Celia Forner: the Spanish model who conquered Louis Bourgeois with her projects, then Beyoncé

When Celia Forner was just a beginner model who had just left Silla, her hometown, to try her luck on the catwalks of Valencia at the hands of Antonio Alvarado (the designer and other fashion figures used to frequent the restaurant that was then run by her parents ), there was already an entrepreneurial streak in her that she has never been able to escape.

"If you were already selling belts then.

She was very

he laughs on the other end of the phone. Later, in 1987, she would win the prestigious Ford agency competition, Supermodel of the World, a title that launched her modeling career with iconic fashion brands such as Dolce & Gabbana, Chanel, Jean Paul Gaultier, Comme des Garçons, Dior, Donna Karan, Versace, and beauty brands like L'Oréal and Guerlain. That mark turned her into an international mannequin with a prolific career and a name in New York, Paris and Tokyo: “I fondly remember the months I lived in Japan. Then there was not as much tourism as now and when you walked down the street you were incredibly exotic, as if you were some kind of goddess ”, he recalls. But when she retired from the catwalks in the late 1990s, she reoriented her activity towards jewelry design: she never stopped being an entrepreneur.She came to open her own store in London, which during a stage of her life took her to travel every two months to India.

Now, Forner is about to leave the British city, which has been his home for two decades: “During the nineties and two thousand London was the height. In recent years everything has changed a lot, also in my priorities, and we need a different quality of life ”. With that first person plural she refers to her and her husband, Francesco Venturi, owner of the Vendome Press publishing house, the man with whom she has founded a family and with whom she is about to move to Rome, where he is from. Venturi has been one of her main supports in the art world, in which she has become a renowned collector. Insatiable inquisitive, she studied art history courses at Christie's and jewelry at Sotheby's, ending up directing for nine years, in collaboration with the Hauser & gallery.Wirth ("When I met them it was a very small gallery. And now, look at them, a world reference"), a project called Portable Art, in which he collaborated with 15 artists. The initiative consisted of creating body ornaments that had the status of works of art and in it participated names of the height of Louise Bourgeois, John Baldessari, Subodh Gupta, Paul McCarthy, Cristina Iglesias, Mary Heilmann, Stephan Bruggeman ... The project was exhibited in the Hauser & Wirth galleries in New York and Los Angeles in 2017 and 2018 respectively. Forner designed both exhibitions and contributed to the catalog.The initiative consisted of creating body ornaments that had the status of works of art and in it participated names of the height of Louise Bourgeois, John Baldessari, Subodh Gupta, Paul McCarthy, Cristina Iglesias, Mary Heilmann, Stephan Bruggeman ... The project was exhibited in the Hauser & Wirth galleries in New York and Los Angeles in 2017 and 2018 respectively. Forner designed both exhibitions and contributed to the catalog.The initiative consisted of creating body ornaments that had the status of works of art and in it participated names of the height of Louise Bourgeois, John Baldessari, Subodh Gupta, Paul McCarthy, Cristina Iglesias, Mary Heilmann, Stephan Bruggeman ... The project was exhibited in the Hauser & Wirth galleries in New York and Los Angeles in 2017 and 2018 respectively. Forner designed both exhibitions and contributed to the catalog.

Now, the model is starting again, this time with a cosmetic brand called Alleven whose star product is a spray-dosed makeup for the body that she has created in collaboration with one of the great Spanish cosmetic laboratories whose identity she prefers not to reveal: this idea in an absolutely organic way, as has always happened with all the projects in which I have been involved. The product that I have created is the one that I thought was missing in the market and I realized it because I myself, and the people around me have needed it many times ”. The success of the product has been a surprise even to herself. Beyoncé, Cardi B, Emma Stone, Laura Dern, Alicia Vikander or Naomi Watts have acknowledged using it: “And what makes me most funny is that it is not just a feminine product.I have friends who even use it to go to the gym ”, she says in surprise. Forner, who has two children, Filippo, a photography and film student at the Parsons school in New York, and Allegra, an actress and an art history graduate at NYU, is now beginning a new life in Italy, albeit with an eye toward the East: "The Asian market is our great hope."