Karolina Kurkova, Angela Lindvall, and Coco Rocha plot the
future of their relevance.
Karolina
Kurkova |
| (Photo:
Ben Hassett; Styling by Ludivine Poiblanc; Hair by Akki; Makeup by Alice Lane
for Jed Root Inc.; Manicure by Tracylee for Tim Howard Management. Kurkova
wearing Uniqlo turtleneck, available at Uniqlo, 666 Fifth Ave. |
High above New York on the 21st-floor balcony of the Cooper
Square Hotel, German television is filming Karolina Kurkova teaching ten
aspiring models how to walk a runway. “It literally looks like we’re walking on
skyscrapers!” the Czech native, 27, says in enthusiastic English that later
will be partially dubbed over in German. The girls, plucked from a
Deutschland-wide search, at least pretend to understand.
 |
| Angela Linvall |
Battling stiff winds and language barriers, Kurkova
demonstrates three runway walks: high fashion, couture, and “show,” which
basically means pretending to wear giant Victoria’s Secret wings—a technique in
which Kurkova is quite expert. Then, to the delight of the Teutonic producers,
she gets her heel stuck between floor slats. Her fumbling to free herself is a
moment that, along with the many times she bursts into tears eliminating girls,
will be played on repeat in stridently dramatic European promos.
The show, called Das Perfekte Model (The Perfect Model), is
Kurkova’s first step toward building the kind of career that keeps a model in
the spotlight after shoots have dried up. The greatest post-modeling successes
in the past decade have been Heidi Klum and Tyra Banks. And not surprisingly,
Kurkova and her producers are billing Das Perfekte Model as a toned-down,
“documentary-style” counterpart to Klum’s second-best-known TV-hosting gig: the
megahit Germany’s Next Topmodel (itself derived from Banks’s Top Model
juggernaut).
What Becomes of a
Legend Most?
Looming in the background of every model’s career, even one
as thriving as Kurkova’s, is the inevitable fear: aging out. The thirst for
fresh faces in modeling is so intense that the Council of Fashion Designers of
America has issued a plea for designers and modeling agencies not to let girls
under 16 walk at New York Fashion Week. Not everybody complies.
So what’s a woman shunned from a girl’s world to do? Try
acting (Milla Jovovich, Amber Valetta, Charlize Theron, Cameron Diaz, Tyra
Banks), play music (Karen Elson, Irina Lazareanu, Banks again), become a
photographer (Helena Christensen, Banks again), start a beauty line (Miranda
Kerr), start a yoga line (Christy Turlington), start a clothing line (Kate
Moss, Erin Wasson), start a jewelry line (too many to count), start a furniture
line (Cindy Crawford), get a bachelor’s in comparative religion and Eastern
philosophies (Turlington again), run a charity (where to begin), run for
Estonian Parliament (Carmen Kass), marry rich (Stephanie Seymour, Christie
Brinkley), or become the First Lady of France (Carla Bruni).
 |
| Coco Rocha |
In dance, another industry ruthless in spitting out its genetically
gifted workers, there’s actually a foundation for “career transition” funded by
the Newhouse family. Modeling has no such safety net. “You’d be stupid not to
think you have a shelf life,” says Iman, 56, who now runs a $25 million Cosmetics
Company. “I knew I had to become a brand. And that brand was me.”
But the trick for Kurkova and two other models who are
thinking hard about their futures—Coco Rocha and Angela Lindvall—is how to
build a populist brand without screwing up their still-active careers as
high-fashion models.
Put another way: Can
a QVC line ever coexist with the cover of V?
The youngest of the three is Rocha, age 23, who’s big enough
she got a shout-out in a Kanye West song; Tyra Banks has called her “the queen
of posing.” Rocha thought “modeling was just going to be a summer thing and then
I’d go home,” she says. “Then I went to Asia. Then I worked with Steven
[Meisel].” Now she even has friends like Karlie Kloss, 19, arguably the most
famous face of her generation, joking that girls in Rocha’s class (“the
old-lady crew,” as Rocha calls them) have stuck around too long. Yet Rocha is
convinced she’s found modeling’s holy grail for longevity: social media. “Once
I started making noise, I thought, I’m not going anywhere.”
Making noise certainly worked for Heidi Klum, 38, who
started her career in 1992—too late to be a supermodel and too curvy to be a
waif. Clothes “would get stuck on my boobs,” Klum says. She wound up doing
catalogues until she “nagged and nagged and nagged” Victoria’s Secret. She got
a publicist, who helped her get Sports Illustrated, which led to Leno, which
proved she could do TV, which led to Project Runway and her becoming far more
influential in fashion than she ever was as a model.
It also worked for Cindy Crawford, 46. Against her agents’
advice, she took an unpaid job as the first host of MTV’s House of Style, which
gave her a new, large, male fan base that led to a huge campaign with Pepsi. “I
definitely made a choice to go more all-America,” she says. “I felt that was my
brand.”
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