(Photo: Vitorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images)

Lauren Hutton is determined to be at this year’s supermodel-themed Costume Institute ball at the Met, whether she can walk or not. Two weeks ago, Hutton was surfing in Hawaii when a teenage surfer ran into her knee with his board and she began getting dragged out with the tide. “I couldn’t stand or swim. I was screaming, ‘Save me! Save me!’ And the kid that had hit me—thank God, after me screaming at him about five times—grabbed my hands.” But, back at the beach, “My leg went sideways,” she said. “The only thing that’s holding our foreleg bones attached to our thigh bones are these little ligaments around the knee. And once they go, the bones fall sideways inside the bag of skin. It was like one of those Halloween skeletons.” Now she’s back in L.A. and must decide, she said, “whether I want to go through a five-and-a-half-hour flight to New York with my leg up in the air in public because I can’t bend it more than 30 degrees.” Still, “Lord knows, I’m trying to make the Met ball,” she says. Her date is Michael Kors. “I certainly feel like I should be there. I’m the granny of the girls.”

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• Archive: “Intelligencer”
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• Table of Contents: Apr 27, 2009 issue of New York | Subscribe!