CARMEN: I have been with the Ford Agency — in fact, I was with Eileen Ford recently celebrating her 85th birthday — since 1947. I have just recently done a Rolex campaign, which I am doing next year, too. I did a Taryn Rose shoe campaign, I just shot four pages of fashion for Paris Match, I am going to Florida to meet with Bruce Weber to do something for French Vogue. Two weeks ago I was in London working on a book for the London College of Fashion.

BILLY: When will you do your own book? “The Best of Carmen,” you should call it.

CARMEN: I told Paul Himmel, the son of my friend Lillian Bassman the photographer, over at Harry Abrams that he has first option on my book. Sixty-two years I’ve been modeling, but I am not ready to settle down and look back, I’m too busy. You see what I mean about still working?

BILLY: And always with Ford?

CARMEN: Always. Sometimes I am cast as the grandmother. Sometimes I play the — what’s the modern expression? — the cougar. The cougar!

BILLY: And does Carmen have a position on Cougar-dom? Would you date — do you date younger men?

CARMEN: I’m not after a younger man. I always prefer my contemporaries. An older woman and a younger man? That ain’t me. I am through training them. Really, it gets to be too much.

BILLY: Too much?

CARMEN: The training!

BILLY: What are you wearing these days, fashion-wise?

CARMEN: Because I am a model does not mean I am a current expert on the current styles other than I feel, as a woman, at my age, which is 77 - 78 on June 3 — I feel I am a spearhead for the decades coming up behind me for how to reinvent yourself in the image of an older person, because the images I had growing up of older people were either ridiculous or something I could not aspire to be like. It is a challenge not to make a fool of myself.

BILLY: The ageless question: What is age-appropriate dressing?

CARMEN: Yes, but it doesn’t mean not to have some fun, not to think outside the box and try to make the best of all the classic pieces I have collected over the years that fit my body at a price I could afford when I bought them.

BILLY: Did you spend money on clothes?

CARMEN: I never had the budget that society ladies have when they marry rich men and can shop and have lunch. I’ve always been working. What I am most grateful for is that Isaac Mizrahi designed for Target. I bought some pieces of his — safari jackets, seersucker things, classic stuff you wear day in and day out.

BILLY: Do you wear high heels during the day?

CARMEN: Sometimes, I do, because I can’t wear any heel, flat or high or in-between, for more than three hours at a time before it troubles my foot. So I am always changing my shoes.

BILLY: Do you have any beauty secrets? Any skin products you swear by?

CARMEN: Outside of the products of Dr. Norman Orentreich that I have been using since I was 37, funny you should ask. Recently, delivered to my door, was a present of all these skin products by the famous South American plastic surgeon Dr. Ivo Pitanguy, I didn’t even know he was still alive. All these people used to go to him in the jet set, people like Merle Oberon. You could always tell a Pitanguy facelift.

BILLY: How?