Tum your head over a bit … fabulous, fabulous. Laugh, laugh. Hoving explains that Gia is also known as "a virtual symbol of the bright side and the dark side of modeling. The show had been taped nine months earlier, when Gia was in the midst of one of her many comebacks. But by January of , her drug use had become too extreme and her work habits too erratic, even for an industry accustomed to prodigious pampering, She showed up late for work if she showed up at all.
She sometimes shot up heroin in the bathroom between takes. In the middle of a Richard Avedon photo session for Italian designer Gianni Versace, she said she was going out for cigarettes and never came back. He remembers the model he described in his book Scavullo Women as: "My darling — old, young, decadent, innocent, volatile, vulnerable, and more tough-spirited than she looks … all nuance and suggestion, like a series of images by Bertolucci.
She had a fabulous appeal to me and I always took care of her. I used to cook for her, make sure she ate. I always wanted to make her very happy, because she gave so much to me when we worked together, There was something she had — no other girl has got it.
And I wanted her to like me and like working with me. And I think she did, Even after she was missing appointments with everybody else, she never missed one with me. There were a lot of girls who were victims of those times — the night life, Studio 54, dancing, having fun. I think she was a victim of herself. She looked like a gorgeous girl with all that hair and those bosoms and that great body. She had tremendous feminine appeal, even if she was gay emotionally.
And I think she was smart. She was too smart for the world she had come into. Kathleen Adams Carangi was the second of five strong-willed sisters who came from Maryland farming roots but found themselves in Northeast Philadelphia when their father, a machinist, took a job at the Navy Yard. The Adams family was of British descent and the girls had a strict upbringing.
At 21 she married a man 11 years her senior. Joe Carangi was a hardworking restaurant owner who had been married once before and had a son from that marriage. The couple had three children in their first four years of marriage: two boys, Joe and Michael, and Gia, whose unusual name her father had first heard in Italy during the war. The Carangis maintained the outward appearance of happiness and growing prosperity — Joe sold one restaurant and opened a lucrative poolroom called Moulin Rouge before founding the Hoagie City chain.
But the marriage grew increasingly tense as the years went on. Kathleen was a woman who always liked to be in control. The household was clearly divided along gender lines. Dad and the boys stuck together. Kathleen and Gia were "the girls," and Joe Carangi was a great teaser of girls. Gia was a quiet, bright child whose mannerisms were so adorable that she was encouraged to speak in baby talk long after it was appropriate.
She was precocious and quietly rebellious, and if she had a truly close bond with anyone in the family it was with her mother, with whom she could share "girl things. The abuse occurred once, but she was traumatized by the incident and lived in fear that it would happen again.
At age 14, she would tell her mother that a neighborhood man was the offender. Later, she would tell several friends that her father had been her abuser. Joe Carangi agreed to be interviewed for this article but was rushed to emergency surgery for a brain tumor before the interview could take place; he died several weeks later.
By the time Gia was nine or ten, the tension in the Carangi household had escalated from verbal abuse to violence. While none of the children was ever hit, the parents began to tangle on a fairly regular basis.
Kathleen clearly suffered a lot of emotional stress during this time. By her own account, she had a psychiatrist check her into a hospital for a week to get away from her husband, and later made a suicide attempt by swallowing an overdose of pills. Finally, when Gia was 11 years old, Kathleen decided that her marriage had reached the point where "he was going to kill me or I was going to kill him.
Today Kathleen says she saw her children regularly from the time she left and that no other man was involved in the split-up. But her younger son Michael, now a year-old bus driver in Atlantic City, remembers things differently. He says his mother was "pretty much totally gone" for a period of several months after the breakup; he also says that his father insisted that there was another man involved.
Both also agree that Joe Carangi was devastated by the divorce and that the next several years were ones of chaos and emotional upheaval for the entire family. Joe Carangi had never been much for disciplining children. As a single parent, in shock over the loss of a second wife and frightened by the prospect of re-entering the social world in his mid 40s, he became the unwitting ringmaster of a three-ring circus.
We were allowed to do what we wanted. I could stay out as long as I wanted and nobody would know. For a while after the separation, she was not allowed to return to her home to see the children. Later, she saw them regularly, and eventually Gia would decide to move in with her mother and stepfather.
But the damage was done, and it would be years before she fully comprehended the profound impact her departure had on her children. Nothing ever happened, but she was uncomfortable. Before long, the young girl found herself in the center of an emotional tug of war — in fact, several. There was the obvious division between her parents and the ramifications of that split; many who were close to Gia say that she never gave up hope that one day her parents would get back together.
But there were more subtle forces at work as well. Eventually her father would remarry as well, to a woman Gia liked even less than her stepfather. Rolling Stone assessed his career as almost single-handedly "redefining rebellion as entertainment, and entertainment as subversion. Being a Bowie kid meant outrageous hair styles and hair colors, outrageous glitter makeup, outrageous posing.
It also meant, for some kids, delving into the mysteries of sexual confusion; Bowie and his genderbending naturally attracted many teenagers curious about alternative sexual lifestyles. She got a Bowie haircut and that changed her personality completely. She seemed like a sweet young little kid before, and then afterward … ". Afterward Gia emerged as a rebellious young woman who seemed as alienated from the Sperrs as David Bowie himself might have been.
Because she was convinced it was Bowie changing Gia, Kathleen decided to try to understand Bowie herself by attending his concerts with her daughter. And her friends … well, I always got along great with her friends. They thought I was really neat because I really tried to understand them. Gia would be high and the mother would be there thinking she was protecting her daughter.
Over the next few years, Gia pushed adolescent rebellion about as far as it would go. Her father seemed largely oblivious, since he had his own social life. Part of the problem was that Gia was able to get away with things. She had a way of flashing a little grin and just slipping out of things. She had grown into a very exotic-looking, very special girl. She could just sit in a chair and smile and she was automatically the center of attention. She had charisma. And she was very aggressive about it — she was sending other girls flowers and poems when she was 14 years old.
When confronted, Gia told her mother she was gay. Her mother did not believe it and, in fact, does not believe it to this day. She said she was, and clearly all her friends were gay, but I would not believe it. She probably hid behind being gay. The therapy was finally discontinued when all concerned realized that Gia was making up stories to tell the counselor.
It began innocently enough with an audition at Gimbels department store. She was always late, always had some excuse. But I used her as much as I could. Her home life seemed very hard for her. And she had a way of looking at you at certain times —this look — it was the face of a little girl. She learned how to drop it for the camera, but sometimes I would still see it. The club was a logical hangout for several reasons: It was a way to meet other people who were openly gay; during much of the pre-AIDS s in Philadelphia, gay night life was far more exciting than the straight scene; and because the gay clubs were private, a year-old girl could get in with few hassles.
It was at the DCA that Gia met one of her first long-term lovers. Sharon Beverly was a short, blond year-old. She loved to wrestle, she was very mischievous and had all this energy. But there was also something sad about her. Gia and Sharon represented something of a challenge to the lesbian scene of the day, which was still very stereotypically "butch" and "femme," with one very masculine partner and one very feminine.
In reality, Gia and Sharon were that way too. But they were perceived as a "femme-femme" couple because Gia was too beautiful to appear truly butch. But for five or six years there I saw only women. This kind of sexual ambiguity would confound Gia throughout her life. She went after people and she always got them.
Although her relationship with Sharon was a bright spot in her life, Gia was getting more and more out of control. At home she would be fine for a few days at a time — going shopping with her mother after school or just hanging around the house sketching and writing down rock lyrics — and then another skirmish would occur.
But her parents had no way of knowing just how far her rebellion was going. She tested positive for traces of cocaine but denied she had taken the drug. When Kathleen dragged Gia back a second time for testing, the doctor refused to do the test. What are you going to do? None of her friends recall Gia doing any more drugs than anybody else was doing It the time. By this time, she lad already graduated from her first modeling experience to having photos taken by several Philadelphia photographers.
The way she would move … she knew her face, she knew her body. And it was no big deal to her — she was only doing modeling because she needed something to do. But she was totally untrusting, she seemed used to being abused because she was so beautiful.
And she became very hardened to that. She realized it young and tried to protect herself. She loved kids — because they were pure and going to love her for the right reasons. And she was basically very wholesome, loving and involved with her family. And it was the pure things that would make her laugh, simple things. Once she came up to our house in New Hope for the weekend and I gave her a haircut outside and it was really windy.
As we were cutting her hair it was drying, and later she would bring that up, the memory of having her hair dry in the wind. Many of her friends believe that the biggest reason Gia gravitated toward modeling was that she thought it would satisfy her mother on a number of levels: It was a professional "direction"; it was the kind of "girl thing" the two had always shared; and it was a vicarious fantasy for her mother.
I think she knew that she could go to New York anytime and make it big. And after the failure of his third marriage, Joe Carangi was more accessible to his kids, who me to see him as a non-judgmental man who would love them more unconditionally than their mother and would bail them out of any situation. She was too unusual-looking for the Philadelphia market, one reason she finally had to go to New York to make a career. Gia joked that her dream was to be on the cover of Vogue once, just to prove she could do it, and quit.
If anything attracted her about modeling it was the chance to be closer to the glamour scene: She idolized model Patti Hansen, who was not only a cover girl but was dating Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards.
To a 17year-old girl who had spent countless hours of her adolescence trying to get backstage at Bowie concerts, the chance to hang out with rock stars seemed more compelling than the opportunity to have even more people tell her she was beautiful.
The powerful Wilhelmina "went absolutely crazy over Gia," Tannenbaum recalls. She was so in awe that she forgot to give Gia the contract, and she ended up running down the hall after us to give it to her. By the time Gia was ready to move to New York in February of , her relationship with Sharon Beverly had cooled down to mostly friendship; Sharon, who had begun working in cosmetics and wanted to become a makeup artist, was already thinking about dating men.
Gia was crushed by this. But despite the hurt feelings, the two remained close enough that they decided to be roommates in New York. The girls got a small apartment and set about making their brilliant careers — Sharon selling makeup, Gia going on "go-sees" set up by Wilhelmina agency bookers so that photographers could get a look at the promising young model.
Gia would later tell an interviewer that she was initially scared of New York. It was really kind of freaky. In the beginning she would do a lot of tests, which are free shootings for your portfolio, and then you take the portfolio around to the thousands of photographers in the city.
She would come home from her day and throw her book to the side and put cartoons on. And there would be all these men out in the city daydreaming about her that had seen her or her book. And there she was watching cartoons. Her makeup was being done by the two best in the business, Sandy Linter and Way Bandy, and her hair stylist was invariably the legendary Harry King. She was being booked by the top photographers and modeling the work of the top fashion designers before she really even knew who they were or how to spell their names: Her datebooks were filled with references to "Norman Kamali" and "Scovollo" next to the endless lists of reminders she always wrote to herself.
The reasons for her rise were complex. She was played by Angelina Jolie, who at the time was just beginning her career.
Jolie's depiction of Carangi brought her to life again, and genuinely showed the inner-workings of her mind and personality. In , a memoir titled Born This Way by Sacha Lanvin Baumann was released in which friends and colleagues recall their time with Carangi.
Carangi had always been pretty candid about her sexuality and dressing in an androgynous way. She met one of her first long-term girlfriends Sharon Beverley, at a gay night club in New York.
Although she had a few encounters with dating men, she personally identified as lesbian. In one of her most iconic photoshoots, Carangi was shot by Chris von Wagenheim alongside Sandy Linter, a makeup artist who modeled with Carangi specifically for this shoot. They both posed nude alongside a chain-link fence, creating what would become her breakout moment. Her nude fence photoshoot led to her modeling for major brands like Versace and Dior, and collaborating with legendary photographers like Helmut Newton.
Carangi was extremely hard to control and had a vivacious attitude. Though it was her edgy personality that attracted people to her, she was also very tough to work with on projects. Being a famous model in New York during the early '80s, it's no surprise that Carangi began experimenting with drugs like cocaine during her career at places like Studio When Wilhelmina Cooper died, this sent Carangi spiraling out of control. Cooper was essentially the caretaker in Carangi's life, and acted much like a mother figure to her.
Carangi began using heroin which was the beginning of her ultimate downfall. She would leave during the middle of photoshoots to buy or use heroin and in her last-ever cover shoot for Cosmopolitan , she was directed to hide her arms behind her dress to prevent her track marks from showing. Carangi was arrested in , during the height of her career, for driving under the influence of a narcotic.
Her professional life and personal demons were intertwined at this point. In May of , Carangi needed hand surgery because she had injected herself in the same spot so many times, it created an infected tunnel that lead into her vein.
Some magazines gave her a few last chances, like this shoot she did in September of shot by Andrea Blanch. Still, she could not pull herself together. In , Cindy Crawford came on the scene essentially as a more polished version of Carangi and was nicknamed "Baby Gia. In the last few years of her life after her modeling career, she was in several different rehab facilities in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. She made new friends there and got the help that she needed for the time being.
Carangi was diagnosed with AIDS in late The last stretch of her life was spent working in a shopping mall selling jeans, and briefly being employed at a nursing home as a cafeteria checkout clerk. She reunited with her mother during this time and spent her last few weeks with only her mother by her side. Carangi's life came to an abrupt end on November 18th, No one in the fashion world knew about her death at the time, so none of her colleagues and collaborators were at her funeral. Carangi was quoted saying: "Life and death, energy and peace.
If I stop today it was still worth it. Even the terrible mistakes that I made and would have unmade if I could. The pains that have burned me and scarred my soul, it was worth it, for having been allowed to walk where I've walked, which was to hell on earth, heaven on earth, back again, into, under, far in between, through it, in it, and above. United States.
Type keyword s to search. Today's Top Stories. Ring in the Holidays with Loewe's New Campain. Andrea Blanch Getty Images. She was born and raised in Philadelphia. She comes from a humble beginnings. She was a big fan of David Bowie. Her first photoshoot was at a nightclub. She had a unique look that disrupted the modeling industry. She rarely wore makeup, which made her stand out. She has been referred to as the world's first supermodel.
She is said to be the original "heroin chic" model.
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