I was watching one of the VS videos with Erin in it, and I think she's one of my favourite models these days! Almost passing Candice S

Hello fellow Erin-fans!

I was watching one of the VS videos with Erin in it, and I think she's one of my favourite models these days! Almost passing Candice S

Hello fellow Erin-fans!

Why hello

Introducing Perfect Body Luminous Lotion

Giles London SS 2008

Vote for Erin in the I am the Biggest fan revival 2012 competition

here - It´s the third round!

emailer from victoriassecret.com

Russell James‏@NomadRJ

It just gets really hard when I have to show @erinheatherton every single pose for @victoriassecret. #victor

VS

she is so gorgeous

VS

so lovely!

Very long article, so I will be posting in pieces.

PART 1

Erin Heatherton goes beyond sexy

The next career step for Victoria's Secret model, Skokie native might be off the runway

By the time this grueling day of standing around and looking fabulous ends, Erin Heatherton will have said the phrase "Very Sexy" upward of 20 times, narrowly dodged a kiss on the lips from an overexuberant local morning show host and been bumped from a TV news appearance by live footage of a disgraced ex-governor driving to the airport on his way to jail.

Her day's menu will include an egg-white omelet for breakfast and some fruit and hummus for lunch; three sleek dresses and maybe five pairs of super-high heels; several cigarettes smoked out the window of the SUV ferrying her and half of her eight-person entourage between appearances; and the Leonardo DiCaprio question, asked both obliquely and by a TV outlet flashing a tabloid photograph of her and the actor holding hands.

She has already made the transition from Erin Heather Bubley of Skokie to Erin Heatherton of New York City and, increasingly, of the gossip columns; from Niles North Vikings basketball player and science nerd to full-fledged, wing-wearingVictoria's Secretsupermodel.

Then, she was planning to go to a good school somewhere warm, maybe become a scientist. Now, in the long aftermath of a modeling scout's jumping out of a car to chase her down a street, her days are sometimes like this one, a minimarathon of Chicago media stops designed to help her principal employer sell more frilly underthings.

It's a transition both extraordinary and not in the least surprising to those who knew her when (and still do: her mom, dad, younger sister and two high school friends will be at her Michigan Avenue store appearance at day's end).

But "supermodel" is almost a relic of another decade. The movie stars have taken over the magazine covers and the big makeup campaigns that used to be the turf of supermodels. And the big question for Heatherton — by all accounts a driven, competitive and intelligent young woman — is this: What, if anything, comes after achieving a modest amount of fame by wearing underwear well and, rumor has it, dating a movie star?

It is funny to watch men around Heatherton. She is 23 years old, 5 feet 11 inches, blond, with olive-green eyes, full lips and absolutely adorable freckles — the anime vixen next door. Men tend to turn either dorky or, in one way or another, leering. This morning's stop yields the former effect.

Before her appearance on "Windy City Live," the WLS-Ch. 7 morning show, Heatherton is in an 11th-floor room getting her hair and makeup done by the specialists who've come with her from New York. Pop music too perky for 8:45 in the morning chants and jangles. She looks out the window toward the Chicago Theatre marquee.

The show's co-host, Ryan Chiaverini, comes down the hallway and calls out, "Hey, Erin, I know you can't see me, but it's Ryan." She doesn't turn, might not even have heard him. Chiaverini, still watching for a reaction, walks into a hallway chair, stumbles.

On air, he's no more graceful, apparently moving as if to kiss her on the lips during the on-set greeting. "I think I planned that," he says. "It was in my subconscious."

The first time he and co-host Val Warner ask about DiCaprio, a question that includes the word "hunkalicious," Heatherton deflects like a veteran politician, giving a camera-melting smile and saying, "I do have a dog named Eddie."

The second time, she goes into promotional mode, a response her mother will praise her for later on.

"Well," she says, "what I'm here to talk about today is the 'Very Sexy' tour" —Victoria's Secrethas Heatherton and two other models promoting the 2012 edition of its Very Sexy line in four cities — "and I'm going to be at the Michigan Avenue store between 5 and 7."

Later in the day, she explains why she doesn't answer such questions: "It's really not important what my personal life is. I'm here because of my hard work that I put in modeling, and I don't want anyone to look at anything else besides that."

Heatherton is in a tough spot. The association with the actor is making her more famous even thanVictoria's Secrethas — celebrity that can help in her career ambitions. But appearing to exploit that might only increase the level of snark and vitriol directed toward her in the Internet's dark corners and could damage the relationship itself, whatever it might be.

When the WLS producer, after the segment, thanks Heatherton and says, "I hope that wasn't too awkward," it's unclear whether she is talking about the kiss, the DiCaprio questions or both.

Tall and a little awkward is how Heatherton says she felt in high school.

"I never thought I was cute, ever," she says during a car ride between appearances. "I never had boyfriends or anything like that."

Ahem.

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-04...el-morning-show

PART 2

High-school friend Daniel Fansler, watching Heatherton chat and pose in front of a giant Very Sexy logo at theVictoria's Secretstore, will say, "The whole family is pretty: her mother, her sisters. Her brother is pretty. They're a pretty family."

But her friends didn't think of her first in those ways, he says: "She was a jock and a nerd, if you can use those words. Please don't use those words."

"I can tell you she certainly got a lot of strokes in high school for being beautiful," Jacki Naughton, a Niles North science teacher and mentor to Heatherton, remembers. "If she didn't know it, she wasn't paying attention very closely — but she wasn't a vain young woman. We used to kind of kiddingly say to her, 'Smart and beautiful? We pretty much hate you, right?'"

Someone else who noticed was a scout for Abercrombie & Fitch, the teen clothier. Heatherton, coincidentally, was working in its Woodfield Mall store at the time.

In 2006, the summer after her junior year, she went to Miami with a friend and the friend's mom to have a look at the University of Miami. It was the first plane ride for Erin Bubley, who grew up without a lot of extras, the second of four children of Mark, a police officer, and Laura, a high school special-needs teacher.

"It was beautiful," she recalls. "We walked around the campus, and we went down to South Beach, and this guy, he jumped out of a cab, and he started chasing me down the street, and he asked me what agency I worked for. … I had never been approached about modeling, and it was very, like, embarrassing, 'cause he didn't ask my friend to be a model too. It was just shocking and scary, but my friend's mom got his contact information."

Back home, Laura and Erin learned the man was legitimate, and mother and daughter flew to New York — airplane ride No. 2 — to meet with him, and with modeling agencies. "We were thinking she'd sign with a small agency, spend the summer in New York and put some money away for college," Laura says later from behind a spotlight, watching her daughter pose with fans at the store.

Instead, the biggest agencies were interested, and Erin signed with Marilyn because it had a reputation for taking care of its young models. "I moved into their model apartment," Erin says. The agency gave her the new name. And her mom "just left. That was it."

She remembers being "freaked out" in modeling when she realized "the adults I was around didn't want me to act in the way that the adults that I had grown up around had expected of me. They wanted me to party and be fun, party with them. And I just couldn't grasp that in the beginning. That's when I really felt like I was thrown out of the nest."

When Heatherton left school, she left behind the basketball she had worked so hard at, starting on the varsity team as a sophomore, and a top 10 academic ranking in her class, she says. She was slated to be president of a science research club in her senior year, Naughton says, and had talked about becoming an embryologist. Four credits shy of graduating, Heatherton would earn her high school diploma by correspondence, her mother says. And in New York, she threw herself into modeling with the work ethic her father had taught her.

"She would walk the streets everywhere, take the subway, in these 5-, 6-inch heels so she'd learn to walk in them," Naughton says. "She'd do exercises to strengthen her ankles. She has a plan."

On the Northwest Side, at WGN-Ch. 9 for the midday newscast, it's hurry up and wait. An early arrival — and ex-Gov. Rod Blagojevich's takeover of the telecast Heatherton was to be on, narrating aVictoria's Secret mini fashion show — means there is more than an hour to sit around and indulge in the banter that Heatherton says gets her and her group through days like this.

Among the topics: childhood pets, last night's Bulls game, Zac Efron's dropping a condom at a movie premiere.

Sitting in the central makeup chair, Heatherton is loose and funny, telling stories about her childhood, comparing a clothing steamer's insistent wheeze to Darth Vader. She jokes about the hobbies and interests she might tell fans about.

"Wouldn't it be funny if I started doing taxidermy?" she says.

And then there is what Ryan Brown, Heatherton's personal publicist, refers to as "almond butter-gate." At the New York stop of the "Very Sexy" tour, Heatherton said something that turned into this, in a celebrity magazine:

"Leonardo DiCaprio's supermodel girlfriend has one of the hottest bodies in the biz, but even Erin Heatherton needs to watch what she eats. 'I love apples and almond butter, but I think it's making me fat right now,' Heatherton, 23, told Us Weekly."

There was the predictable lack of sympathy from a less slender public, and a lesson for Heatherton about the increased scrutiny she is under and how irony and celebrity coverage are strangers.

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-04...-morning-show/2

Karl Lagerfeld Paris SS 2008 - Backstage

PART 3

She and Brown ponder whether she should use an upcoming live webcast on the Victoria's Secret website to further address the almond butter/fat question. But Heatherton's bigger worry is that she'll be on with fellow model Miranda Kerr, who, she is told, will be talking about her baby and her book and her husband, the actor Orlando Bloom.

"Well, I don't have any of those things," Heatherton says with a laugh. "It's going to overshadow me."

When the webcast does air in the following week, Heatherton ends up talking about charity work she has done and her passion for interior design, showing off the apartment she has decorated herself.

Branded home goods are part of one possible future for her, says Brown, who counted her as a friend before a client and who calls her, as her intimates do, "Bubs," from her original last name.

"Hopefully, the goal for Erin is to make her like a Kathy Ireland, someone to turn things into a brand," Brown says. Or, perhaps, another Northern Illinois native. "Cindy Crawford, I think, is a perfect example," he says. "She's a Chicago native. Women related to her. Men related to her."

Marie P. Anderson, who discovered Crawford, agrees.

"When you get that articulate, bubbly personality that comes with the beauty," says Anderson, director of the Galatea modeling agency in Chicago, "with Midwestern ethics and morals, man, that's a multimillion-dollar opportunity for an agent — and for the model, of course."

The original plan for the day was to squeeze any formal interview with Heatherton into the hour before the store appearance. But on the car ride back downtown from WGN, she is talkative, candid, sincere and vulnerable about the modeling life and where she might go from here.

She is taking aromatherapy classes and has studied French, she says, but wants to try improv comedy.

"I mean, secretly, that's always what I wanted to do, I guess, in the back of my mind. But I realize that it's so hard to do it. I just appreciate it so much, to the point that it's like, you know, where a little boy dreams of being a rock star but doesn't know how to play guitar. So I guess throwing myself in there and doing a class, even though it would be truly humiliating, would be a really great thing for me.

"I feel like my job now is very much like that. It's not my personality. I mean, I act what I'm doing, in a sense, when I'm on these TV shows and doing interviews and representing Victoria's Secret. It's definitely not what I saw myself doing growing up. I always did sports, and I didn't like attention or the spotlight. I was scouted for modeling and just kind of adapted to it."

Modeling, she learned, is about surfaces. "Nobody cares how hard you work. They'll book the girl that parties all night and shows up a mess. I like to work hard and see the results of my hard work."

It's why she says she's so thrilled to have landed with Victoria's Secret. It offers' stability and the sense that she is building something, rather than scurrying from runway job to print job, scrambling to stay in demand. Plus, she feels valued as a person.

"I sat down with my agent," she says, "and said, 'Listen, I don't want to do (regular modeling) anymore.' You know, 'I want to have a voice. Everyone always tells me to shut up.' I'd rather do something where I can A) eat more" — she laughs — "and B) talk. I can't maintain the body of a 16-year-old anymore. That's just a really boring life to me. You really just cannot do anything fun ever."

Ireland and her housewares line come up. "The dream is to be able to do something like that and not necessarily be such a face," Heatherton says. "I want to be behind something, where I get to do more work and not need to, you know, put my face forward."

At the Victoria's Secret store, fans waiting to see Heatherton say she's "bubbly," "loyal to Illinois" and "so real."

"She looks great in everything," says an aspiring model, in town from Kansas to do test shots. This rings true. Heatherton has done everything from arty nudes to the washed-out, haunted look favored by some designers, but she's portrayed these days more with a healthy glow.

At the store, Heatherton is surrounded by big pictures of herself in sultry, pouty poses. She is surrounded, too, by family and the pair of old high school friends. "It's crazy," Fansler says, pointing at a display case. "She's literally on that package."

When it's all over, Heatherton glides back to the private changing room. It's been an exhausting day, but Heatherton calls the experience "awesome."

She slips out of a blue cocktail dress and into jeans. "Is Erin's T-shirt out there?" comes a voice from behind a door. It's passed in to her. And Erin Heatherton, formerly of Skokie, heads through the store's back passages to a waiting car, on the way to the airport and a flight back to New York.

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-04...-morning-show/3

So when her VS contract expires?

She has a vs event next week

Is Toni Garrn the Next Victoria's Secret Angel?

Next week Lindsay Ellingson and Erin Heatherton will step out at the Victoria’s Secret Soho store in NYC to promote the brand’s “Love Is Heavenly” collection; but they won’t be the only blonde beauties discussing the line and posing for photographs. Newbie Toni Garrn, who only just walked her first Victoria’s Secret runway show this past year, will be joining the Angels for the launch.

Although Toni wore a pair of wings on the glittery runway back in November, we’re wondering if this press event means she’s next in line to sign a contract and join the likes of Miranda Kerr and Alessandra Ambrosio as an official Victoria’s Secret Angel. She’s certainly got the look!

Do you think Toni Garrn should be the next Victoria’s Secret Angel?

modelinia.com

I don't want Erin's contract to expire anytime soon