She’s a supermodel with bitchy resting face in the extreme. Whereas other famous beauties’ faces boast cherubic lips, dimples and doe eyes, her pulchritude is borne of an aquiline nose and remarkable pale green-blue almond-shaped eyes that slant upwards as they stare into the camera’s lens defiantly. She became famous young, as all supermodels do, and yet she has never seemed like a vulnerable slip of a thing. Rather, she exploded onto the super scene at the end of the 1980s a grown woman, fierce in a way that Tyra can only dream of, formidable  and demanding: well, she very famously told US Vogue in 1990, aged 25: ‘We don’t wake up for less than $10,000 a day.’

The thing is though, beneath the Alaïa dresses and the imperious-looking face, is, it would seem, a real doll. When founder of the Elite model agency, father of the Strokes frontman Julian Casablancas and notorious modeliser John Casablancas died this weekend, the papers recounted his disdain for some of the women whose careers he had enabled. He decried Naomi Campbell as ‘odious’ and called Heidi Klum a ‘talentless German sausage’ but he had, they said, respect for the grateful and polite Italian-Canadian Evangelista. ‘Apart from Linda Evangelista, no supermodel has ever thanked me when she got to the top,’ he remembered even as he railed against the industry after stepping down from Elite amid scandals in the European offices of his agency.  

And it seems, he wasn’t the only fashion industry insider touched by Evangelista’s kindness. In John Galliano’s Vanity Fair interview  earlier this summer – his first tentative steps back into the spotlight after his anti-Semitic comments threatened to topple him forever – the journalist Ingrid Sischy outlined his time in rehab. ‘Naomi Campbell was on the phone arranging for a bed at a rehab center in Arizona,’ she said. ‘Jeremy Healy packed the designer’s bags. Camilla Morton pitched in.’ And don’t forget that Kate Moss offered him fashion rehabilitation by asking him to design her wedding dress even as he languished in disgrace. But who was it that actually made the trek to Arizona to see Galliano at his lowest? Why the benevolent Evangelista, of course. Sischy says: ‘When the first visitors’ weekend rolled around, Linda Evangelista was the sole friend to make the trek. ‘I just didn’t want that weekend to go by without anyone reaching out to him,’ she told me.’ 

The clue is in the name: EvANGELista, you see. The 48-year-old is fashion’s fairy godmother, the woman you can rely on when the chips are down. Forget about Christy’s clean living and Kate’s band of devoted London pals; if you’re looking for steadfast fashion loyalty, turn to Linda.