Cindy Crawford has paid tribute to Tatjana Pattiz, who died at the age of 56. Taking to Instagram, Crawford shared a photo with the former model and wrote, “So sad to hear of the passing of beautiful Tatjana. We were babies together in the fashion industry and I’m l felt like we grew up together.”
Tatjana Patitz, one of the original supermodels who dominated fashion in the 1980s and 1990s, raking in huge sums of money for photo shoots, died on Wednesday, her agent announced.
German-born Patitz was one of a handful of women of the era whose looks and style propelled them to worldwide fame that transcended modeling.
Corinne Nicolas, founder of The Model CoOp, a Manhattan-based agency, told AFP that Patitz died Wednesday morning in California.
Nicolas told the media that Patitz had been ill, but gave no further details.
Along with Christy Turlington, Linda Evangelista, Naomi Campbell and Cindy Crawford, Patitz appeared in the smoldering video for the hit “Freedom!” by George Michael in 1990.
It happened after photographer Peter Lindbergh captured Turlington, Evangelista, Patitz and Estelle Lefebure, Karen Alexander and Rachel Williams in a photo titled ‘White Shirts: Six Supermodels, Malibu’.
Vogue magazine said that despite the elite professional company she kept, Patitz always seemed separate from other models.
“There was a certain element of mystery in Patitz’s beauty, something in the soft oval of her face and the shape of her eyes that spoke of poise and passion,” the magazine wrote.
“Patitz’s look was feminine and self-aware, not the wide-eyed ingenue, and with her acting background, she was a force to be reckoned with,” he said.
Born in Hamburg, Patitz moved early with her Estonian mother and German father to a small Swedish town.
Her break from modeling came in 1983 when she won a trip to Paris and a fixed-term contract.
She then moved to California, where she has been pictured for the past few years around her ranch near Santa Barbara with her son, Jonah.
The Lindbergh Foundation’s Twitter account paid tribute to Patitz.
“We would like to salute Tatjana’s kindness, inner beauty and exceptional intelligence… She will be sorely missed.”