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Bar Refaeli does not spend a lot of time planning her career.

This may explain why instead of strutting across a red carpet during the film festival, she’s holed up in the Eaton Centre, inside a makeshift interview suite at Sears. It’s the first time Refaeli, the Israeli-born beauty and ex-girlfriend of Leonardo DiCaprio, has visited Toronto. It also may be the first time a supermodel has ventured into the innards of Sears without taking a wrong turn.

Refaeli is the new face of the company’s Nevada collection, a line of denim and separates that retails for less than most of her leggy peers spend on champagne shooters. And while she would no doubt look dazzling in a grubby potato sack, there is something incongruous about an alliance between a woman with a Victoria’s Secret and Sports Illustrated Swimsuit pedigree and a department store best known for catalogues and Craftsman power tools.

It’s like seeing a pair of fuzzy dice dangling from the rearview mirror of a Ferrari.

After baffling sales associates by asking for directions to the “Green Room,” where I’ve been told the interview will take place, I snake my way past menswear, the Blue Jays shop and watch repair kiosk, up an escalator, past a battery of elevators where publicists and security guards are waiting.

Inside the Green Room, accompanied by a manager, Refaeli is wedged into the corner of a couch, wearing an ensemble you might otherwise find inside a TGI Fridays. After an exhaustive Google Images search the night before — “It’s research,” I tell my wife, when she asks pointed questions about the bikini and lingerie shots on my laptop — Refaeli doesn’t quite look as one might expect.

Don’t misunderstand. She’s gorgeous. But, somehow, hidden away on the second floor of Sears, decked out in a black jacket and eggplant trousers, it’s almost as if the sensible clothing and fluorescent lighting has all but destroyed her supermodel superpowers.

It’s hard to imagine, say, Kate Upton endorsing a line for Sears Canada at this moment in time. But Refaeli is at a different stage in her career. She started doing commercials at 8 months of age, jumped into fashion at 15 and is now 28 years old.

In the real world, that’s super-young. For a supermodel, it’s about 62.

“I’ve enjoyed it all,” she says. “But I never thought I’d be here. I never had big plans. I never thought I’d be a supermodel or famous. I never had a vision. I just enjoyed the everyday work of it.”

As the first Israeli model to make the cover of Sports Illustrated, did this create a mix of personal and national pride?

“That is something that I’d rather not look at because, you know, with all the good things or pride that come with being the first Israeli of certain things, there is also the bad things,” says Refaeli, who has been criticized for everything from the men she has dated to her “dodging” of Israel’s mandatory military service.

“You carry a lot on your shoulders. When you do something wrong — in other people’s opinion, you know — you’re to blame. I’m not the presenter of Israel. I am Bar Refaeli and I’m from Israel and I love my country.”

Or put another way: “If I wanted to do stuff for the peace of Israel, I would be in politics. I don’t think I can. I don’t think I have the power. So my career is my own.”

The career has spread into film and a TV role as host of the upcoming X-Factor Israel.

“Two years ago, if you said, ‘Will you do the X-Factor Israel?’ I would probably say, ‘No,’ ” she says. “I was all about travelling. I never spent more than four days in Israel at a time. But now I’m looking for reasons to be there. I’m looking for different experiences that I can tell my kids when they’ll be older.”

But first they have to be born. Since Refaeli does not yet have children, I ask if the unplanned plan is to get married and start a family?

“I don’t know if I want to get married,” she says. “It’s not about that. But I’d like to have a family.”

About a half-hour after our interview, Refaeli appears on the main floor of Sears, standing on a stage before a Nevada fashion show that crackles with the energy of a bingo tournament. Clutching a microphone, she praises the line and then rushes to a seat in the front row, clapping awkwardly as unknown models prance across the stage in various Nevada “looks.”

A large crowd of media and onlookers has assembled around the stage. Some have taken a wrong turn. Others are clearly there to see Refaeli model the clothes on sale about four feet away. When that does not happen — she was never supposed to be in the show, a publicist tells me afterward — there is a palpable sense of disappointment. It’s like the crowd went to a hockey game and then watched Sidney Crosby drop the puck.

When the music, including The Strokes’ “Reptilia” ends, Refaeli and her manager make a beeline for a street-level exit hidden behind the stage backdrop. She escapes and vanishes so quickly, it’s possible her next gig will be with the Houdini Museum.

Seconds later, the crowd disperses and Sears returns to normal.

http://www.thestar.com/life/fashion_style/2013/09/13/supermodel_bar_refaeli_appears_at_torontos_eaton_centre_to_publicize_new_sears_clothing_line.html