“I couldn’t sleep at all last night,” says Amber Valletta, on set at the Highline Stages in New York, where she’s being shot by Craig McDean. As one of the world’s top models, the Los Angeles–based Valletta, 39, is beyond camera fright. What’s keeping her awake is the fact that these photos aren’t for someone else’s magazine or label: They’re for Master & Muse, Valletta’s new e-commerce project with Yoox focusing on ethical and environmentally responsible fashion. As she says, “I’m the model and the client.”
Valletta’s nerves are understandable, if unwarranted. Good taste and social awareness come naturally to her—and two decades as one of the industry’s most in-demand faces have earned her a kind of ultimate insider status. Who better to bring a sharp, informed eye to a genre that too often is more hippie-dippie than hip? “I didn’t want to see, like, leaves and trees and granola and flip-flops [on the site],” she says, laughing. “I wanted to see fashion.”
To that end, the selection Valletta and her team have curated reflects both a sense of responsibility and the idea of what’s happening on the runways now. For instance, long and lean jeans with a cool seventies vibe (which showed up in several resort collections) can be found from Goodsociety, a sustainable denim line from Germany; and M. Patmos’s slouchy organic-fiber sweaters and loose tanks can be piled underneath biker jackets—made from recycled motor cycle seats—by a little-known collection called the Sway. Eveningwear, an area not often explored by the green movement, is covered as well: Valletta found edgy, semi-sheer jumpsuits from zero-waste company 100% NY by Daniel Silverstein. “We really looked at the brands and made sure what they do is right,” she says.
Prioritizing design alongside purpose is important to Valletta outside of work, too. At home—a 1929 Santa Monica bungalow she shares with her husband, Christian McCaw, a former Olympic volleyball player, and their twelve-year-old son, Auden—she’s planted lemon and loquat trees and installed solar panels and a Tesla charging station. She’s also planning to participate in the city’s innovative water-conservation program. “I grew up in Oklahoma, around nature, so that’s what inspires me,” says Valletta. “The farther away from it I am, the less peaceful I feel.”
When she does go out, this booster of the Natural Resources Defense Council bikes or walks to the Brentwood Country Mart, a hub for favorite spots including field-to-table restaurant Farmshop and small-batch ice-cream shop Sweet Rose Creamery. Valletta and her husband are also hockey superfans and recently took the Metro Rail to an L.A. Kings game—conveniently bypassing gridlock from the American Idol season finale filming near the Staples Center. But before envying the supermodel for both her otherworldly beauty and her virtue, know that she’s also real. Sure, she may want her family to go packaging-free for a week, “but I’m not going to be psycho mom telling Auden he can’t have a Clif Bar,” she says.
In other words, Valletta allows room in her life for, well, life. It’s why she’s able to keep her cool at Master & Muse’s New York shoot when only a fraction of the shoes have arrived because Guava, a small Portuguese label that hand-makes each pair, doesn’t have the capability to produce a huge run of samples. Rather than freak out, Valletta thinks creatively. Maybe she’ll throw them in the air. “If you look up muse, it doesn’t mean a woman standing in the corner looking beautiful,” she says. “It’s actually an active, powerful word.”
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