Supermodel

One of the top models of the 1960s, Verushka, was born Vera Gottliebe Anna Gräfin von Lehndorff-Steinort in East Prussia, 1939. Her father, a count and army reserve officer, became a member of the German Resistance after witnessing the beating and killing of Jewish children, and was executed when she was a child for the attempted assassination of Adolf Hitler in what came to be known as the 20 July Plot.

After his death, her mother was arrested, and Vera and her sisters spent the remainder of the war in Gestapo labor camps. The family was reunited after the war, but were left destitute and ostracized by fellow Germans for the treachery of their father. Eventually, the six-foot-tall Vera left to Hamburg and then to Florence to study art, focusing on textiles, and was discovered on the street at age 20 by photographer Ugo Mulas. Although models as tall as she was weren't desireable in Paris at the time, Vera made attempts in New York before coming back to Munich, where she changed her name to begin cultivating a new and mysterious persona, and thus Verushka was born! Dressing in all black, she made her way to different photographers, telling them "I am Veruschka who comes from the border between Russia, Germany and Poland. I'd like to see what you can do with my face."

She gained even more attention when she appeared as a model in Antonioni's classic 1966 film Blow Up, and although her only scene was at the very beginning of the film and lasted just five minutes, it is still regarded as one of the most provacative in film history.

Around this time, she teamed with Salvador Dalí and photographer Peter Beard, who took her to Kenya. There, in an attempt to "go native", she painted herself with black shoe polish to resemble surreal plants and animals; it took weeks to remove.
In 1966 (the same year as Blow Up), she began doing photoshoots in nothing but body paint, which was often fantastically colorful, or applied in order to resemble animals, in a similar vein as what she'd done with Dalí - a concept which would become a lifelong pursuit for her even after she'd left the fashion world and employed it as performance art during the mid-1980s in New York.

Veruschka made the cover of Vogue 11 times. Editor Diana Vreeland's only complaint was that she sometimes looked past the camera and looked a little sad. "Don't have that future look, be now and be happy," she'd say.
"And I couldn't agree with her on that," Veruschka says. "That was a little bit of a conflict. My success has been because I was my own boss."