The Face of the House: Isabella Rossellini and Lancôme

“The next best thing to winning the lottery is having a beauty contract,” Isabella Rossellini used to joke.^[1] For fourteen years she had one. She was the face of Lancôme, photographed for its advertising and sent around the world to stand for it.^[1]

The arrangement was the decade’s most visible way of selling makeup — one face for a whole house — and its ending, when she was in her forties, became an argument about who that face was allowed to be.

Rossellini, the daughter of the director Roberto Rossellini and the actress Ingrid Bergman, decided at eighteen not to model, and began only at twenty-eight; she did not act until she was thirty-one.^[2][3] She had felt, she said, that she should not do a job that took advantage of her looks, and she did not think herself beautiful: “there’s a difference between being a pretty girl in your classroom and having the cover of Vogue.”^[2]

She came to cosmetics, in her own telling, without having wanted them. “Fashion, cosmetics, and beauty were far from my interests,” she said; she had been “adopted by the fashion world”.^[2]

The accounts disagree about when it began. A report of 2018 has her signing with Lancôme in 1982, at thirty, in a contract that made her at the time the world’s highest-paid model; the report of her return in 2016 dated her first engagement as the face of the house to 1983.^[4][5] Both agree on fourteen years, and so did she.^[6]

The money is reported less consistently still. One magazine, writing in 2016, said that by the early 1990s she had a contract worth $2 million a year, which reportedly made her the highest-paid model in the world.^[7] Whatever the figure, the contract was long, and it asked one face to stand for the house internationally. The surprising pleasure of that, she said later, was “the endless number of people you encounter around the world.”^[6]

Rossellini described the work as something stranger than glamour. On a single day of a publicity tour she might shake hands with six or seven hundred people, “maybe for ten seconds each, but because you come as a symbol, those ten seconds are very highly charged.” In Taiwan and Indonesia she found that what she stood for “goes way beyond selling mascara—it’s the whole capitalist world of free market,” and in Taiwan people genuflected and kissed her hand.^[8]

She looked at her own pictures as merchandise. “When I look at a photo,” she said, “I detach myself and look at it as a product—not as me, Isabella.” Every model, she added, would say: “Half is me, and half is the photo, the hair, the makeup.” Away from work, she did not wear much makeup at all.^[8]

In February 1996 her interviewer could say that she had “just finished” fourteen years as the face of Lancôme.^[10] She was in her forties, and she was told the reason. “They told me they needed somebody younger,” she said later. “The advertising was aspirational, and even though they have clients of many ages, the desire was for youth.”^[11]

What hurt, she said in 1996, was that the house’s market research had been so positive and its sales so strong that she had hoped it might break the taboo “about women in their forties not being beautiful”.^[10] That research, she recalled, had found that older women responded well to an older model, “because they looked at me and were not frightened to grow older.”^[12] She went on to a line of her own: in 1996 she said she was putting one together with the Lancaster company, and the range that reached the shops, Manifesto, was made with Coty and cancelled in 2002.^[10][12]

Twenty years later the house changed its mind. In 2016 Lancôme engaged her again, at sixty-three, under a general manager, Françoise Lehmann, who praised her “very positive, serene attitude to age”; Rossellini called the decision “a strong indication of Lancôme’s inclusiveness”.^[13] In 2018, at sixty-five, she appeared in a Lancôme campaign photographed by Peter Lindbergh.^[14]

The single face had a rival even in its own decade. When Frank Toskan and Frank Angelo founded M·A·C in 1984, they decided not to have one. “When we started MAC,” Toskan recalled, “we didn’t want to put a face to our product.”^[15]

The start of the contract is given as 1982 by one account and 1983 by another, and a third places it in the late 1980s, which cannot be reconciled with fourteen years that were over by early 1996.^{[16][17][18][19]} The ending is as uncertain: one account has her at forty-three, another has the house dropping her six days after her fortieth birthday while also dating the decision to 1996.^[16][18] In 2018 she spoke of returning to a Lancôme campaign “after 25 years”, which fits neither.^[16]

The fees are reported, not documented: no contract or company figure is cited here. Nor do the sources say what the contract required of her face — which products she wore in the advertisements, or who made her up for them — and this account does not guess.