Natalia Vodianova

Natalia Vodianova’s grim Soviet childhood is fashion-world legend by now—if hard to square with the supermodel’s gilded present. Divorced from English aristocrat Justin Portman and living with LVMH scion Antoine Arnault in an elegant Paris apartment, the 32-year-old mother of four might have tried to forget her hardscrabble beginnings in Nizhny Novgorod. Instead, as Ingrid Sischy discovers, Vodianova’s past is a source of strength, passion, and purpose.

 

‘Natalia does not tell you her story the way an American would,” says Bruce Weber, the photographer. “You don’t get any of that melodrama. With Natalia: it happened, it’s simple, and that’s the way it is. Just like the women in a Chekhov play, she has this extraordinary resilience. She doesn’t let her difficult past stop her.” In fact, the past drives her like a Ferrari on the last lap of the Formula 1 Grand Prix.

Natalia, 32, is the once-you’ve-seen-her-you-never-forget-her blue-eyed Russian model Natalia Vodianova, who electrified fashion runways in London, New York, Milan, and Paris a dozen years ago, when she starred in something like 40 shows that season. Mind you, this was two weeks after she had had her first baby, Lucas, with the Honorable Justin Portman, an English aristocrat, third son of the late Viscount Edward Henry Berkeley Portman. (His family owns a lot of prime real estate in central London.) Since then, like Twiggy, Veruschka, Iman, Linda, the Christies, Naomi, Kate, and Gisele before her, Natalia has reached such iconic status in the fashion world that she has entered the ranks of one-named idols.

Weber was one of the first photographers to shoot a large portfolio of pictures of Natalia, when her modeling career was just taking off. “We went to the Dominican Republic to do a shooting for W magazine, with Oscar and Annette de la Renta, Carolina and Reinaldo Herrera, Hillary and Bill Clinton, and Apolo Ohno, the gold-medalist speed skater from the Olympics,” Weber recalls. “We had asked Natalia to be in the story, too. Most girls starting out on one of their first sittings, in this company, would have been a little bit insecure, if not terrified. But Natalia fit right in. She acted like she was home with her family.” Weber remembers Annette de la Renta and Hillary Clinton comparing her to an angel.

Now she lives in an elegant Haussmann building in the center of Paris, in an apartment she rents with her partner of the last three years. Antoine Arnault. Arnault, the C.E.O. of Berluti, and his equally capable sister, Delphine, are the young scions of the family that owns the LVMH empire. (Vodianova and Portman, who together had three children, Lucas, 12, Neva, 8, and Viktor, 6, ended their marriage in 2010.) On weekends she, Arnault, and the family can often be found at their country place, about 40 minutes outside of Paris. I called her on the phone there, only to witness a bit of malarkey—Arnault pretending to be the butler and answering the phone in French so fast I almost called Berlitz. After we had a laugh about that, Natalia apologized for the “weird electric sound.” No, it wasn’t Antoine whipping up a kale-and-spinach smoothie. “It’s my breast pump,” Natalia explained. She was pumping for Maxim, her and Antoine’s first child, who was born this past May. While we were chatting, she would coo to him in Russian baby talk that her own mother might have once whispered to her. Otherwise his earliest memories will be as different as can be from his mother’s—that’s for sure!

Disorder and Early Sorrow

Natalia’s early, hardscrabble life is fashion-world legend by now. She grew up in Nizhny Novgorod, in southwest Russia, in the Soviet Union before its collapse. Her father joined the Russian Army, disappearing without a trace, only to reappear after her mother, Larisa, took up with another man; this brought home still more misery, and for a while Natalia and her mother were dispatched by Larisa’s parents to Ukraine. When Natalia’s grandfather checked in on the situation, he was absolutely horrified by what he saw: his granddaughter alone, in the dirt, eating with the geese. Back in Nizhny Novgorod, her mother eventually re-married—but husband number two wasn’t around for long, either, leaving right after the birth of Natalia’s half-sister Oksana, who was diagnosed with cerebral palsy and then with severe autism as well.

Apart from Natalia, no one supported her mother’s refusal to institutionalize Oksana. “There was absolutely zero support from the government, family, or society,” recalls Natalia. “The doctors said Oksana was a vegetable and would be dead before she was 10.” (Oksana is now 26 and lives with her mother in Nizhny Novgorod.) Larisa’s parents—with whom they were living at the time—said they were too old for this additional burden of Oksana, so if this was to be, Larisa and her kids had to move. “Everyone said what my mother was doing was crazy,” remembers Natalia. But Natalia loved the new baby and was proud of her mother. “I knew she was doing it for us, and I wanted to help her so much,” she says.

Pitch in the seven-year-old Natalia did. She would be so exhausted by the time she got to school that she could barely focus, or she’d miss school entirely because she was needed at home. Her mother washed the floors at Natalia’s school and worked nights in the car factory where both her grandparents had been employed all their lives. Natalia’s teachers knew of the harsh realities of her home life, and they respected how the young girl tried her best anyway. “I spent my life trying to make my mother feel better,” she says. “She was miserable and tired and alone, and I wanted to look after her as much as I could.” When her mother got into the business of selling fruit on the street, Natalia hit the streets with her. It was a risky, illegal venture, rife with bad characters and financial disasters when the fruit went rotten.

Natalia describes herself back then as a sad sack. “I had dark circles under my eyes, I didn’t smile very much, and I knew the problems of adults.” It was only when she spent time with her grandparents—who had suffered even worse privations during World War II—that she could still be a kid. They were clearly determined to show Natalia a world with more possibilities. “My grandmother always told me, You have to study, otherwise you will end up like your mother,” Natalia says. “She called me her little tail. She’d say, ‘Oh, this is my little tail. She follows me everywhere.’ The moments when I felt special were when I was with her. She made sure I ate with a knife and fork and put a napkin on my lap. She sewed clothes for me and kept them in her home so every time I went to her house I would be dressed nicely. If my mother was someone I loved and adored, my grandmother was like a god to me. She was my idol.”

At 15 Natalia came out of her cocoon. “I remember noticing men were looking at me—really looking at me,” she says. “People turned their heads. I had become visible. I remember having this feeling of Wow! It was thrilling. I had never kissed a boy. I was not what teenage boys were attracted to. One of my friends was a larger girl with a big bosom. She was very popular with boys.”

Natalia had a recurring fantasy in which she’d picture herself as another girl in school, whose home she had visited and been impressed by. She’d daydream that she was living the other girl’s happier life and imagine herself in the other girl’s bedroom, wearing her clothes … Even before she knew it, Natalia the model was born.

Still, the hardships kept coming. Her mother had a new boyfriend in the house, whose behavior when he was drunk was “atrocious,” Natalia recalls. So, right before she turned 16, Natalia left home, moving into her own apartment, with a friend, the daughter of one of her mother’s competitors in the black-market fruit business. The two enterprising girls struck out with their own fruit venture. “I already had five years’ experience doing it with my mother,” explains Natalia. “I knew it by heart. I knew exactly where to buy it, who to buy it from, how to choose it, how to sell it, how to market it.” She also knew how to handle the Mob, which came with the territory.

ADVERTISEMENT

 

But it wasn’t all work and no play. “By then I had a cute boyfriend,” recalls Natalia. “My business was doing quite well. I loved my friends, and I loved going out.” Natalia’s boyfriend attended the local modeling school; he persuaded her to try it, too, and although he didn’t have much money, he put up the entrance fee for her, and she loved the experience. Soon she had a gig at a modeling show in town; the $50 she earned made an impression, as it was more than she could hope to make selling fruit for a month. When word got out that a modeling scout was coming to town, Natalia, encouraged by her beau, showed up. But it was a turnoff. “I hated it,” she declares. “There were about 100 girls lined up in this big room, and this guy would walk along the line looking at each and every girl. The girls were so nervous. I found it very humiliating. It’s not a nice feeling when someone looks at you that way—it reminded me of the fruit I was selling. The bananas that people would look at and say, ‘Oh, does this one have a spot on it or not?’ ”

Natalia separated herself from the pack by refusing to stand in the line. A photographer noticed her through his lens, however, and introduced her to the scout; she was chosen for the next round of scouting in Moscow. Natalia remembers, “I was excited, but I was also afraid no one would pick me if I went. So I pretended I didn’t care. It’s a very Russian way of protecting yourself. You turn up your nose and you hold your head high and you have this proud air. I was a very different girl back then. I was kind of tough and easily sparked into an argument. I was very defensive.” But she went to Moscow anyhow, only to be rejected by Viva, the agency she really wanted to join. However, she was accepted by another, Madison, which offered to take care of her visa so she could go to Paris. Natalia wasn’t so sure she wanted to go anywhere. At last she was enjoying life in Nizhny Novgorod. On the weekends, she and her gang would hang out at a local club and dance all night. But her grandmother pushed her to pursue a modeling career. She bought Natalia’s ticket to Paris more than once, saying, “Go! This is your chance. Take it!” Still her granddaughter would not get on the plane. Finally, aged 17, she took a leap of faith. “The plane ride to Paris was absolutely incredible,” she remembers. “It was Air France and my first taste of a different language and a different culture. Everyone was so smiley and polite—and the food! Lovely vegetables in a creamy sauce with pasta. You got a little starter, then the main course, and then a little Camembert, a little dessert, a chocolate, and a piece of bread and butter.”

The Girl from Nizhny Novgorod

It did not take long for Natalia to break through to the fashion world big time. The same scout who had spotted her back in Nizhny Novgorod took her under his wing and asked her to accompany him to Viva, the agency whose representative had passed on her in Moscow. Proud, she said, “Oh no, no, no. They’ll think I’m desperate.” The scout prevailed. He was taking another girl there anyway and told Natalia she could just sit quietly in a corner. Not likely. People kept popping their heads around the corner to get another look at the startling, unspoiled beauty. “I thought, My God, they must be wondering what I am doing here,” says Natalia with a laugh. Finally she was called into the office of Cyril Brulé, the president of Viva. Brulé recalls, “This guy had said to me, ‘Cyril, I brought you an incredible girl; your scout did not choose her, but could you see her? Because I think she made a mistake.’ ”

When Brulé looked for himself the deal was done. “Wow, I thought, she has star potential,” he remembers. He’d helped usher in his fair share of fashion stars, including Audrey Marnay, Raquel Zimmermann, and Trish Goff. Brulé apologized that Vodianova had not been picked in Moscow, and said that he hoped she would consider working with Viva one day. “Right then I said, ‘Can I please change right now? I love it here,’ ” remembers Natalia. “I went with my gut. You always hear horrid stories of models being exploited, cheated, and treated badly, but 13 years later that man, Cyril, is still my agent in Paris and is one of my best friends in the world.”

I asked Brulé what went through his mind when Natalia made such an instant decision to join his agency. “I thought, I guess miracles do exist. The interesting thing is that when I asked Natalia a few months later what had happened to make her give us the opportunity to work with her she said that in our office everything was organized and clean and seemed perfect. She told me that she grew up in a family where everything was a mess. Our agency’s order gave her confidence.”

I then asked Brulé what it was he saw in Natalia’s looks that made him so sure she would become a fashion star. He replied, “I kept looking at her. She looked just like a baby Romy Schneider.” In fact the beautiful Austrian-born French actress is a constant reference when people in the business talk about Vodianova. In addition, they often comment on her mutability, her capacity to go from an innocent-looking child/woman—which became a sought-after quality in the 1960s and stuck—to the most sophisticated woman imaginable.

But personality is also key in fashion. Those fittings and shoots involve long days and endless nights, and models who make themselves difficult don’t last long—at least when they’re on the lower rungs of the profession. (Once they are on top they have a much better shot at getting away with diva syndrome.) Brulé says that when Natalia arrived, “it was around the time that the Russian girls were starting to be a big thing. None of them made it like Natalia or became as famous as she did. Most of them had a horrible attitude. They were unfriendly, rude, uncomfortable with the job, and acted like real princesses.” Not her.

Brulé had the opportunity to prove his loyalty to Vodianova early on. About six months after she’d made it to Paris her mother’s situation reached a crisis. A cold front had hit Russia, spoiling her fruit. Larisa had lost everything, and in order to re-start her business she had borrowed from the wrong people, at an enormous, impossible interest rate. “She owed these Mafia people $5,000—more than a year’s salary in the fruit business,” says Natalia. Brulé stepped up to the plate with a loan, so everyone could breathe easier.

Natalia’s career skyrocketed. By 18, she’d even met her Prince Charming: Justin Portman, then 31. These two blue-eyed beauties floated through a world of chic vacation spots, luxury hotels, and the picky pages of Vogue. If ever two people seemed made for each other, it was them. I’d run into them out and about, and I was always impressed by how polite they were, not just to each other but to everyone else. They were self-deprecating and had real (not unctuous) polish—and soon gorgeous children as well. (Natalia had become pregnant with Lucas five months after the couple met.) Instead of derailing her career, childbirth seemed only to render her more exciting, more sensual, more authentic to the arbiters of the industry. When she showed up on fashion runways, shortly after giving birth to Lucas, looking as if she were fresh off a holiday in Tulum, her place in fashion lore was sealed. Neva and Viktor, named after Natalia’s grandfather, soon followed. The joke became: Who is going to win the race? The fashion shows and campaigns she was hired for or the next baby?

ADVERTISEMENT

 

When, in 2010, Natalia and Justin separated, it seemed all the more shocking because the romance had been so highly visible and public. I asked her directly about it. “If you try really hard at something and it doesn’t work, then you have to let go because it means it is not the right thing,” she explained very softly. “You have to try really hard to make it work, but at the same time you have to know how to let go of something when it is time.” Now the kids live with Natalia and Arnault in Paris and spend half of their vacations with their father.

Natalia and Antoine Arnault had seen each other around the fashion circuit but didn’t get together until later, when they were both available. She laughs about it now. “He made himself noticed. Men are good at that.” Their first date was in front of the building where they now live. She explains, “We couldn’t go anywhere together, so we just met on a bench and sat and talked. We knew if we go somewhere, in Paris, then the whole world would know.” Natalia is clearly smitten. “When I moved [to be with Arnault] in Paris, the year before last I moved with my children, and my grannie, who stayed for eight months. That tells you a lot about Antoine as a future husband, or as a father or as a partner in life. He’s one of the most patient people. It’s not like we have a big house. We’re all in an apartment together.

“He gets up at eight A.M. and goes to work with a big smile on his face. He loves what he does, loves my children so much, is a great father and stepfather and boyfriend. I guess he is still a boyfriend. I want to call him my husband because it feels right, whether we have the papers or not. He feels like a husband already, although it doesn’t make a difference, does it? I feel blessed. He is everything I love and respect.”

Life Is a Dream

Maybe because of her past, Natalia can dream herself into almost any identity for the camera—sophisticate (Patrick Demarchelier), Alice in Wonderland (Annie Leibovitz), or even Madonna and Child (in this summer’s intimate Instagram image of Natalia breast-feeding Maxim, shot by Paolo Roversi, complete with a public declaration of love to Arnault: the caption read, “Happy birthday baby from Paolo, Maxim and I Love you @antoinearnault”). Her ability to look into the light and communicate yearning reminds me of those unforgettable images taken by the mid-19th-century Scottish photographer Lady Clementina Hawarden, who died of pneumonia at 42, and spent her all too brief adult life recording her eight daughters as they played dress-up with a trunk of clothes, or looked longingly from the windows in their fancy Victorian house, opening out to a world that still had no place for women.

On a more pragmatic level Natalia picked up the tricks of her trade faster than one could say “Nizhny Novgorod.” Here are some of her tips: “It’s really a matter of very little details. Little angles, little tilts of the head. Eyebrows up to make the eyes look bigger. Mouth a little open. Shoulders down for a long neck. It’s a lot like sculpting.” Her grasp of the process and reputation for hard work won her the Gucci campaign in 2002, under Tom Ford’s reign. Suddenly she was everywhere, on billboards, in magazine spreads galore. Other prestigious fashion houses clamored for exclusives with her.
Calvin Klein—whose reputation for putting his money where his mouth is and making models global stars, from Brooke Shields to Christy Turlington to Kate Moss, was unparalleled—won. I asked him, Why Natalia? “All I know is that I have to fall in love, and I did with Natalia,” Klein replied. “It’s an emotional thing. She reminded me of someone like Mrs. Onassis, but also she had that thing that Brooke Shields had—an ability to project innocence, also glamour and sensuality. Natalia really is quality and not pretentious. She talked about all kinds of things that had to do with giving back, being grateful for what she had already, and wanting to give to people in need. I mean, how often do we hear that? I just said, We have to get her. And, believe me, I can see the fraud in two minutes.”

For Natalia’s part, the offer from Calvin Klein was a no-brainer. “Very few brands made it to Russia, even once the open economy began,” she explains. “But Levi’s and Calvin did. I could not afford Calvin then, but I remember the logo very well. When I first arrived in New York, Justin and I lived downtown, and I remember Calvin’s incredible billboards. I knew what was cool. You recognize it. You understand it’s what you want to be.”

Her collaboration with Klein himself and with the house in general has lasted until now. There have been a few breaks, and she no longer does the print campaign, but she still does the Euphoria perfume ads. Her bond with Klein is still so strong that after he left the house he had founded and I wrote a story on him for this magazine in 2008, Natalia showed up to give me a private fashion show of some of the highlights of his 40-year career.

But—and this is what separates Vodianova from so many others—all the fame, money (she was listed in Forbes magazine as earning $8.6 million in 2011–12), and success did not make her feel complete. She bought her mother and Oksana a comfortable house in Nizhny Novgorod, saw to it that her grandparents had the best doctors, and placed a younger half-sister, Kristina, who was four years old when Natalia left, in a British boarding school.

Next came good works for others: when she was 22, Natalia started her Naked Heart Foundation, initially inspired by the September 1, 2004, Beslan terrorist attack, when Chechen rebels attacked a school in Beslan, North Ossetia, Russia. Three hundred thirty-four people were killed, including 186 children, and more than 700 people were wounded. Vodianova was in Moscow when the tragedy struck. On the flight back home, she remembers, she could not stop weeping and asking herself how she could help the survivors heal. That inspired her plan to set up play parks for children, including for those with disabilities, across Russia. “I thought about what I was missing from my own life when I was growing up, and it was that I had no play.” (The great psychologist of children Bruno Bettelheim would certainly approve. He wrote, “Play permits the child to resolve in symbolic form unsolved problems of the past and to cope directly or symbolically with present concerns. It is also his most significant tool for preparing himself for the future and its tasks.”) The Naked Heart Foundation has since built 120 full-scale play parks and small playgrounds across Russia and 1 in Ukraine. Perhaps the most emotional moment for Vodianova was when the play center in Beslan was opened.

These days the Naked Heart Foundation is run by dedicated, passionate professionals in the philanthropy circuit; not surprisingly, all the leaders grew up in Russia. Three years ago the foundation expanded to include family-support centers for the disabled, summer camps, seminars, and financing for lawyers who fight for new laws around issues of disability. The foundation’s big fund-raiser, the starry Love Ball held annually in such places as Monte Carlo and Valentino’s château just outside Paris, has become a coveted invitation on the international social circuit. Vodianova Skypes or speaks with her key staff, including Naked Heart Foundation president Asya Zalogina, several times a week, when she does not meet with them in person. And she is about to launch an extraordinarily ambitious, visionary digital platform for philanthropy, called Nakedhearts, in which she herself has invested significantly. The basic idea is to connect people, brands, and charities, something that has never been done on a global scale. Timon Afinsky, another Russian, who grew up in Siberia and who is Vodianova’s new-media adviser and co-founder of Nakedhearts, describes the project as “a global digital platform designed to connect users with the causes they care about, and integrate social good into our daily habits.” The project plans to work only with vetted charities, to be sure the money goes where it is intended. All those involved are blunt about the corruption that can happen in charitable organizations, and they are doing all they can not to be part of it.

ADVERTISEMENT

 

I asked Afinsky, who knows Vodianova well—she was the maid of honor at his wedding this summer—if there is something especially Russian about her. “Oh yes. Oh yes,” he replied. “She is a fighter. In Russia when she was raised she had to survive. The qualities she needed—the constant awareness, the readiness to fight, the sixth sense about danger—these things are in her blood. I have seen many Russians who have this fighting spirit but not her openness. She is like a combination of Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia. That would be Natalia.”

What drives her? “I think it is pain,” he said, “that it is deep inside her that something could be different in people’s childhoods.” I thought of a line in Chekhov’s play The Seagull: “I am in mourning for my life.”

Of all the big models of the past, Vodianova reminds me most of Veruschka, now 75, born Vera Gräfin von Lendhorff. She too was not going to stop at the point where others controlled her image. Her history—a father in the German Army Reserve, who had been executed by the Nazis for being part of a plot to kill Hitler—affected everything she did. Unlike Vodianova, Veruschka eventually wanted to “disappear.” She started taking pictures of herself in which she was completely camouflaged by her surroundings. Vodianova, of a different generation, wants to stand up and be seen.

Bruce Weber told me that once, when he had shot Vodianova, he had asked her to eat a strawberry for a picture and that she ate it as if she hadn’t put anything in her stomach for weeks. “Her survival mode is so deep inside her,” he said. “All the best of Russia is in there. How can one person control her? You couldn’t. It’s like trying to control Russia.” Pity the person who tries to hold Vodianova back. Her determination is epic, a bit like the small role she played in the 2010 movie Clash of the Titans. She was cast as the Medusa, and my favorite scene is a battle between her and the fierce warriors Liam Neeson and Sam Worthington, as Zeus and Perseus. There she is: a gorgeous head, hair in ringlets of serpents, propelled on a powerful long slithering tail, chopping up whatever enters her field of vision. When Zeus and Perseus look her in the eye, it is over for them. They turn to stone.