NENA VON SCHLEBRÜGGE

(1941 - )
FASHION ::: MODEL :::

The Aristocratic Phantom of Fashion

Born Birgitte Caroline “Nena” von Schlebrügge on January 8, 1941, in Mexico City, Nena von Schlebrügge arrived already carrying a transatlantic charge — a Swedish mother, a German baron for a father, lineage that felt closer to European fairy tale than mid-century reality. By her teens, that combination of aristocratic bone structure and cool, self-possessed distance caught the eye of Vogue photographer Norman Parkinson in Stockholm. By sixteen she was moving through London’s fashion world; by seventeen she was in New York, appearing in Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, helping define the elegant, restrained aesthetic of the late 1950s and early 1960s. She wasn’t posed so much as observed — a face that seemed to withhold as much as it revealed.

But Nena’s story quickly slipped beyond covers and couture. She moved through the early-1960s avant-garde as easily as she had fashion salons, briefly exploring acting and brushing the edges of Warhol-era cinema (Ciao! Manhattan, scenes ultimately cut). In 1964 she married countercultural psychologist Timothy Leary, a union that became less a private commitment than a cultural event. That moment is preserved in You're Nobody Till Somebody Loves You, a cinéma-vérité short by D. A. Pennebaker, filmed at the Millbrook estate. The camera famously misses the wedding itself, instead capturing the atmosphere: Charles Mingus at the piano, socialites and seekers, laughter, drifting conversations — a perfect artifact of a decade where fashion, psychedelia, jazz, and documentary film briefly overlapped. The marriage was short-lived, but the film fixed Nena forever at a hinge point of 1960s culture.

By 1967, she pivoted decisively away from the spectacle. She married Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman, raised four children — including Uma Thurman — and redirected her life toward psychology, spirituality, and healing. She became a psychotherapist and spiritual director, later leading Tibet House US and the Menla Mountain Retreat in upstate New York. In the pantheon of fashion and countercultural lore, Nena von Schlebrügge occupies a rare space: not just a face in glossy pages, but a bridge between worlds — aristocracy and avant-garde, surface and interior life, image and meaning. Her photographs remain icons of elegance; her life tells a deeper story about choosing presence over performance, and legacy over pose.