Cindy Crawford
Cynthia Ann Crawford (born February 20, 1966) is an American model. During the 1980s and 1990s, she was among the most popular supermodels and a ubiquitous presence on magazine covers and runways, as well as fashion campaigns. She subsequently expanded into acting and business ventures.
For the Arkansas politician, see Cindy Crawford (politician).
Cindy Crawford
- Model
- actress
- television personality
1983−present
2, including Kaia Gerber
5 ft 9+1⁄2 in (1.77 m)[1]
Brown[1]
Brown[1]
Storm Management (London)
Early life[edit]
Crawford was born in DeKalb, Illinois, on February 20, 1966,[2] the daughter of Daniel Kenneth Crawford and Jennifer Sue Crawford-Moluf (née Walker).[3][4] She has two sisters, Chris and Danielle,[5] and a brother, Jeffery, who died of childhood leukemia at age 3.[6] On social media, she has stated that her family had been in the United States for generations and that her ancestry was mostly German, English, and French.[7] She is a descendant of English Puritan settler Thomas Trowbridge, who helped establish the Congregational Church in New Haven.[8] She was raised in the Congregationalist faith and found it “incredible” that religious values “trickled down" to her family.[9] According to official census records, Crawford’s paternal great-grandfather David Crawford was of Scottish ancestry from Ulster, Northern Ireland who settled in Wisconsin.[10][11] Appearing in an episode of Who Do You Think You Are? in 2013, she discovered that her ancestors included European nobility and that she was descended from Charlemagne.[12][13]
In her sophomore year at high school, she received a call from a local clothing store regarding modeling work, only to discover it was a prank by two of her classmates. However, the following year, another store hired a number of high school girls, including Crawford, to work for them (including a fashion shoot). In her junior year, local photographer Roger Legel, whose duties included photographing a different college girl to be that week's coed in the DeKalb Nite Weekly, asked to take her picture for the publication; the result was Crawford's first cover.[14] The photo and positive feedback she received were enough to convince her to take up modeling. Initially, she worked with a small agency, which was sold to Elite Model Management shortly after she signed. In 1983, she entered Elite's Look of the Year contest at 17 and made the national finals.[15][16]
Crawford graduated from DeKalb High School in 1984 as valedictorian.[15][17] She earned an academic scholarship to study chemical engineering at Northwestern University, which she attended for only one quarter before dropping out to pursue a full-time modeling career. After working for photographer Victor Skrebneski in Chicago, she moved to New York City in 1986 and signed with the Elite New York modeling agency.[18][19]