“It wasn’t just a matter of stopping,” she once said when asked about her life with drugs.
“It was a matter of living in the world I wanted to live in. Making it work for me, instead of against me.
Life and death, energy and peace. If I stop today, it was still worth it.” G I A
‘G I A‘ Carangi was unquestionably the iconic starlet of fashion she embodied the archetype of a supermodel in the 1980s. In her all-too-short, but meteoric rise to fame, GIA Carangi led a life that encapsulated both the triumph and terror of success. She was an overnight sensation in the fashion world. Gia’s legacy serves as a cautionary tale, and a powerful reminder of the double-edged sword of fame and fortune.
My name is John Stember. Going though my archives I found these photographs that I had taken of GIA over 30 years ago. I hadn’t seen them in years but I instantly recalled our many colorful and dramatic experiences together. She was an amazing beauty a wild rebel, a kind of female James Dean who changed the fashion world forever.
Meteoric is the only word to describe GIA’s rise to supermodel status in the years from 1979 to 1982. She arrived on the Manhattan fashion scene as a seventeen year old with a major wild streak and an exceptionally seductive beauty. She was immediately signed by the top model agency Wilhelmina.
We first met when we worked together for Vogue magazine in New York in 1979. At that time she had only recently arrived in New York but even then she had a dynamic character unlike any other model. She never posed like other models, she was continually moving as if in another world. She was living in her own world doing her own ‘thing’.
She had the perfect face; body and looks for a model plus she moved naturally like a wild animal and had the provocative ‘I don’t give a damn’ attitude to go with it.
Working with GIA could easily become chaotic and although she could be tempestuous and difficult, she always came to life in front of the camera, in a way that was both spontaneous and unsurpassed. That is why I loved working her. She was by far the best model I have ever worked with. She was a ‘born natural’.
Her favorite revenge when angered, with an editor or member of the crew, was to bide her time sometimes for hours, until finally she’d make her move. She would sabotage the entire shoot just seconds before the first click of the camera, causing many hours of hair, make-up and styling to be wasted without a single photograph being taken.
No matter how outrageous her behavior, the fashion magazines would continually re-book her for more. They would tolerate her craziness because they wanted the commercial success she brought them, but they intensely disliked what she put them through to get the photographs they needed.
She was the ultimate provocateur.
Her career was dramatically cut short in 1986, at the young age of 26 when she became one of the first celebrities to die from AIDS in the USA. It was as a result of her growing addiction to heroin and her need to overcome her obsessive sense of abandonment that she suffered from an insurmountable feeling of loneliness and lack of love.
GIA had fallen headfirst into the dark side of fame. The demons she faced could have been anyone’s, including my own. The obsessive need to be loved and the ever-present curse of temptation were never far away.
Thirty years later, it’s become obvious if not imperative for me to share what I had experienced and what she left behind, captured in these photographs. You witness the dichotomy of the light and beauty in these photographs that was so dramatically and diametrically opposed to the reality of the darkness and loneliness in her personal life.
