The Dane: As hot as Helena Christensen

Helena Christensen hopes to be the first person to dodge death, refuses to make plans and is in love with an Essex boy.

You never know what you will find when you're on your way to interview a model, particularly a properly super one. Will she be statuesque or spider-like and alien? Will she be a moron, or worse, a moron busy trying to prove that she's an intellect? Will she be late and grand, bored and prickly or all loving and Buddhist? And most of all, will she be beautiful or will she be one of those women transformed by the alchemy of the camera?

Helena Christensen fits me in last-minute because I am unable to stay in New York for the ES shoot. She asks if I'd like to go and have tea with her at her apartment before she pops down the road to have a fitting for the Zac Posen dress that is being made for her to wear to the Met Ball (which was earlier this week). Just as we all feel that we'll scream if we see another famous female poured into a floor-length strapless gown, Anna Wintour has let it be known - Helena says - that this year it should be all about short. The theme is 'The Model as Muse: Embodying Fashion'. She fishes out Posen's sketch of the proposed gown which is slightly tutu in feel with lots of nude net and tulle and a burnished, embellished VOGUE running diagonally from shoulder to thigh.

Her apartment is in the West Village, on the first floor, and runs from the front of the building to a terrace at the back. It is an open loft space painted the blue of a stormy day at the seaside. It is full of antiques and curiosities, from old Danish tea towels to dressers, bits of art picked up in Paris, a striped day bed, modern photography and pictures of a funky-looking, Nordic blond nineyearold - Mingus, Helena's son. Everyone always whispers that Helena has the best taste, and this place is clearly the home of the gradual collector rather than of a shopper who gobbles up a whole 'look' in one spree.

The kitchen, the heart of the space, is well-equipped and wellused. This supermodel is obsessed with food. Her nickname at school in Copenhagen was Dairy Queen because of a fondness for anything creamy and cheesy. She cooks every day and struggles to identify her favourite food. 'I would probably choose my mum's homemade chilli because I have loved that since I was a baby,' she says in an accent that is almost New York with a lingering European flavour. I am as guilty as the next civilian of being fixated on what models eat, and assume that when she bangs on about being fanatical about her food she is talking about flavour rather than bulk, about nibbling organic delicacies rather than slurping up pasta. She shakes her head sadly. 'I eat what I love in bulk,' she says. 'It's always been like that. I've always been a huge, huge eater. I'll probably eat four courses every night. But I make sure to box most of it off the next day. I think it's become a tiresome subject, me eating my way through life.' She has recently taken up boxing because, at 40, she wanted to be strong, straight and able to keep gorging without reservation.

(left) Helena wears dress, £6,885, Christian Dior
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Gianni Versace once declared that Helena Christensen had the most beautiful body he had ever seen and, as she opens the door to her apartment wearing a little flower-sprigged Japanese play dress that is fitted and demure around the neck and has puff sleeves but is very short, I can see that she is in amazing shape. Her legs are long and brown but it's the caramel quality of her skin that compels. Her hair is shoulder-length, hennaed and a bit trashed. Her face is familiar, with those feline eyes that blaze as bright as ever they did. She doesn't look like a model, she looks like a woman, and what a woman.

We loll around her kitchen table and I stare at her as she gets going on bloggers and how they write nonsense about her. 'You end up in this evil maze, this dark place,' she says of Googling herself. 'These are strangers writing about me and I tell myself that it's to do with being bitter, being jealous, being bored. But I'm still flabbergasted at the depths of nastiness in the way bloggers express themselves about any living or dead person.' I haven't focused on what she is saying yet as I'm still gazing at her, and this works out fine because Helena can really talk. She has that syndrome sometimes found in beautiful people who became famous very young of being able unself-consciously to talk and talk because, historically, people have listened and listened.

She's rather jolly and very vigorous, so it's relaxing to watch her as she chatters, and then she pads off to get a hair clip and I stare at her retreating back, as sinuous as a Stradivarius, as she retreats to her bedroom (high old-fashioned bed, big window, uncluttered unlike the rest of the flat) for a second. She emerges and, without a mirror, winds her hair up into two tight little buns above her ears. And bang. There she is. All Nordic angles, Incan roundness (her father is Danish, her mother Peruvian) and high impact. There's a reason why these supermodels made fashion history and impressive personal fortunes. 'We were so different from each other,' she says. 'Think of Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington, Yasmin Le Bon, Tatjana Patitz, Stephanie Seymour, me - we all looked totally different and our personalities were different and we came from different parts of the world and we had different types of bodies, but it was interesting how we all had shapes. That was a sign of the times and thank God, as my career would have been about a month long if hips and boobs were out.'

Much as she would like to dismiss the supermodel phenomenon as a media construct, she sees now that their enduring power has become an observable fact in itself. 'I guess that if you have to have a label then supermodel is better than shitty model,' she says. 'Really it was about girls with staying power, and I am happy that we can now see there was a good reason for the hype around us, since most of us are still working. That's something to be proud of, to have been part of a group who did something out of the ordinary in this cutthroat business. I would like to think that our personalities had a lot to do with it. I look at those girls now and they exude something else because they have wisdom and experience and children and life behind them. Humans will always be drawn to young beauty [her boyfriend is ten years her junior - more of which later]. It is like a bud flowering - it hypnotises you - but then you take somebody in their thirties, forties and fifties and there is a wit and an intelligence that adds another dimension to their beauty.'

Helena was 40 on Christmas Day, has a mobile face that she describes as 'rubbery' and is unhindered by Botox. 'I think fear will stop me having any form of incision until the bitter end,' she says. 'Maybe when I'm 80 I'll go under the knife, but by then they'll hopefully have other ways.' She is not prepared to panic about getting older, feeling that it would be a silly waste of time. 'In that sense I am very realistic and Danish. What, am I going to start panicking about something that has been happening for billions of years? The consolation for me is that it happens to everybody. If I have a bad day when I wake up and everything looks wrong and I see a beautiful 20-year-old, I want to go up and say, "You know what? It's going to happen to you, too, so wipe that smile off your face."' She pauses at the vision of the mature model viciously accosting the cygnet and she laughs. 'But most days I honestly don't even think about my looks. I have always been more interested in developing my brain than worrying about my looks.'

Helena started young. Born in Copenhagen, she and her sister were both child models. 'My mum had friends in the business and she thought it might be a good way to save up some money for holidays. I stopped when I was about 11 as it became too embarrassing. You don't want to have tear sheets of yourself wearing 20 different kooky catalogue outfits with a big perm and a silly smile plastered all over the school walls.' Her mother worked for Scandinavian Airlines for 30 years and her father was a typographer. They now run a shop called Yo-Yo through which Helena sells many of her old clothes. 'My mum is a really special force of nature and she has a really intense positive energy. She's a life force,' she says. 'My dad is probably the kindest, sweetest, nicest man. I have never met anyone who is loved so whole-heartedly. He doesn't talk much - maybe because my mother talks all the time - but when he does it is right to the point and very witty.' Her sister, who is four years younger, got married, had two children and lives in the Danish countryside. 'She basically did everything I didn't do,' says Helena.