Claudia Schiffer by Claudia Schiffer

It all fell out of the sky. I was in high school in Rheinberg, the typical sort of shy, well behaved child. My afternoons were busy with tennis, piano, ballet. My girlfriends and I did not even look at fashion magazines. I was the sort of girl who blushed when the teacher spoke to me.
Relatives and friends of my parents always said, "Oh, Claudia's so pretty," but it didn't mean anything, because I wasn't the "star" at school. This other girl, three years older, had announced that she was going to model, so all the boys were after her.
In 1987, I was in a discotheque in Düsseldorf and an agent from Paris "discovered" me. I finished high school at the end of that year and moved to Paris; then, shortly after that, I moved to Monaco, which is still my residency. My father had taken me there many times, to the Grand Prix, so I knew a lot of people.
I started to do a lot of editorial work with Elle and Vogue, and in 1989, I did a campaign for Guess Jeans with Ellen Von Unwerth. That's really when it all happened-with those pictures. I looked wild and sexy, which was so exciting. I had never thought of myself that way. A lot of people said I reminded them of Brigitte Bardot, and at first I didn't like it, because I thought, I don't want to be compared to someone else, because then, who am I? Later, I realized it was wonderful to be compared to an icon.
Then I met Karl Lagerfeld, and I became the muse at Chanel for seven years. It's funny because when I left home, I just made up this story about what I was going to do. I told everyone, "I am going to Paris to work for Chanel. They hired me to work with the house."
But I never signed an exclusivity agreement with Chanel, because those relationships are never forever.
Later, a different kind of look became popular-much less sexy, much less powerful-it probably would have been bad if I didn't have a name. Because if you weren't well known , you would have been out of a job, basically. But if you're a name you still continued. Actually, I probably doubled my income.