Lauren Hutton on How to Be a Badass Woman ! #Instyle

Lauren Hutton on How to Be a Badass Woman …from Instyle.
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At 77, Hutton says fun is her guiding principle these days, and the natural world is her main source of inspiration.

“People get really crazy about fashion, and that’s just because they think they’re going to find some new information. I took my rules and all my ideas of what beauty was from nature because that’s what I loved first.”

In Hutton’s personal life, the only jewelry she wears daily (a ring converted from an antique stickpin that her godfather gave her) is tied to her earliest memory from when she was around 2.

“My godfather was throwing me up in the air, and I remember going as high as the chandelier, he was smiling at me, and my mother and his wife were in the corner mewling like a couple of cats, ‘No! Don’t!’ But he was not even hearing them,” she says. “I just remember my brain at that moment thinking, ‘Power. The short hairs wearing pants have it; the long hairs in dresses don’t.”

“One of the first things I noticed was that the men had the most fun.”

“I used to spend three months out of the year traveling in Africa, mostly in Tanzania but also in Ethiopia, Somalia, and Congo, and I really wigged out on wildlife,”

“I’ve had these nanosecond smatterings of escaping death, particularly with animals, and those are the moments when I’ve learned the most. The biggest thrill in life is seeing how precious it is, when you come so close to just throwing it away by holding a crocodile’s claw or something.”

The crocodile in question was not a baby, not jeweled, and very real — in the late ’70s an acquaintance found one fatally wounded on her property in Kenya near the Tanzanian border. Hutton was struck by the creature’s feet, how tiny and delicate the scales were, and she couldn’t resist “hunkering down to touch them.”

She suddenly heard her partner scream, jumped up, and felt a whoosh of air behind her. “The crocodile used its 8-foot pure-muscle tail to flip itself over and gnash at me,” she says. “If I hadn’t jumped, I definitely would have been killed. The best adventures,” she adds, “are the ones you live out and live through.” More from Instyle