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There was a moment in the late eighties and nineties when a handful of women became famous enough to be known by one name.

Naomi. Cindy. Elle.

They weren't just models. They were cultural shorthand. They were on every magazine cover, every runway, every beauty campaign. They sold workout videos and shampoo and perfume. They appeared on talk shows. They starred in music videos. They became celebrities in their own right.

Rachel Hunter was one of them.

On this week's episode of No Filter, she tells Kate Langbroek what it was actually like to live inside that era — and why she eventually walked away from it.

Watch: How Rachel Hunter met Rod Stewart. Post continues below.

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90s Supermodel Rachel Hunter reveals how she met Rod Stewart

At the height of her career, Rachel was a Sports Illustrated cover star, a Revlon and CoverGirl face, a woman flown around the world to shoot campaigns on elaborate sets built just for her.

"They made this lagoon in one of the studios," she tells Kate, remembering an early commercial in Los Angeles. "I was just like, oh my God, they've literally made this lagoon."

There were flowers waiting in her room each day. Casablanca lilies perfumed the air. There were handwritten welcome cards and teams of stylists devoted entirely to lighting, hair and makeup. "It was just the epitome of the time."

It was the era when supermodels were as recognisable as rock stars. When they released workout tapes and went on press tours. When they were invited onto television not just to pose, but to speak.

"It wasn't just the pretty face," Rachel tells Kate. "We started having voices."

And then she married an actual rock star.

When she met Rod Stewart at 20, she was already famous. He was already a global music icon. Within three weeks, they were engaged. Three months later, they were married. Suddenly, they were one of the most photographed couples of the 90s, talked about as if they were characters in a glossy modern fairytale.

"You never laugh so much," she says of Rod. "He's very, very funny."

To the outside world it looked like she had everything. Fame. Beauty. Marriage. Children. Money. Adoration.

But, as she explains to Kate, that version of Rachel Hunter was never the whole story.

Rod Stewart and Rachel Hunter during 8th Annual Carousel of Hope Ball. Image: Getty.

Long before the runways and the flashbulbs, she was an introverted teenager in Auckland who preferred ballet studios and bushland to attention.

"I was very, very inward," she says. She followed her mother everywhere. She spent hours in the library. She poured her energy into dance and running. Nothing about that girl suggested she would become one of the most photographed women of her generation.

Even at the height of her fame, she insists she never quite saw herself the way the world did.

"I didn't see myself as beautiful," she tells Kate. "I was like, okay guys, I'll go along with this."

There was always a sense that she was participating in something extraordinary rather than being consumed by it.

Approaching her late twenties, though, something shifted. She describes it to Kate as a kind of internal check-in, the moment where you quietly ask yourself whether you are still on your own path.

"I kind of was like, where am I going? What am I doing?"

When she and Rod separated, their children were five and seven. Looking back now, she can see how much courage that required.

"When I look back at it, I'm like, God, you had a lot of guts to do that," she says.

She does not dramatise it. "I left. We were fine. I left. So I take the consequences of this." From there it became practical. "I created a home. I created work. I sometimes had to leave the kids to go and work. They had a beautiful relationship with their dad. You do what you got to do."

If the supermodel era was one version of Rachel Hunter, and the rock star's wife was another, what followed was something quieter but arguably braver.

The most pivotal moment in her life happened not on a set or in a nightclub but beside her mother's bed in New Zealand. Shortly before she died, Rachel asked her what she regretted.

"She said, I regret not fully being who I am."

As she tells Kate, it was a sentence that rearranged everything.

Her mother had been deeply spiritual and intuitive, but even she had felt the pressure to tone herself down. That confession became a directive.

After her mother's death, Rachel went to India to move through her grief. She signed up for yoga training and immediately wanted to leave. "I was like, I have to leave this place. This is weird," she says. It was uncomfortable in a way modelling had never been. It was not about lighting or angles. It was about sitting still long enough to meet herself.

Listen to Rachel on Mamamia's No Filter. Post continues below.

When media reports suggested she had "gone weird" in India, she felt the old instinct to shrink. Her teacher told her she had two choices. Leave and continue the pattern of self-editing, or stay and break it.

She stayed.

In the years since, she has led retreats, spoken publicly about meditation and breathwork, and leaned fully into the metaphysical world she once watched her mother navigate more cautiously.

She also tells Kate that she has not had a boyfriend in over a decade.

When Kate asks her directly whether she is in love now, Rachel does not rush to fill the space. There is no defensiveness, no sense that being single is a problem to solve. Instead there is openness. An understanding that love, like identity, does not have to follow a fixed script.

Throughout the conversation, she references what astrologers call a Saturn return, that late twenties reckoning that forces you to reassess your direction. Listening to her speak, it is clear that her life has been marked by several of those returns. The moment she stepped away from modelling's golden bubble. The moment she left her marriage. The moment she chose to stay in India rather than bolt.

Each era has stripped something away and brought her back to herself.

At the height of her fame, Rachel Hunter was defined by external markers. The covers. The campaigns. The marriage. The spectacle.

The gift her mother left her was permission to live less defined. To not be the supermodel forever. Or the rock star's wife. Or the spiritual woman in India. To not allow any one chapter to become the final version of who she is.

There was a time when Rachel Hunter helped define an era. Now, she is more interested in defining herself.

You can listen to the full conversation on No Filter. The episode, "Supermodel Rachel Hunter Was The Ultimate 90s Muse – Then She Walked Away," is available now wherever you get your podcasts.

Feature: Getty.