I live my life day by day, and that's how I continue to live it.

I dream of a world liberated of all diseases. Ignorance also upsets me a lot. How can one calmly look at the pictures from Rwanda and not instantly want to take action and try to ease the suffering?

I think it's always good to learn a craft from scratch the real way, so that you've learned it from the basis, the raw bones, and then you have that to fall back on. I personally wouldn't want it any other way.

So when this opportunity came up through Elisabeth Murdoch and her company Shine, to be an executive producer and actually be part of the show, I liked the idea because I like the word mentor. I don't want to judge someone. I like sharing my knowledge with my girls, and anything they ask me I'll try to do to help them. Any of my real friends who know me, know that's how I really am.

Look, you have to make mistakes. That's how you learn and that's how the world works.

I started this charity, Fashion for Relief, in 2005, after Hurricane Katrina happened. New Orleans was actually the first place I visited in the United States. It was one of my first big jobs, a shoot for British Elle. It was April 14, 1986.

I’ve been offered jobs by companies that supported apartheid many times in the 25 years of my modeling career, but I have never taken one of them. I have to refuse that money, because I’m not going to work against my people. They’ve suffered enough.