Porizkovas to live together in Sweden. When she first arrived at her new home in Lund, “Little Paulina” was on the front page of Swedish newspapers.

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“When I came to Sweden as a child, my emotional perception was that I was taken away from the only mother I had ever known, my grandmother,” Porizkova says. “I was plonked down in this new country where I couldn’t understand anybody and nobody could understand me.” She was bullied in school, relentlessly, for being tall, for being “a communist ”. To make matters worse, shortly after her arrival in Lund, Porizkova’s parents divorced.

It wasn’t until she moved to Paris at 15, to kick off what would become an iconic modelling career, that Porizkova’s perception of the country in which she spent her adolescence shifted. As she puts it, Sweden built her “as a teenager, as a young woman coming into her sexuality”. “There was no better place for that than Sweden in the 1970s,” she says. “I was shaped into having this belief that there is nothing wrong with being a woman. In fact, it’s a really awesome thing to be a woman. And I have Sweden to thank for that.” Today, Porizkova holds dual Swedish-American citizenship.

There wasn’t one star-making moment in which Porizkova knew she was going to take off as a model. “It was boiling frog syndrome,” she says. “You know, things just get hotter and hotter and then you’re boiled and you have no idea.” Perhaps the major moment was appearing on the cover of Sports Illustrated in 1984, perhaps it was securing a six million dollar contract with Estée Lauder in 1988 – then the highest-paying modelling contract in existence. Perhaps it was walking for every major fashion house one could name or appearing on the cover of Vogue (the first time? The second time? The 10th time?). According to Porizkova, it’s all of these things – a blur of shoots and travels, of bad experiences and good experiences.

She can pinpoint, however, the image that started it all. A friend of hers in Lund, an aspiring makeup artist, used Porizkova “as her canvas”, ultimately snapping a photo and sending it to modelling agencies. “She was directly responsible,” Porizkova says, adding that she recently made an attempt to reconnect with this friend but didn’t get any response.

I ask Porizkova how she feels about the recent resurgence in her modelling career, one spurred not only by the resonance of her filter-free Instagram (and, subsequently, her book), but also the industry’s overall supermodel nostalgia. She chortles at the question. “Let me just correct you on this,” she says. “People are like, ‘Oh, now that you’re back modelling and your modelling career has taken off again and you’re doing so much modelling...’ I’ve had six f ***ing jobs this year.” This is her seventh – Vogue Scandinavia came in at the wire, shooting in late December. “That’s not a career, that’s, like, a little side hobby.”

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Still, those six jobs got a lot of visibility. “People hire me because they’re hiring Paulina Porizkova, the celebrity, not Paulina Porizkova the older woman, necessarily,” she says. She has a point, one that’s bolstered by the way in which her modelling jobs petered out over the past couple of decades. It wasn’t until Porizkova really put herself out there as “the crying lady of Instagram” (her words) that she started landing high-profile modelling gigs again.

Though modelling, these days, is “not her favourite thing to do”, she’s “not going to squander an opportunity” that comes her way, especially as she recalls the period when the calls weren’t coming in. “When I was just hitting 50, I realised I had no life, literally. I had no career, I had no marriage, I had zero opportunities,” she says. “I thought, ‘If it ever comes my way again, I have to remind myself to seize every opportunity that I get’. Because I had been kind of careless with it, saying, ‘family first, love first’.”

There’s another reason she continues to step in front of the camera, sometimes nude or nearly so, often with minimal makeup and little retouch. “I have a whole different perspective on modelling, because it’s not something I’m doing for money or because it’s my job, per se,” she says. “I feel like I’m representing 50-something-year-old women who look their age. And I deeply feel that we need more representation.”

Putting her face (“her wrinkled face”, as she calls it) and her body out there grants her musings on ageing – both on social media and in her book – extra credence. “I’m going to put it forth and say, ‘This is good. This is a different kind of beauty. Learn how to accept this kind of beauty’.” She’s also put in the work to accept this kind of beauty in herself. We so often see the vision of the empowered woman, completely devoid of insecurity. As Porizkova puts it, “they’re selling you something”. “For most of us, the truth is always somewhere in the middle. Sometimes you’re ashamed with ageing, sometimes you’re thrilled with it,” she says. “I don’t know anybody that is truly, honestly shame-free.”

As Porizkova astutely observes, wrinkles are still viewed as something that ought to be “cured”, like acne. “How can you love your wrinkles, how can you love your sags when it’s pointed out to you that your face is now wrong?” She asks. While she doesn’t hold anything against those who try to slow or reverse the ageing process (“who can blame them?”) she can’t square the notion that one’s face is supposed to remain frozen in time as one’s soul continues to change and grow. “That's offensive to me – the idea that I age and I’m actually getting much better as a person and my outside is supposed to stay the same and not reflect changes,” she says. “The whole idea of it sucks – that we have to be desirable looking in order to be desirable."

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But it’s not as if Porizkova has given up on desire, or, for that matter, being desirable. She’s had one significant heartbreak since Ocasek’s passing, which she describes in her book. Concealing the man’s identity, she dubs him “Mr. Emotionally Unavailable” (he’s called that in her phone, too). “I have to admit, I wrote ‘Mr. Emotionally Unavailable’... it’s worse than that,” she says. Apparently, when he “chucked” her, he said something “very unkind” – something that “pertains to ageing ”. “So my first thought after he left was, ‘Oh my god, I’m undesirable again’. I got back to, ‘I’m invisible, I’m undesirable, I’m ugly. No one is ever going to find me attractive again’.”

So she did what any reasonable woman would do. “My first move was to date as many men as I could possibly find,” she says, adding, “On dating apps.” She name-checks Raya and Hinge, noting that her age range is 50 to 67 (she usually dates men her age or a little older as the 50-year-olds tend to be after 20 or 30-year-olds). “I went out with literally anybody who was even faintly interested. Turns out there were a lot of men interested.” That comes as no surprise. While she didn’t find her next special someone, she did confirm that, yes, she is still desirable. After “getting it out of her system”, she took a year off dating. These days, she’s searching for a real connection. “I know I can have sex any time,” she says.

Those who have been watching Porizkova go through it on Instagram will be relieved to hear that she’s in a good place. And, when she’s having a low moment , she reaches out for those “little rays of hope”. In addition to meditation and therapy, she’s tried every “woo-woo” thing you could possibly do – palm reading, psychics, positive self-talk, revisiting her childhood. Does she believe all of it? She isn’t sure. “If it’s a placebo, I’m fine,” she says. “I’m a big believer in placebos.”

Now, having been through it – the grief and heartbreak, the anger and sadness – she knows she’s equipped to handle just about anything. “It’s like after childbirth, natural childbirth. I was like, ‘Oh, I can physically take anything’,” she says. “Now I know how much I can take physically and how much I can take emotionally, and I feel like I can take a lot.”

So what’s next for Porizkova? “That’s a really good question,” she says. “If you can answer that for me, I’ll pay you.” She’ll continue to take opportunities that come her way – the ones that feel right, anyway. Some days she’ll consider giving up everything she owns (“I don’t really own anything. I live in a rented aparment”) and moving to work in an orphanage somewhere (“my grandfather was a director of an orphanage in the Czech Republic”).

Ultimately, she tells me, what she’s searching for is human connection, be it through Instagram, through writing, through public speaking, through dates from Raya. Whatever comes next, she’s ready. “Actually, I feel like I’m at the apex of my power as a woman,” she says. “I might not always be happy – I have very weak moments and sometimes I feel really lonely and really sad and really anxious. But I know that I am at the apex of my power.”