Latest News and Updates

Maurice Lynch Music - Black Supermodel Pat Cleveland Is Still the Star of the Catwalk at 71 (Het Parool-Amsterdam)
Wed - February 16, 2022 11:15 am  |  A+ | a-
 Black Supermodel Pat Cleveland Is Still the Star of the Catwalk at 71 (Het Parool - Amsterdam)
Black Supermodel Pat Cleveland Is Still the Star of the Catwalk at 71 (Het Parool - Amsterdam)
Black supermodel Pat Cleveland (71) is still the star of the catwalk  (Translated from German)

I wanted to share this great article with you. The article talks about Pat Cleveland's New Song " I'm Falling In Love"  from Maurice Lynch Music. The article was translated from German so somethings are backwards..... Enjoy.

ARTICLE: 
At 71, Pat Cleveland, the legendary superstar of the catwalk, is still a hot model. She will release a jazz album this year and is working with actor and producer Jamie Foxx on the film version of her life.

he just cuddled with local llama Michelle. Sweetheart, Pat Cleveland says with still childish enthusiasm over the phone from a Buddhist center in the mountains near Lake Maggiore. She's been coming here for twenty years. In her years running a modeling agency, she lived by the lake. Before that, she was the uncrowned queen of the catwalk. Renowned for her energy, she pirouetted the catwalk and brought the clothes to life while dancing. It made her deeply loved by several generations.

Paradise
She has managed to survive in an industry obsessed with youth. At 71, she is still a sought-after model. She recently shot a beauty campaign for Valentino's socials in Paris together with daughter Anna, also a model. After the interview with this newspaper, she flies home to New Jersey for a suitcase change, followed by a commercial shoot in Palm Springs. A day later, she meets in Los Angeles with producers Jamie Foxx and Datari Turner about the film script she wrote based on her life, previously described in her autobiography Walking with the muses.† Cleveland hopes to get young director Kira Kelly on board. Corinne Foxx, the 28-year-old daughter of actor and producer Jamie Foxx, is likely to play a young Pat. “The timing is right, I want young people to remember that despite the limitations of today, there is a lot of freedom. That you – whoever you are – can still pursue your dreams.”

She has never done anything different herself, this year she is releasing a jazz album. The song Falling in love was recently featured in the new collection video by couturier Ronald van der Kemp, who had flown her to Amsterdam. “I love Ronald's clothes, and so beautiful, the recordings in the magical Paradiso. It was so intense, my friend André Leon Talley had passed away the day before. I felt the presence of his spirit and heard him say: You go sing your song, girl . It felt like I was sending the number straight up to André. Goosebumps and tears.”

Cleveland was close with Talley, the first black editor to reach the highest echelons of fashion. “ We go way back, before all of his Vogue stuff . I helped him get his first job in New York, at Interview magazine . I loved André because he was bold, present, always talkative and cheerful. He has opened many doors for young people in the industry. Unfortunately, Thierry Mugler, another great personality, passed away shortly after André. I've known him for so long. The first time at his studio he received me in a Star Trek-overall, as if he were the captain of a spaceship. In 1984, during a show in a Paris club, he let me fall down on a rope like the Madonna, pregnant with my daughter.”

Never a dull moment
Falling in love is one of ten songs written for her by songwriter and producer Maurice Lynch Music. Recordings for the album will start in New York in March. In the 1970s Cleveland sang in various clubs in New York, in 1975 she was on Broadway in the musical Let my people come . “Only a handful of fashion friends knew about it, because at the time musicals weren't cool in fashion. And guess what: André came one evening, he had brought a load of model onions, they took a pontifical place in the front row. Typical Andre.”

She grew up in Harlem as the daughter of African American (including a dash of Native blood) artist Lady Bird Cleveland and Swedish saxophonist Johnny Johnston. Pa left the nest early, in her youth there was little money, but never a dull moment in the Lady Bird house. 'Aunt' Katherine Dunham often practiced with fellow dancers in the living room, Eartha Kitt and Billie Holliday were always at home. Just like contra-alto Marian Anderson. “She never sang at home, she said, but she wanted to sing Twinkle twinkle little star with me. Sometimes we sat in the front row at Eartha Kitt shows. I remember that one time at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, Eartha surrounded by drag queens whose hairy legs I especially remember. Eartha crawled on the floor, lay right in front of us and sangSanta baby. †

At 15, Cleveland was discovered on the subway and became one of the first successful black models, paving the way for Iman and Naomi Campbell. Women of color were banned from couture shows in the mid-1960s, but Eunice Johnson, founder of the first African-American magazine, Ebony, hired Cleveland for a show tour with a bus full of colored models and Johnson-bought couture. “Picture it: a black woman together with royalty on a couture show. Inappropriate at the time, but Mrs Johnson was the only editor who bought entire collections. She was wealthy. The young Yves Saint Laurent and Hubert de Givenchy were very grateful for her support.”

he bus often caused a stir, especially in the segregated south. Cleveland once had to run for her life when the Ku Klux Klan stood in the yard of her hotel in Little Rock, Arkansas. Complete with flaming torches. “I have experienced racism from an early age. My mother had grown up in Georgia, on vacations I spent a lot of time there with my cousins ​​who were darker than me. In some neighborhoods people threw rocks at us. I couldn't tolerate it, picked them up and threw them back.”

Rare pearl
Europe was more open to diversity and a wider color palette, so Cleveland left for Milan and Paris in 1970. She lived with the Puerto Rican illustrator Antonio Lopez in Karl Lagerfeld's guest apartment on Rue Bonaparte. “Everyone wanted to sleep with him. He was extremely sensitive, could dance amazingly and was so handsome.” She also continued to party on Fire Island with designers Roy Halston, Calvin Klein and Andy Warhol. “Designer Stephen Burrows, illustrator Richard Bernstein and I invariably arrived by seaplane.”

She had affairs with several famous men – 'nothing special, those were the only ones available at parties, there was no dating app'. Boxer Muhammad Ali wanted to marry her, but then she had to stop wearing miniskirts. Mick Jagger was 'all fun' and Jack Nicholson was 'everything you can imagine and more'. She eventually married the Dutch photographer Paul van Ravenstein. "He's a rare gem, we've been married 38 years and just as happy."

During the Paris fashion week in April 2019, things went wrong, shortly after running a show, she was rushed to the hospital and colon cancer was discovered. Karl Lagerfeld had died a month earlier in that same American Hospital. “I didn't know that, but suddenly he stood at my bedside and told me that everything would be fine. And so it happened.”

Because her insurance wasn't valid outside the United States, her fashion friends started a crowdfunding campaign to pay the bills. It yielded one and a half tons. “I got so much love, they were all there for me. The hospital refused to admit me at first, but then some phone calls were made here and there and I got the couture treatment. I ended up having the same surgeon as Jean Paul Gaultier.”

Discrimination in the fashion world is certainly not a thing of the past, concludes Cleveland. Take the ethnic profiling of Edward Enninful, editor-in-chief of British Vogue, who was told to use the back door by a doorman at his own publisher in London in August 2020.

The same Enninful is now receiving praise on social media for his latest cover, on which the skin of models is said to have been photoshopped blacker. "Nonsense, just an artful cover, beautiful and mysterious," says the ever-positive Cleveland. “A creative expression of beauty, let's appreciate that. Edward just has to follow his gut feeling, eventually there will be room for all skin colors and everyone. Let's ignore negative people, they don't belong on the painting .”
Mobirise

© Copyright 2017 - All Rights Reserved