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Telegraph Natalia Vodianova: role model The supermodel Natalia Vodianova has brought joy to the lives of thousands of Russian children with her charity, which builds playgrounds in some of the bleakest parts of the country, including her old hometown. The night before I met Natalia Vodianova, a snowstorm descended on south-east England. The Russian supermodel ('SuperNova’, as Mario Testino calls her) was on her way back to her house in Sussex from a party in London when her car got stuck in the snow. Rolls- Royces may be the height of luxury, but it seems they are not suited to icy country roads. Luckily, her driver’s house was not far. 'We couldn’t go forward or backward or anywhere. I walked to his house in my Christian Louboutin heels.’ You must be used to extreme weather conditions, I suggest. She fixes me with her pale aquamarine eyes and shakes her head. 'It was a long time ago,’ she says. Vodianova was born 27 years ago in the industrial motor-building city of Nizhny Novgorod, formerly known as Gorky, the fourth largest in Russia. Between November and March, there is almost permanent snow cover. But, as she says, it is more than 10 years since she left the city to work as a model in Paris. She looks like a teenager and it is hard to believe that she is old enough for anything to have been a long time ago. But it has been quite a journey from a childhood of poverty to the idyllic converted water mill in the rolling countryside she shares with her husband, Justin Portman, the land-owning half-brother of the 10th Viscount Portman, and their three children. Since then, Vodianova has raised enough money to fund 39 play parks and smaller playgrounds in 30 Russian cities. They cost between €15,000 and €300,000 to build, depending on their size. She finally opened one in Beslan on October 31 last year. The playground – with its brightly coloured pirate ship climbing frame, designed to trigger the children’s imaginations – is in the grounds of the newly built school. 'I was told, “Don’t go, it’s so close to Chechnya and it’s dangerous,” but I went, and of course it was so emotional.’ She travelled without security, quietly on a commercial plane. She was taken to the mass graveyard where the victims are buried, and then on to the official opening of the play park, followed by a children’s concert at the old school. 'I’m going to go there every year. The concert, it was just the most beautiful thing. I was really on a rollercoaster of emotions.’ Now that she has achieved her original goal, she says she wants to build 500 play parks across Russia, many in the remotest, most forgotten towns, such as Megion in western Siberia, where the sun shines only 60 days a year, and Leninsk Kuznetsky in southern Siberia, where the coal soot and pollution turns the snow a dirty grey. Once the foundation identifies a place that would benefit from a play park or playground, including grounds of orphanages, hospitals and schools, the equipment is supplied at a discount by Russia’s leading producer of playground equipment, Ksil – a deal Vodianova has negotiated. It partners with local government to ensure the playground is properly maintained, with a 24-hour security guard and a fence to keep out the drugs and criminal elements that have blighted so many existing playgrounds. It was to Siberia that Vodianova took the editor in chief of Harper’s Bazaar, Lucy Yeomans, last summer, to accompany her to the opening of two playgrounds. They had discussed the idea of doing a fundraising event together in London along the lines of the Love Ball extravaganza that Vodianova organised at the Tsarit­sino Palace Estate in Moscow on Valen­tine’s Day last year. That raised $6 million, and included a 220-ton ice palace specially constructed for the event, the auction of a Damien Hirst work that fetched $1.2 million, and a performance by the Bolshoi Ballet. 'She was very funny and said, “You can’t do it unless you come to Russia, so we are going to Siberia,” ’ Yeomans told me. 'I’d never even been to Moscow or St Petersburg, but one day we were in Paris, sitting three seats along from each other at the Valentino show, and 48 hours later I was in a rusty old Lada-style bus on a six-hour journey from where we’d landed to this town in Siberia.’ They spent four days there, opening two playgrounds. 'We would go and check out the playground in the morning before anyone had arrived. It would be deserted and this very bleak landscape with big high-rises and a very decrepit tower block and you would come back to this playground about four hours later and there would be thousands of children, clamouring for her attention. She is a huge heroine to them.’ Harper’s Bazaar will be co-hosting the first Love Ball London at the Roundhouse in Camden on the last night of London Fashion Week in February. Yeomans suggested that the London event should also channel some money into building playgrounds in Britain – they are planned for Glasgow, Liverpool and London. The ball is being co-curated by Dinos Chapman, who is working on the overall look, which will feature a Russian-style fairground. 'It will be a very chic fairground – fun without the tacky bits, the hot dogs,’ Vodianova told me. 'Dinos is brilliant, he is full of ideas. Some of them are mad and you have to keep him at bay, like making a carpet out of live kittens.’ She laughs and just to add to the sparkle, she puts on a pair of diamond earrings, courtesy of De Beers, which is the main sponsor for the ball. She is designing a piece of jewellery involving a 3.5ct diamond and a 2.5ct pink diamond to be auctioned on the night, along with work by artists including Jake and Dinos Chapman, Tracey Emin, Francesco Vezzoli and Pavel Pepperstein. The big prize this time will be a work by Jeff Koons, the nature of which is unknown. Vodianova went to meet him personally to ask him to donate a work. 'Compared to other artists’ work, Jeff’s is extremely rare,’ Victoria Gelfand of the Gagosian Gallery, who has been helping Vodianova with her art contacts, says. 'It is very exciting, a very good opportunity for people who collect art to get something inaccessible, because there is very little of it on the market.’ For any collectors who are not able to attend the event, there will be telephone bidding, courtesy of Christie’s. (In 2008 Koons’s Balloon Flower sold for a record £12.9 million.) Diane von Furstenberg has accompanied Vodianova on her fundraising journey since she helped her out in New York. As well as the London event, she is helping with another Love Ball planned for Moscow in April, for which Vodianova has commissioned one-off creations by 40 of the world’s best-known fashion designers, including Valentino, Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel and Dolce & Gabbana – which should keep the interest of the world’s rich and glamorous. Within an hour of my request for an interview about Vodianova, von Furstenberg is on the phone from LA. 'The more you know Natalia, the more you are impressed with her. She is a remarkable woman and I don’t say that easily. She is probably one of the very strongest women I have ever met. She is extra-ordinary, she really is, her beauty is nothing compared to her character.’ Von Furstenberg says it is a cliche to describe somebody as having an old soul, but in Vodianova’s case, it fits perfectly. 'She is an old soul and as a child growing up in Russia with her family and everything, she was the provider, even as a child. She was the provider of strength in her family and then money later on. Natalia is a provider. She is a person who takes charge for herself but also for others, for family.’ Vodianova says she did not have an unhappy childhood, but it was a hard one. 'The way Lucas is growing up is so healthy compared to the way I grew up,’ she says. Nizhny Novgorod was 'very polluted, very grey and very miserable. The whole area is people who work in the car factory.’ Her father walked out after the birth of her sister, Oksana, who has cerebral palsy. 'I raised my sister. I was six when she was born. My mother had to make a living for herself and it was very hard, so I was looking after my sister, cooking and cleaning, and she had four jobs.’ After school she would help out on her mother’s fruit stall. Vodianova’s mother, Larissa, still lives in Nizhny Novgorod. It is difficult for her to leave because of Oksana, but Vodianova has organised for a carer for her, and her mother and grandparents now lead a very comfortable life there. Vodianova left home to live in her own apartment with her best friend at the age of 15. Perhaps inevitably, she was spotted by a French scouting agent, was told to learn English (which, of course, she did in two months and now speaks fluently) and, with a little encouragement from her 22-year-old model boyfriend, moved to Paris. She arrived on New Year’s Eve in 1999 and soon became the most famous of the new wave of eastern European and Russian 'waif’ models. Vodianova and Portman met at a dinner party on the top of the Pompidou Centre nine months later, and she was pregnant with her first baby at 19, the same age her mother was when she had her. 'I was very much ready,’ she says. But the fashion world was at her feet, and within two weeks of giving birth to Lucas, she was back on the catwalk, everyone marvelling at her slimline figure. The family works as a team and has often been photographed together in fashion shoots, Portman pushing a buggy in the background of one picture and often in the foreground of others, taking a starring role with his wife. Thanks to the support of her husband, she has managed to maintain a balance between a family life and a stratospheric career. By 22 Vodianova had landed two of the most lucrative contracts in the fashion business, with Calvin Klein and L’Oréal, between them worth millions. As well as being an old soul, she is a restless one. For the moment at least, she seems to have found a channel for her energy and her urge to survive and provide. 'Why not use this strength that I have from my childhood, this strength to survive and carry on in very difficult situations? And to see a light where it seems like there isn’t any, and being persistent and being very conscious of who you are… and as long as you have a reason to live, which I think you always do, then it’s just good.’ * The Love Ball London is on February 23. Tickets are priced at £1,500 each, with a table for 10 guests for £15,000 (nakedheart.org)

Making Of shooting Etam Lingerie 2010 - Natalia Vodianova http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KooZ2Kc_klM...=youtu.be&a

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Natalia with Victor

here from photas

two videos with Natalia

Top Russian Natalia Vodianova is separated from Justin Portman The marriage of ten years of Natalia Vodianova and Justin Portman over. This is the subject that rolls in Punta del Este end of this year, where the top is for the Russian New Year's celebrations. Natalia and Justin are the parents of three children: Luke, 8 years, Neva, 3, and Victor, 2. At 27, she is one of the highest paid models in the world and this month was on the tops list of 30 most important years of 2000 devised by the French Vogue. Last year, the whole family came to Brazil to give the Rio Summer. While Natalia and Justin followed the parades, the children were playing on the beach in Ipanema.

here is the video from youtube

from fenouka TFS

from www.kkhaev.ru