Supermodel Linda Evangelista Loves Her Job, a Glass of Wine and a Good Cigar 
She moves. She is slender, radiant; her close-cropped auburn hair sparkles against the bright, starkly white background, shifting ever so gently with the motion.
Click.
Her head tilts, barely. Her smile, unchanging yet real, radiates an unconventional beauty; not a classic blonde mannequin but a living, breathing, intense individuality.
Click.
A leg bends, ever so gracefully, at the knee. The white silk blouse, open at the collar, undulates flowingly, as if in a breeze, the folds as sculpturally flawless as a Michelangelo.
Click.
The eyes, limpid and crystal blue, narrow and mysterious, come sensuously alive, reflecting the photographer's flash with a million brilliant points of diamond light.
Click.
She moves again. A new position, minutely different from the one previous, yet just as flawless; every pose, every angle, every stance a model of perfection.
A model of perfection. Make that a supermodel of perfection. Because the model in question, finishing a long day's magazine-cover photo shoot at an East Fourth Street studio in downtown Manhattan, is Linda Evangelista.
In the intense, competitive, fast-lane world of fashion and modeling, with its glitz and glamour, celebrity and gossip, only a few of the best and most beautiful rise to and stay at the top. In recent years, there have been but a handful. They include Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Claudia Schiffer, Christy Turlington. And Linda Evangelista.
For nearly a decade, Evangelista has graced the covers of Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Allure, Cosmopolitan, Mademoiselle, W and scores of other major magazines. She has starred in ads for Ralph Lauren, Chanel, Versace, Perry Ellis, Lanvin, Guy Laroche, Capezio, Bloomingdale's, Barneys New York, Donna Karan, Valentino, Calvin Klein and countless other top-name designers, as well as for perfumes such as Opium and Jil Sander. She and her companion, actor Kyle MacLachlan of "Twin Peaks" fame, are regulars in newspaper gossip columns and on television gossip shows. Even the well-known fashion writer Michael Gross (not one of her favorite people) has called her "the most accomplished model of her time."
Evangelista is sitting in the outdoor garden of a trendy Italian restaurant in Soho one muggy, late-spring evening, her 9-to-5 day of work over and a glass of ruby red Chianti resting before her. Just turned 30, but looking at least five years younger, she is getting ready to talk about what the life of a supermodel is really like. She will reveal that sometimes she must create an imaginary cocoon to shield her from the glare of success. She will reminisce about her childhood in Canada, just north of Niagara Falls, where she was raised in a working-class Italian Catholic family and where she began dreaming at age 12 of becoming a model. She will discuss the difficult early days of her career and what she had to do to rise to the top. And she will speak about cigars, because she smokes them and loves them.
read the rest of Mervyn Rothstein story at Cigar Aficionado
