‘She was broke enough to be taking food stamps but she worked her ass off to keep us in school and to put food on the table.’ ‘My mom never gave up,’ Valletta once told me. Her parents separated when she was two and her mother, who worked as a waitress and for the post office, struggled to make ends meet. Born in Arizona, she was raised with her younger brother Robert in Oklahoma. Her steeliness has its roots in what sounds like quite a difficult childhood. ‘I’m at home in my office.’ Does it have a view of the sea or the mountains? And does she still arrange her books by colour? (A picture of the office in her old house on the InStyle website shows colour-coded books on every shelf.) ‘I prefer not to talk about my house and things like that,’ she says, understandably. This time she is at her home in the Pacific Palisades, west Los Angeles, a couple of miles from where I live, but she will only agree to speak by phone. Our conversations usually follow a similar pattern: at first she is quite clipped and distant, then she slowly thaws – but she is always guarded. This is the third time I have interviewed Valletta during the past six years. ‘I don’t really want to sit around and kick it and eat bonbons.’ ‘I believe in living a life that has meaning,’ she tells me today.
She has become one of the most outspoken voices for sustainability in the fashion industry and was just appointed contributing sustainability editor at British Vogue, overseeing the magazine’s coverage of the industry’s environmental impact. She may be one of the original ’90s supermodels and have appeared on 16 American Vogue covers, but she is no cipher.
‘The waters! Are rising! And so are we!’ she chants defiantly as she is led away by police. A video on Amber Valletta’s Instagram page shows her laughing as she is handcuffed during a climate-change protest arranged by Jane Fonda in Washington last November.
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