It was a magazine cover - British Vogue's January 1990 edition - that ushered in the supermodels and everything that came with them: the demands, tantrums, bad time-keeping and quips that they wouldn't get of out bed for less than $10,000. It was after seeing that black and white picture of Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington and Cindy Crawford that George Michael booked them to appear in the video for his song Freedom, and Gianni Versace paraded down the catwalk with them. But there was another woman positioned right in the middle of those four - Tatjana Patitz. She was certainly no less beautiful than the others, with her catlike eyes and uncommonly perfect bone structure, and she went on to become the face of numerous coveted campaigns, including Chanel, Calvin Klein and Versace; she was shot by some of the best photographers in the business.

Over the last couple of years, the first four, although positively geriatric in model years, have had something of a revival. Evangelista has fronted a Prada advertising campaign, Turlington was booked for Escada, and, last year, Crawford staged her comeback with a shoot in French Vogue; Campbell has never really gone away. Last summer, Vanity Fair magazine devoted several pages to the supermodels of old. But Patitz was not among them.

For whatever reason, the return the other supers have been enjoying has not included her. Instead of being offered YSL or Prada, she has modelled for Uniqlo and is currently fronting a campaign for the slightly dowdy and relatively obscure brand Franco Callegari. She also models for Claire Fisher, a German cosmetics company (Patitz, who was born in Germany, has a higher profile there than here).

All of this is a roundabout way of saying, rather meanly, where did it go wrong for Patitz? Did her strong, feline look simply go out of style? Outside the fashion world, she never came to be known by one name only, the way Naomi and Cindy were (and still are). In fact, few people outside the fashion world would even recognise her full name. Indeed, Claudia Schiffer - who has lately done campaigns for Chanel and Dolce & Gabbanna, and has a L'Oréal contract - has seemed to replace Patitz in our collective memory of the lineup on that Vogue cover, a kind of a cuckoo in the original supermodel nest.

It would be easy to view Patitz's low profile as a bit of a failure, but, of course, there is more to life than flying all over the world to walk up and down a catwalk, or having your hair pulled by stylists and your face caked in makeup, before standing for hours while a photographer tells you what to do. Patitz has said before that she was never very interested in fashion. "There were glamorous moments, but it was exhausting," she says now. "The low points were having to travel so much and being exhausted. I always thought that [fashion and modelling] wasn't who I was; it was what I did. It didn't define me. Living out here and coming back to this place was like a sigh of relief in a sense."

She is speaking from her home in Malibu, the ranch where she lives with her five-year-old son Jonah, four horses, four dogs and two cats ("I needed nature around me"). She moved there in 1989 at a time when her career was approaching its height and most other high-profile models lived in Paris or New York, where most of the work was.

On the phone, Patitz seems down-to-earth, quiet and reserved. I quickly realise that I am not going to get the dish on dating Seal or (as rumoured) Johnny Depp, or catty comments about the other models. (When I ask if she thinks there was any jealousy between them, she says, "I never saw any. Maybe it was because we all looked so different.")

I ask, as tactfully as I can, if she wishes she were getting the kind of work that Campbell and Evangelista get - the kind of question that would make other models throw a huge tantrum. There is a silence before she speaks - is this where she shouts at me, then hangs up? "I hadn't thought about it," she insists in a quiet voice. "I'm happy for them."

But would she want a big campaign and a comeback? "I wouldn't say no," she says. "For the past five years I have been very active in my son's life. I didn't want to hand him over to a nanny. That's the choice I made. We all have different priorities and that was mine. I would hate to be on a plane every day. The jobs I still do are perfect, they fit in with my life." She is separated from Jonah's father, a marketing executive. "It can be challenging at times, especially with a very young child," she says of life as a single mother. "You don't have much time for yourself. It can be pretty stressful but it's wonderful."

The supermodel era ended in the mid-90s. The all-powerful names were replaced by grungy waifs on the catwalks, and actors and pop stars on the covers of magazines. You could argue that while the supermodels may have become monsters, at least they were better than the young models paraded today, grey and anonymous, their invisibility and powerlessness physically manifested in their extreme thinness. The supers were never like that.

"Everyone was a [size] eight or 10," says Patitz. "The girls were healthy. Sometimes you watched what you ate, but that was more for health reasons than to be really thin. I never starved myself." She says she worries about young models now developing eating disorders. "Some models are naturally very thin, but if they aren't naturally like that, then what these girls do to their health to fit in ... To be a size zero or a two when you're tall is incredible to me. It would be nice if models were allowed to be a more healthy weight - for the models, and for the young women who look up to them. We were athletic and healthy, and we looked like women."

If she were starting out again now, would she be a model? "It's hard to say. I honestly don't know. It would be much more difficult because there's a sea of girls. It's almost like a fast-food market - a girl does well for a few seasons, then she's forgotten. Whereas before, it would take you a few seasons to get going and it was more possible to have longevity."

When she grew tired of modelling, Patitz followed the well-trodden path to acting. She was in a Sean Connery film, Rising Sun, which sank, along with her aspirations. Now, her interest is in environmental and wildlife issues and she is producing a documentary on wild mustangs. "That's my passion," she says. While she admits she wouldn't turn down a lucrative advertising campaign, the idea of returning to the catwalk doesn't appeal. "No way. I want to do more documentaries and travel to places I haven't been. That is where I think I can be fulfilled".