Why Amanda Lear Remains a Timeless Fashion Muse

Amanda Lear has literally seen it all.

As companion and muse to the Surrealist painter Salvador Dalí, she found herself at the nexus of ‘60s pop culture — dating doomed Rolling Stone guitarist Brian Jones, helping Mary Quant launch the miniskirt in the U.S. and later becoming a disco diva, with a little help from David Bowie.

Over the course of her decades-long career, she’s cemented her status as a style icon, whether appearing on the cover of a Roxy Music album, on the runway for Thierry Mugler and Jean Paul Gaultier or on Italian and French TV as a presenter and star of popular variety shows from the mid-1980s.

Among these, “Stryx,” an avant-garde production that fused black magic, disco glamour and medieval mysticism has gained cult status and continues to inspire creatives, almost 50 years after hitting the small screen.

“It revolutionized Italian television. It was the advent of disco and color — but above all, it was the first time they had topless girls on TV. That was quite the scandal,” chuckles Lear, sitting in front of a cappuccino at the Meurice hotel in Paris. 

Fresh off fall 2026 Paris Fashion Week, where she attended Antonin Tron’s debut show as creative director of Balmain, Lear has fittingly selected the restaurant Le Dalí at the Meurice for our meeting — even if the current decor by Philippe Starck bears little resemblance to how it looked when Dalí was a resident of the hotel in the ‘60s.

“This place always brings back so many memories,” she says. “He had a suite on the first floor, with a balcony overlooking the Tuileries Gardens. I was very impressed because I was living at the time in a fleabag hotel in Saint-Germain-des-Près called Hôtel La Louisiane, which had no TV and no elevator. When Dalí brought me here for the first time, I was speechless.”

Lear was an art student moonlighting as a model, having been scouted by agent Catherine Harlé, who thought her rangy physique would be a perfect fit for Paco Rabanne’s Space Age designs.

“I had protruding teeth and stick-straight hair, and I was as skinny as a rake,” she recalls. “You could say I had the look of the moment.” 

Rabanne was looking for girls who could shoulder his heavy metal gowns. “When you wore those dresses over bare skin, they were ice cold, and they turned scorching hot under the spotlights. It wasn’t fun — but we ended up becoming great friends,” Lear says.

It was Rabanne who introduced her to Dalí, sending her career into orbit. As the artist’s constant companion, she met everyone from John Lennon to Coco Chanel, demonstrating an uncanny knack for always being in the right place at the right time. 

“I was in London in the ‘60s when it was all happening with Ossie Clark and the gang. And when disco arrived, as if by magic, I was in New York at Studio 54. But it was all a total fluke,” she insists. 

“Contrary to many girls of my generation, I never had a career plan,” Lear continues. “It was written in the stars.”

Call it part of her personal mythmaking – a skill she has turned into an art form. Lear has always been deliberately vague about her age and origins, and has spent most of her life fielding speculation about her gender. 

“Yes, I lie all the time. It’s part of the game. In fact, I’ve come to realize that the truth doesn’t matter at all. What matters is what people want to believe,” she says breezily.

“If they saw me at home with my cats in my dressing gown and curlers, they’d be horrified. They want to imagine Amanda Lear is out having dinner with Brad Pitt. People crave fantasy — they don’t care about mundane reality, and I give them what they want,” Lear argues. 

The Girl in the Picture

She credits Dalí with teaching her the art of creating buzz. “Dalí was a school of advertising,” she says. “He knew exactly how to get people talking, how to stoke controversy.”

The artist and his entourage remain a rich source of inspiration for filmmakers. Lear, who’s been featured in biopics before, says she’s been contacted by a Spanish production company working on a Netflix series that would focus on her relationship with Dalí — an opportunity, perhaps, to explain what bound them together for close to 15 years. 

“It’s never very clear what a muse does. People wonder whether you’re sleeping together or just posing immobile,” she says. “The truth is, he needed my presence. I made him laugh, I inspired him.”

Fashion has always been integral to her mystique. In her early days as a model in London, Lear hung out with Anita Pallenberg, Marianne Faithfull and Pattie Boyd, defining the bohemian look of the Swinging ’60s and setting the foundation for genderfluid style. 

“Everyone was trying to copy Anita with the heavy fringe, the eyeliner and all that. Guys were borrowing hats and scarves from the girls, so the lines were blurring, which was new,” she says. “I love guys who wear makeup.”

Her affair with Roxy Music singer Bryan Ferry led to one of her most memorable shoots, the cover of the band’s 1973 album “For Your Pleasure.” She appeared in a skintight black leather Antony Price dress, holding a live black panther on a leash. 

“It was quite a dark look — a Hitchcock-inspired femme fatale, distant and mysterious,” she says. “It got everyone in a lather, to the point where David Bowie fell in love with that photograph. He absolutely wanted to meet me. It was only later that I realized he wasn’t in love with me at all, he was in love with the girl in the picture.”

Bowie encouraged her to branch out into music, even paying for singing lessons. Lear’s first album was titled, aptly, “I Am a Photograph,” and Women’s Wear Daily is name-checked in “Fashion Pack,” a signature track she has rerecorded several times, regularly updating the lyrics to keep pace with current trends.  

Another classic, “Follow Me,” has found a whole new generation of fans since Chanel used it as the soundtrack for a Coco Mademoiselle fragrance ad in 2023.

When it came to her ‘70s stage persona, Lear drew inspiration from Tina Turner, who was signed to the same record label. “I thought Tina was fabulous. She really was the queen of rock, and she always had these shredded animal print outfits by Bob Mackie,” Lear says.

“I couldn’t afford Bob Mackie, so I decided to do it myself. I bought some tights at Repetto and cut them up with a pair of scissors,” she continues. “My role models were Barbarella and this graphic novel called ‘Pravda.’ It was this whole idea of wild women with big hair and thigh boots. I wanted to project an aggressive femininity.”

Lear has continued to milk her reputation as a man-eater, including at Gaultier’s farewell show in 2020, where she was carried down the steps by a pair of topless male models. It turned out to be a memorable night for a different reason.

“Backstage was completely insane. The dressers tear off your clothes, and at the Théâtre du Chatelet, the dressing rooms are upstairs, so I end up in the elevator wearing nothing but my panties. Anna Wintour gets in. Can you imagine? Everyone knows Anna Wintour likes to ride the elevator alone,” she recalls.

“So the doors close, and I start apologizing profusely, but she was nice about it, saying how much she enjoyed the show. Meanwhile, I’m just dying of shame. Trust me to get stuck naked in an elevator with Anna Wintour,” she says with an uproarious laugh.

Reluctant Icon

These days, Lear is keen to nuance her larger-than-life public image and reveal more intimate facets of her personality, such as her lifelong passion for painting. She says she declined an offer to walk in Matières Fécales’ fall 2026 show because she was wary of the brand’s outré styling.

“I mean, I get it — I’ve been there myself. To draw attention, you have to provoke, shock and scandalize,” she says. “I decided to pass, but I did watch the show. Beyond the shock value and the makeup, there were some things that were really good.” 

While she admires designers for their creativity, it hasn’t escaped her notice that the luxury sector is in a funk. 

“Fashion is over,” she declares. “The real fashion now is in the street. It’s the kids who are putting together outfits on a shoestring, it’s upcycled clothes. Fashion has changed. Brands like Ami are very kind to me and they gift me stuff, but I usually end up at my local Uniqlo.”

On the afternoon of our interview, she’s wearing a gray Ami pantsuit with a black turtleneck and a vintage leopard print wool scarf from Leonard that she holds up to the light. “Look…I have moths,” she exclaims in mock horror. 

Leaving her greige Hermès Birkin bag on her chair, she dashes off to the hotel bar to pose for portraits in her signature tinted sunglasses. Her vision is back to 20/20 following a series of recent eye operations. “Now I can read the small print — it’s amazing, but I had a bit of a shock when I looked in the mirror,” she quips. 

Lear will be playing against type in her next film project, “La Sobrietà,” an Italian comedy set to be released on Prime Video on April 27. She gleefully pulls up a still on her phone: she’s dressed as a nun with — by her standards — minimal makeup. 

“That was unexpected,” she wrily notes. “We shot it last summer and it was boiling hot. I was dying in my habit.”

Ever the multitasker, she’s also working on a new play with Jean Franco and Guillaume Mélanie, the duo behind French boulevard theater comedies like “Lady Oscar,” in which she played a fashion editor having a meltdown. 

“I told them, ‘Write me a play about a star who’s fed up with life.’ She wants to die, but somehow, she never manages to. The play is called ‘Unsinkable,’” says Lear, a member of the Association for the Right to Die With Dignity, a nonprofit that’s campaigning to legalize euthanasia in France. “I’m totally in favor of assisted suicide,” she notes.

Having lost many of her former friends, she indulges in a little nostalgia in “Sixties Survivor,” a track from her recent album “Looking Back” — but she doesn’t want her youthful adventures to define her. 

“People look at me like I’m ‘Jurassic Park.’ Yes, I knew Jimi Hendrix, but that was 50 years ago,” she sighs. “I sometimes wonder if they admire my talent or just my capacity to stick around.”

That’s why she’s uncomfortable with being labeled an icon. “An icon has a religious connotation. It’s something you hang on a wall and you pray to, and it’s there for eternity. I don’t like that, because I’m very much alive. I don’t feel frozen in time, you know?”