Brooke Shields drew herself up to her full six feet, fielding reporters’ questions with an agility that has become second nature. At the Beekman Hotel in downtown Manhattan last month, Shields, the model, actress and veteran of numberless interviews, was delivering but the latest in a series of canny performances. She bantered good-naturedly, as is her habit, displaying an unflappable poise and a set of curves pneumatically packaged inside a close-fitting top and skirt from the collection she was about to unveil for QVC.

Her features and frame were considerably fuller than in 1980, when she scandalised television audiences with the coy claim that nothing came between her and her Calvins. The once-angular jaw is softer. Not that it matters. Shields has ripened into the kind of consummately relatable personality much coveted by QVC, the home-shopping behemoth that found success with celebrities including model Iman and actress Catherine Zeta-Jones.

The 52-year-old’s history is part of the draw. On screen and on the page, she has been a continual presence in the lives of her fans: A comedic talent and the author of several viscerally revealing memoirs in which she casts herself as a survivor, beating back demons that include a codependent relationship with an alcoholic mother and a severe episode of postpartum depression.

As Rachel Ungaro, the vice-president of fashion merchandising and design development for QVC said, “she transcends the decades”: fixed firmly in home viewers’ imaginations as paradoxically tough and alluring but approachable.

TRANSCENDING THE DECADES

During his first season as creative director for Calvin Klein, Raf Simons resurrected her famous jeans-clad image on a series of T-shirts. And last year a taut, preternaturally youthful Shields modelled Calvin Klein lingerie in Social Life magazine

From ‘Pretty Baby’ to Menocore

The notion of Shields tweaking hemlines and adjusting seams seems a bit improbable.

True, during his first season as creative director for Calvin Klein, Raf Simons resurrected her famous jeans-clad image on a series of T-shirts. And last year a taut, preternaturally youthful Shields modelled Calvin Klein lingerie in Social Life magazine. But full lips and furred brows aside, her influence on fashion is debatable.

Unlike many models who are over 50 or performers parlaying their celebrity into late-life fashion careers, Shields, surprisingly, has never put her name to a fashion line.

Still the QVC partnership seems promising. Her new label, Brooke Shields Timeless, is trend-free, as the name suggests. It is aimed unabashedly at the “menocore” crowd, a cohort archly defined by Harling Ross on Man Repeller as “like Normcore, if its inspiration were women of a certain age”. (Its members venerate role models like Diane Keaton in a Nancy Meyers movie, or Blythe Danner in any number of roles — women who, like Shields herself, are white, rich and thin.)

But Shields will tell you she is not all that readily typecast. Members of the 35-to-65-year-old QVC demographic may recall her as the paradoxically chaste pinup who courted notoriety playing a pre-adolescent prostitute in Louis Malle’s 1978 film, Pretty Baby. They may also remember her as the demiclad nymph cavorting on a desert island in The Blue Lagoon (1980), her breasts curtained by nothing but her waist-length hair. A disconcertingly sultry naif, she made her mark on a culture skittishly poised between prurience and an uneasy Puritanism.

“I think in my life I’ve really embodied both the sexy and the wholesome,” said Shields, a tutor’s pet on her early movie locations who eventually attended Princeton University. “In school I was a goody-goody. I would do all my homework. But if I’m in a rock ’n’ roll setting, I want to be able to channel whatever it is that’s behind it.”

Still, as she’ll also tell you matter-of-factly, she remains a work in progress. Days after introducing the QVC line at the Beekman, she gusted into Maison Kayser, a friendly West Village bakery near the townhouse she shares with her husband, Chris Henchy, a television writer and producer, and their two daughters, who are 11 and 14. 

“At the end of the day, you’re sort of asking yourself, ‘Who am I?’” she said. “Am I honestly O.K. with being more than just one thing?”

And yet her variability is arguably what has extended her appeal. Recurrent gossip column fodder, the youthful Shields dated John Travolta and crushed on a baby-faced George Michael. Later in life she found herself deflecting the advances of Donald Trump, who had suggested that they date, telling her, as she amusedly told the talk show host Andy Cohen, “‘You’re America’s sweetheart and I’m America’s richest man.’”

She was briefly married to the tennis pro Andre Agassi, who portrayed her in Open, his 2009 autobiography, as a socially ambitious gadabout to his off-the-courts homebody. They were a mismatch, not least because, as he writes, when friends appear, “It feels as if we’re actors and our guests are an audience.

“She playacts,” he adds, “even when the audience isn’t here.”

Protected from predators

In her 2014 memoir, There Was a Little Girl: The Real Story of My Mother and Me,” Shields confides that she pulled away from Agassi by degrees, their rift widening after she learned of his former substance abuse. “I feared our life together was not based in absolute truth,” she writes.

Throughout her marriage and well into her adulthood, Teri Shields, her notorious hovercraft of a mother, was both her bulwark and her bane. Energetic and capable, but often drunk, the senior Shields is portrayed in her daughter’s memoir with an unlikely blend of solicitude and pain.

Over the course of her somewhat patchy upbringing, Shields acquired a robust armour. Teri Shields spent part of her girlhood in Newark, cleaning other peoples’ houses. Divorced when Brooke was a toddler from Frank Shields, a well-born and glamorous business executive, she and Brooke spent summers in Southampton (New York), in a relatively shabby part of town, so that Brooke could see her father.

“I was the person who was living above the hardware store and was fine with it,” Shields said. “At the same time, I was going to day camp with all these extremely wealthy kids and, you know, I could fit in there.” Learning to straddle the class divide was liberating. “I found that I could put on these different hats and thrive,” she said.

That duality is reflected in the QVC collection. Priced from $29 to $109, it veers in tone and style from classically upscale to breezily accessible. 

Shields and her manufacturing partner, the KBL Group International, had approached QVC, a move that she said took courage. The prospect of fusing her country club-inflected aesthetic with something a bit more democratic was daunting at first.

Even simply getting dressed has sometimes proved a challenge. “I was afraid that I didn’t have a through line to my style,” she said, “that when I went into my closet I was too many people, that there was no continuity there, no order.”

She struggled to make sense of her more than 50 pairs of jeans and more rarely worn high-end togs from labels including Carolina Herrera, Rodarte and Saint Laurent.

“I had nice things, but I was afraid I was going to sweat in them and spoil them,” she said. Instead of picking up fancy labels, she said, “I would buy 10 identical pieces from Uniqlo.” More pointedly, she said, “I didn’t want to seem better than anyone else.”

When she is not overseeing the placement of zippers, buttons and seams, Shields is shuttling between New York and Los Angeles, where she is taping Jane the Virgin, parodying herself as an actress and supermodel called River Fields.

Off set, though, she plans to stay sharply focused on Brooke, the brand. “At first I shied away from that,” she said. “I didn’t want to be a commodity. I wanted to be real. But the flip side was that I wanted to sell. And you can’t have it both ways.”

The New York Times News Service