SUSAN HOLMES McKAGAN: THE RETURN OF THE BODY

Jo Rosenthal

7 hours ago

6 min read

The ‘90s Supermodel Returns to Glossy Covers with VALŪS

This story is taken from VALŪS Issue 005 Autumn 2026 - ORDER YOUR COPIES HERE

Written by JO ROSENTHAL

Susan Holmes McKagan has collected experiences for as long as she can remember. Supermodel, designer, entrepreneur, mother, and unapologetic romantic, she's lived an exciting life with an inquisitiveness that refuses to be contained by a single career. Her life is a study in reinvention, glamour, and hard work. She proves a woman can build an empire without losing her appetite for the unexpected.

At a young age, McKagan’s modeling career took her from Paris runways to the pages of Vogue, Harper's BAZAAR, and W, where she worked with some of fashion's most celebrated designers and photographers. Famed fashion-moment capturer Steven Meisel dubbed McKagan “The Body.” But McKagan was never content to remain just the beauty in an editorial. She launched her own clothing line, wrote “The Velvet Rose,” and established a life that moves between fashion, music, and family. There’s something wonderfully traditional about the way she moves through the world, yet she always looks forward.

For McKagan, the link connecting every chapter of her life isn't one job or identity, but a life spent with ease and a 100-watt smile. Interest and independence have remained her north stars, along with what she describes as, “the refusal to live someone else’s version of my life.” She is drawn to people who challenge her creatively, who make her see things differently. Motherhood has changed her understanding of success: her career accomplishments matter, but so does her character, especially in calm moments with her family when she has nothing to prove.

Having entered the industry during the height of the supermodel era, McKagan has spent nearly three decades negotiating a world that can be as demanding as it is glamorous. “Your job is to sell a product or a feeling that inspires someone to buy it,” she explains, adding that her love for the work has just deepened with time. Yet even a career filled with runways and campaigns can leave room for self-doubt. What McKagan eventually came to understand was that fashion’s standards of beauty are constantly changing, and, “you can’t take that personally. It’s simply the nature of fashion.”

Today, she embraces a more expansive understanding of beauty that makes room for everyone. The most important lesson, she says, was learning to separate her own sense of worth from the industry’s changing expectations. “Don’t let someone else’s definition of beauty become your definition of yourself. People see the photograph, not the hours and days and all the preparation before it,” McKagan explains. Behind a polished image is the “work, rejection, discipline, insecurity, travel, loneliness, waiting, and change,” realities that rarely make it into the final frame.

Still, McKagan is careful not to let her honesty overshadow her real love for modeling itself. She has always loved being in front of the camera and meeting new people because those opportunities can be transformative. “Who doesn’t love that fashion can literally change how you feel about yourself? Your posture, your attitude, even giving you a snatched waist, ha!” she jokes. The real magic rests in remembering that clothing should serve the person wearing it, not the other way around.

Writing fiction gave McKagan the freedom to explore her truth without being confined by the literal details of her past. In “The Velvet Rose,” her fiction novel, McKagan molded “feelings, experiences, relationships, desire, ambition, heartbreak, and all the complicated things that happen between people,” into something larger than her own biography. “Fiction lets you tell the truth sideways,” she reflects, because storytelling has been a form of freedom.

The book took McKagan nine years to complete and sold out in one day. “The Velvet Rose” has also now won awards that have allowed McKagan to support causes important to her heart, like the MusiCares Foundation and Wags & Walks animal rescue. Alongside her publishers, Rare Bird Lit and Simon & Schuster, she says, “I’m still pinching myself” at how far the book has come.

Her successes aside, the conversation around aging and beauty has changed considerably since McKagan entered the industry. “I love seeing women take back the narrative around aging. It’s about damn time,” she says. She sees more room for individuality and traits; however, she believes the industry still has work to do. “We shouldn’t have to prove that we’re ‘aging beautifully,’” she says. “We should be allowed to age however the hell we want.” Whether it means embracing wrinkles and gray hair or having a youthful appearance, she thinks both should be equally valid. For women over forty, McKagan believes the power to define beauty should belong to them, because they earned it.

Reinvention, McKagan believes, is both a conscious decision and something that life can impose upon us. “Sometimes you consciously shed the old version of yourself because you know there’s something else waiting. Other times, life does it for you,” she says. Having experienced both, she understands why the process can be frightening, especially when you think you’ve temporarily lost the identity people associate with you. But she sees freedom in that uncertainty, because “you don’t owe anyone the same old, boring, exact consistency.” To McKagan, reinvention is an act of resistance. “You are allowed to surprise people. Change is growth, and change is fresh sometimes.”

Strip away the careers, fashion, recognition, and trappings of a public life, and McKagen’s definition of a meaningful life comes down to something much more human. “A life of value is a life that feels genuinely strong and smart, filled with people who genuinely care and have a good heart,” she says, alongside good mental and physical health, a sense of meaning, and the desire to give back. For her, it is also about the simple things: “It’s having people you love. It’s being able to laugh. It’s creating something that didn’t exist before. It’s being curious.” She values having the courage to tell the truth without fear of disapproval, and being able to sit around a table with people she admires without needing anything more. And perhaps most importantly, she believes getting older should never mean giving up on ambition. “Honestly, it’s still having dreams,” she says. “Your ambitions just become more personal.”

A single place has never defined home, but rather the different versions of herself each city has allowed her to discover. New York will always have a special place in her heart, but Paris offers a different kind of inspiration on how life exists in a way that she finds deeply poetic. In Los Angeles, she has found freedom and the opportunity to reinvent herself, and in Seattle she always feels grounded. Together, these places reflect McKagan’s curiosity for how many ways a life can be lived. And there is still plenty left to explore! Her travel wishlist includes the Maldives, Turks & Caicos, and another unforgettable African safari.

When it comes to the little things, McKagen’s current go-to snacks are refreshingly simple. “At the moment I love Honeycrisp apples and natural peanut butter,” she says. “I love avocado with a squeeze of fresh lemon and sea salt.” It’s a fittingly unfussy answer from someone whose life has otherwise been filled with fashion, travel, music, writing, and constant reinvention.

As for what’s next, the answer, unsurprisingly, is a lot. “Always too many things - which is probably exactly how I like it and how I thrive!” she says. McKagan has recently teamed up with her youngest daughter, Mae McKagan, on a mother-daughter capsule collection of swimwear and resort wear, Mae.NewYork x SHS, a return to the world of Susan Holmes Swimwear, the successful line she created in the 2000s. She is continuing to work across fashion and modeling while also making music and radio, with her weekly SiriusXM show Three Chords and the Truth on Ozzy’s Boneyard, which she co-hosts with her husband, Duff McKagan. Stations around the world have now picked up the show, while The Velvet Rose continues to find new readers and potential life on screen. “How incredible would it be if The Velvet Rose were optioned for a series or feature film?” she says, noting that producers have already expressed interest. For McKagan, the excitement seems to lie precisely in not knowing what the next chapter will bring.

If there is a through line to McKagan’s story, it is that she has never waited for someone else to tell her what comes next. Her advice to anyone hoping to build a creative life is to “set out to create your own fabulous, exciting path,” rather than trying to replicate someone else’s. She encourages young people to “say yes to things that scare you,” learn to hear “no” without making it “a definition of yourself,” and, above all, stop waiting for permission. “Make the thing. Write the book. Start the label. Make the record. Take the photograph. Ask the question. Walk into the room.” After three decades of modeling, writing, designing, making music, and reinventing herself, McKagan’s philosophy reads less like advice than a way of life: “The world is full of people waiting to be discovered. Be one of the people creating something worth discovering.”