![]() The show is a runaway hit for Bravo last season it was the No. (The car she and her mother and stepfather were riding in was rear-ended and fell down an embankment.) An operation left a crosshatched scar. An accident on the freeway coming from Malibu when she was 14 shattered her right arm. Another contradiction: Padma is a beautiful woman who is scarred. She wasn’t fully embraced by the fashion world, however, until she was photographed partially nude by Helmut Newton, who saw beauty in her imperfection. Her first runway show, for Ralph Lauren, “was Stephanie Seymour in front of me and Christy Turlington behind me,” she remembers. ![]() In 1992, Padma was spending a semester in Spain when she was discovered in a Madrid bar by a fashion agent. (A retired Pfizer executive, he had no relationship with his daughter until recently.) Padma joined her mother two years later on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where they lived until 1983, when Vijaya took a job in Los Angeles. In 1972, her mother, Vijaya, a nurse, moved to New York from Madras (now Chennai), after divorcing Padma’s father. She is East and West, also East Coast and West Coast, having grown up in India and America, New York and Southern California. |||Outtakes from Padma’s session with photographer Alexi Lubomirski||| Her shiny black hair was up in a loose bun which she would shake down and pin back again, kittenish and familiar. She was wearing a diaphanous summer dress, smelling sweet and spicy, of her own bespoke perfume. ‘M mmmm, mmmmm, yummy.” On a summer night at Socialista, a noisy, glammy Cuban restaurant in Manhattan’s West Village, Padma Lakshmi was eating ribs, gnawing them to the bone, sucking the grease off her fingers. If there was a sadness in her eyes in those pictures from the red carpet that night, it was because “I wish I could have shared this Emmy nomination with him.” Now they were divorcing, and, she said, “I’m really fucking sad.” “Everyone was an American now, or at least Americanized.… Even anti-Americanism was Americanism in disguise, conceding, as it did, that America was the only game in town.” So wrote her husband, Salman Rushdie, in Fury (2001), the novel he composed after leaving his third wife and moving to New York to be with Padma. “I’m as American as anyone else,” she has said. “She has a global image and no end of ideas,” said John Steele, a senior V.P., “so we have multiple agreements.” “Like,” Padma said, “Tiger Woods.” How amazing was it that she, the daughter of a single mother who fled India to escape the stigma of divorce, was poised to become the first Indian woman with an American brand-perhaps the first to self-brand. “Padma Lakshmi,” she hoped, might one day be on as many food labels as “Paul Newman”-“a big hero.” Soon there would be Padma jewelry and fashion, “like Jennifer Lopez,” she said, and television and cookware, “like Martha Stewart.” In September, she sealed a major deal with IMG, the sports-and-entertainment marketing giant. But if you think about it, I’m the kind of girl who thinks about what she’s gonna cook for dinner when she’s finishing her lunch.” “I never thought that this would be the way,” she told a reporter.
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