Cindy Crawford was born in DeKalb, Illinois, on February 20, 1966, the daughter of Dan Crawford and Jennifer Sue Crawford-Moluf (née Walker). On social media, she has stated that her family had been in the United States for generations and that her ancestry was mostly German, English, and French. She is Christian. Appearing in an episode of Who Do You Think You Are? in 2013, she discovered that her ancestors included European nobility and that she was descended from Charlemagne.
In her sophomore year at high school, she received a call from a local clothing store regarding modeling work, only to discover it was a prank by two of her classmates. However, the following year, another store hired a number of high school girls, including Crawford, to work for them (including a fashion shoot).
In her junior year, local photographer Roger Legel, whose duties included photographing a different college girl to be that week’s coed in the DeKalb Nite Weekly, asked to take her picture for the publication; the result was Crawford’s first cover. The photo and positive feedback she received were enough to convince her to take up modeling. Initially, she worked with a small agency, which was sold to Elite Model Management shortly after she signed. In 1983, she entered Elite’s Look of the Year contest at 17 and made the national finals.
Crawford graduated from DeKalb High School in 1984 as valedictorian. She earned an academic scholarship to study chemical engineering at Northwestern University, which she attended for only one quarter before dropping out to pursue a full-time modeling career. After working for photographer Victor Skrebneski in Chicago, she moved to New York City in 1986 and signed with the Elite New York modeling agency. Below are some photographs of Crawford from the mid-1980s:
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