style.com: beauty icon, brooke shields

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Brooke Shields

She uttered some of the most memorable screen lines of all time—they just happened to be in a denim commercial. “You want to know what comes between me and my Calvins?” a 15-year-old Brooke Shields famously asked America in that 1980 Calvin Klein jeans ad. The answer, of course: “Nothing.” By then, the teenage actress was no stranger to risqué roles, having bared all as a nubile lover in the cult classic The Blue Lagoon and, before that, as the daughter of a brothel-dwelling Susan Sarandon in Pretty Baby. The graceful transition from child star to working adult actress that followed (OK, she did date Michael Jackson for a few embarrassing moments) is one not many young celebrities have pulled off—Hayden Panettiere et al. could do worse than look to her example. It helps, of course, that in addition to being six feet tall, with a mile-wide smile, enviable glossy mane, and eyebrows to remember, she’s got the comic timing of a pro. When Shields’ latest project, Candace Bushnell’s Lipstick Jungle, debuts in Feburary on NBC, Sex and the City fans will have a new weekly ritual. Time’s “Face of the ’80s” is no one-decade wonder.

—Alison Baenen

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Brooke Shields in her breakthrough role as Violet in 1978′s Pretty Baby, with co-star Susan Sarandon.

Kristy McNichol, Leif Garrett, Brooke Shields, and Peter Fonda in a private room at Hollywood’s Stardust Ballroom for the Halloween Celebrity Disco, 1978.

Shields as a young pinball phenom in 1979′s Tilt.

A 15-year-old Shields in The Blue Lagoon, 1980.

Paving the way for Kate Moss: Shields poses for Calvin Klein in 1980.

Martin Hewitt and Shields as doomed lovers in Endless Love, 1981.

Calvin Klein, Brooke Shields, and Steve Rubell at the reopening of Studio 54, September 1981.

In New York City with co-stars Lindsay Price and Kim Raver, Shields promotes her new series, Lipstick Jungle, spring 2007.