![]() Image: Amber Valletta, Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell in 1999. I just wanted to get out of Oklahoma! So I went and I got my first job two weeks later in Milan.’ I went to Europe that summer, which is what everyone did back then when they were starting out. ‘My mom paid for me to learn how to model at a local agency when I was 15, which is how I got scouted. ‘Once I graduated in ’91, I started working full-time immediately,’ she explained of her break in the industry. Image: Amber Valletta, Kate Moss and Shalom Harlow in 1996 I love having a surprise guest star, he enthuses of his. It was so different-we probably weren’t treated as well as models are now, but I don’t think they have as much fun as we did.’ Shalom Harlow basically the Greta Garbo of fashion stars alongside Carolyn Murphy and Amber Valletta who had not modelled together in a decade while other veteran supers Kirsty Hume, Liberty Ross and Karen Elson sparkle in Scott’s fabulously campy fashion. Then the big girls-Linda, Christy, and Naomi-started being nice to us and showing us the ropes. ‘Kate didn’t even have Calvin Klein yet! The three of us would just kind of skulk around everywhere. Fifteen years, clean and sober.‘Shalom and I were living together then, and one day she brought Kate Moss over to the apartment and was like ‘I just met this cute little girl, we fell in love on this shoot, we’re friends,’’ she told IntoTheGloss. ![]() But I didn’t realize that she was so self-destructive in her early days and she was clean by the age of 25. Is it weird that I was a fan so many years ago and I had NO idea that this was happening? I mean, a lot of people were doing coke in the 1990s (they’re still doing a lot of coke now too). “My hope is that someone, somewhere in this room, out of this room will hear something that will help them and perhaps get them out of the shadows and the darkness of addiction and bring them into the light.” Valletta sought help at 25 because she “didn’t want to die…I had to be willing to lift the veil off the shame and say, ‘I’m addict, I can’t do this alone, I don’t want to do this alone, I don’t feel comfortable, can you help me?’ ”Īfter staying sober for 15 years, the model-turned-actress – whose new show Legends premieres on TNT in August – hopes to inspire others by sharing her story. “I don’t blame anything that happened to me that was negative.” “I didn’t care and that’s just to show you addiction takes you to the worst places… I was in a business that drugs and alcohol were widely acceptable and they were given to me.” But she takes full responsibility for her actions. “I had a multimillion deal and I showed up the first day to shoot this campaign high and drunk,” she admits. “I suffer from a disease called addiction…I’ve had it for as long as I can remember.”Īmber Valletta, 40, says she started looking for ways to get high since she was 8 years old because she was “uncomfortable being a human being…I sniffed markers, I sniffed glue, fingernail polish, anything that could give me a buzz,” she says.īy the time she was 22 and her modeling career was at its peak, Valletta was abusing cocaine and alcohol. She gave a speech with which you can see here. And she’s coming clean in a public way about her struggles with addiction. Amber still gets some work, mostly magazine editorials and the occasional ad campaign or acting gig. ![]() I adored her and Shalom Harlow, and I loved their friendship too – they were roommates for a time in NYC. Back in the day, Amber Valletta was one of my favorite models.
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