Fashion model for hire: 5-foot-9, 120 pounds, thick black hair, silky brown complexion . . . and only 82 years old!
Greenwich Village grandma Jacquie “Tajah” Murdock always dreamed of being a cover girl, and she finally is.
The French fashion label Lanvin picked the octogenarian for its fall ad campaign, which replaces professional faces with ordinary people. Now she gets stopped everywhere she goes.
“I’m still thinking in my 20s, not my 80s,” said Murdock, a Harlem-born beauty of Jamaican descent who now lives in Washington Square Village. “The other day I was pointing at those ‘old people.’ I forgot I’m one of them!”
Murdock posed for Lanvin in a tight green dress, dangling earrings, and holding a green fur.
Young admirers have always asked to snap her picture when she runs errands or traipses around the neighborhood in flowing dresses and Billie Holiday-style flowers.
She thanks photographer Ari Seth Cohen for ultimately making her the city’s oldest model. Cohen featured her in “Advanced Style,” a picture book of stylish seniors, after meeting her in Union Square three years ago.
“She was walking with a cane and had a beautiful blue Chanel-looking jacket,” he said. “To see a woman who was standing so confident and proud, I knew she was perfect.”
For Murdock, the journey to the catwalk has been a long time coming. She tried landing high-fashion gigs as a teenager but few designers hired women of color.
So she became a dancer, starting with a Count Basie show at the Apollo at age 17. She still performs and lectures at Harlem’s Jazz Museum and is writing a memoir.
“A lot of people look at me and think I must have had a glamorous life,” said Murdock, mother of two and grandmother of 10. “But you’ve got to work for it. Nothing just falls in your lap.”
She worked several jobs to make ends meet, including at the computer-science department at NYU — where she earned a master’s in media ecology in the 1970s.
Now her sights are set on traveling to Paris and meeting Naomi Campbell, who she believes could be a distant relative.
“Why ignore women of age?” she said. “I’m not going to sit down and watch TV or get Access-a-Ride. I’m not going to ever retire.”