Whispers drifted through Milan's Brera Academy with the launch of Bottega Veneta's Spring 2017 show. Was Lauren Hutton really returning to celebrate the brand's 50th anniversary?

Like an ethereal goddess, the 72-year-old Hutton suddenly appeared, epitomizing the timeless, easy appeal of the Bottega woman. When she appeared again, Hutton was accompanied by social media it girl Gigi Hadid, two all-American bombshells as Vogue described them. Separated by five decades, both femmes exuded "larer-than-life personalities, healthy good looks, and boundless reserves of energy."

Lauren Hutton appears today untrenched and now a lady in red for her bow in Bottega Veneta's Spring 2017 ad campaign.

Lauren Hutton 2013 In Interview Magazine

Born in Charleston, South Carolina, Hutton spent her formative years in Tampa, Florida. After arriving in New York from New Orleans, where she'd been attending college, she did a three-month stint as a waitress at the Playboy Club, before entering the modeling business at the height of the Mad Men-ish 1960s and at a time when young women were suddenly looking to do something other than subside prettily (and quietly) into domestic idyll. Hutton was a different kind of woman entirely: she wore jeans and sneakers and rode motorcycles and rolled her own cigarettes and went to Uganda. Vogue editor Diana Vreeland was an early supporter, introducing her to Richard Avedon; their first session together yielded those famous pictures of Hutton leaping and bounding in studio. Irving Penn was another photographer who very quickly cleaved to Hutton's betraying blue eyes and famously gap-toothed smile (for a time, she tried to fill in the space with wax or caps, which she occasionally swallowed). In fact, several years later, Hutton would appear on the cover of Vogue alongside the phrase "The American Woman Today," an appropriate headline for a woman who was quickly becoming the definition—or the redefinition—of American beauty.

Hutton's success—and where it led—changed the modeling industry. In 1973, she landed what became a landmark contract with Revlon, and her status as the first $1 million-a-year girl had the collateral effect of increasing pay for models across the board, in some ways, giving rise to the more complex business infrastructure that surrounds modeling today.