It’s a crisp, cobalt-skied afternoon at Spencer’s Restaurant in Palm Springs, and Vicki McDermott is midstory. She’s laughing about the time she accidentally whacked a city councilman in the head with a shovel during a photo-op: “It wasn’t my fault! They told me to throw the shovel over my shoulder!” The next moment, she’s sharing stories about Modernism Week parties and that time Spencer’s Restaurant hired her to do some redecorating — after hours, so they never missed a dinner service.
That’s the Vicki McDermott experience: one foot in Palm Springs’ sepia-toned past, the other firmly planted in the present, all while tapping her toe in a very stylish Chazlyn cowboy boot.
At 81, McDermott has taken her signature moxie national as the radiant face of Chazlyn’s Spring 2025 campaign. She’s the muse of the Los Angeles–based company for good reason. With a life journey that spans beauty pageants, horse ranches, architectural tours, and biplane wings, McDermott isn’t just a Palm Springs original. She is Palm Springs — midcentury, modern, and everything in between.
So when Chazlyn came calling, it wasn’t about slipping on a persona. This was McDermott, authentically herself, standing in the story she’s been living all along.
McDermott during her pageant years.
Photo courtesy karin mcdermott
The family had landed in Southern California in 1938, when her father’s asthma forced a relocation from frigid Minnesota. Like many who came to the desert in search of dry air, he stayed. They established roots in Banning — alongside 28 apricot trees — and rented trailers in Palm Springs at a time when there were more horses than Hollywood stars.
While her classmates spent their summers in La Jolla or Laguna, Vicki spent hers in Banning, barefoot and entrepreneurial, picking apricots and selling them from the curb.
McDermott didn’t win Miss Palm Springs on her first try. That title went to Betty Weatherford in 1960. “But I got practice,” McDermott says with a knowing look.
So when the pageant rolled around the following year, she entered again. “And I won.” Talent portion? Not exactly. “This is Palm Springs,” she laughs. “You just had to be adorable.”
As the city’s unofficial ambassador in 1961, she was everywhere — cutting ribbons, opening markets, making appearances in heels and a sash. “They had me christen the Alan Ladd Hardware Store with a ceremonial shovel,” she says. “I walked down the steps in a skirt suit, heels, shovel over my shoulder … and hit a city councilman in the head. It made the paper.”
Later that year, she reigned as a Sheherazade princess at the Riverside County Fair and Date Festival. She rode elephants. Wore blinged-out dusters. Took photos in the sun. And, in true midcentury pageantry, was weighed — publicly.
“They lined us up on a cattle scale,” she says. “Ten of us. We’d gained over 100 pounds collectively. And yes, that made the newspaper, too.”
Attending college in Riverside was less rah-rah campus life and more of a hustle-for-tuition reality, as McDermott balanced a full course load of engineering classes with modeling jobs for the Harris Company, which owned a chain of department stores.
“I’d rush from class to fittings. Heels, hats, the whole bit,” she says.
Rather than gossip on the quad during lunch breaks, McDermott spent most days holed up in the library with a sandwich and a stack of homework, flipping through the local paper like it might hand her a miracle. And then one day, it did, in the form of a want ad: “Wanted: would-be model or actress without vertigo.”
She applied (of course she did), and out of more than 100 hopefuls, McDermott got the gig. Next thing she knew, she was cinched to the wing of a roaring Stearman biplane, soaring above crowds in an airborne blend of daredevilry and glamour.
McDermott on the wings of a biplane.
Photo courtesy karin mcdermott
“I had to write my mom a letter [asking] for permission,” she says, grinning. “I wasn’t even 18!”
It was all whiplash from there: regional airshows, a splashy TV segment, a stunt at March Air Force Base — and then straight back to department store sundresses and hatboxes.
“I came down from 10,000 feet, drove my old car back into town, and went straight to model spring looks,” she says.
McDermott married young, had two kids with her husband, Colin, and planted their lives in sunbaked San Bernardino. One afternoon, she spotted a fixer-upper in her budget and bought the house. Then another. And another.
“I was bringing these places back to life,” she says.
Soon, their inner circle started whispering: Come back to Palm Springs. That’s where the buzz was in the late ’60s, after all. So the family packed up their Chevy pickup — no furniture, hardly any possessions, just a trunkload of ambition and a 6-foot hot pink teddy bear — and rolled into Indian Wells. “We must’ve looked like the Beverly Hillbillies,” she says, shaking her head.
There, McDermott Enterprises was born. Together they built their own home, then designed homes for others, etching themselves into the bones of the Coachella Valley’s architectural story.
In Greater Palm Springs, the grass is always greener — especially with Vicki McDermott on the mower.
PHOTO BY Dirk Mai, courtesy chazlyn
Chazlyn’s Santo Silver boots.
PHOTO BY Dirk Mai, courtesy chazlyn
“We were the kids building homes back then,” she says. “Now we look around and realize we’re not the kids anymore.”
It’s clear Vicki McDermott’s love for the desert runs deep — a mix of memory, architecture, and sheer attachment to place. She still keeps old issues of Palm Springs Life and The Desert Sun tucked away, still geeks out over building details, still mourns the landmarks lost to demolition.
“They tore down Pearl McManus’ mansion at midnight, before we had any preservation efforts. I’m still upset about that,” she says.
So how does a Miss Palm Springs turned midcentury design maven become the face of a modern cowboy boot brand? With McDermott, it’s not a pivot, it’s a perfect fit.
“It’s not posing. It’s just me,” she says. “Maybe that’s what aging is. Not posing anymore.”
McDermott says she never intended to blaze trails. She simply did what she wanted to do, whether that meant climbing onto the wing of a biplane or launching a business.
The trail just happened to follow her.
Chaz Pilarcik, founder of Chazlyn, understood it instantly. McDermott didn’t just fit the boots, she’d earned them. She’s walked every mile of the desert’s transformation, from sandy camel rides to cocktail hours on polished terrazzo. Her story is the brand — sun-worn, steel-spined, still in motion.
Or as McDermott’s daughter, Karin, puts it: “She’s always inspired me, because she doesn’t believe in limits. She only sees the horizon.”
