Veruschka

She was the tallest fashion model — 1 meter 85 cm. — ever to tread the boards of the fashion runways. Angular, legs that reach to the sky, she was Richard Avedon‘s favorite model and the ideal subject for the body-painting launched by Holger Trukzsch in the 1970s. A symbol of the fatal and transgressive beauty of the 1960s, she played herself in Blow-Up (1966, Antonioni) and in a documentary by the photographer Franco Rubartelli presented at the Venice Film Festival in 1967. She was a countess, born Vera Gottliebe von Lehndorff (her father was one of the mutinous generals who organized the unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Hitler in 1944), and long ago she abandoned public life.