Daria Werbowy

[aiden90]

Wow!

She's probably the best Lancome girl to me

Without a doubt! Her eyes are incomparable, especially for those mascara ads.

[Vogue Girl]

Yes, Daria is a perfect face of Lancome.

[CrazyGEN]

True, but I wish they didn't airbrush her face so much for the ads. It's unnecessary

[OlgaMaria]

An interview with Daria in The Telegraph

Supermodel Daria Werbowy is the face you don't know you know

At 25, Lancome spokesperson Daria Werbowy is an elder stateswoman of the catwalk, with the world's top designers at her beck and call.

05 Jul 2009

Unless you work in fashion, it's unlikely you'll ever have heard of Daria Werbowy. You probably won't even be able to pronounce her surname (it's Ver-bo-ee, which is Ukrainian for willow tree). But while the Canadian 25-year-old may not be a household name, she's certainly a household face.

En route to Paris to meet her, I see that her translucent green eyes and ski-slope cheekbones grace the cover of British Vogue and feature in adverts from Roberto Cavalli to H&M. She's also been a spokesperson for Lancôme for four years – a title she shares with film stars such as Kate Winslet, Anne Hathaway and Juliette Binoche. She's translated this into a significant fortune – last year Forbes magazine declared her the ninth most highly paid model in the world, with annual earnings of $3.8 million (£2.3 million) – and serious clout.

'I can't analyse my appeal. If I did I'd be in a straitjacket,' says Werbowy. Sitting in a hotel basement, wearing a black silk shirt and harem pants, she is surrounded by tasteful photos of herself, all bare honeyed limbs (at 5ft 11in she has an extraordinary body that is both skinny and voluptuous) and luxuriantly layered brown hair. Like many models, in the flesh Werbowy has a slightly alien air about her as she towers above me, her almost too-perfect features unmade-up. 'I sometimes find myself staring at it because I don't really know who that girl is,' she says, gesturing at a picture of herself. 'I guess a lot of people don't realise, but I'm always playing a character when I'm working. When you're always having people's images projected on you, who "Daria" is as a person sort of disappears.'

She's no bimbo, that's for sure. Werbowy seems to enjoy the fashion game but knows that the only way to preserve her sanity is to keep a distance from it. 'I am very lucid in relation to the reality of this industry, the ephemeral nature of beauty and fame,' she says, 'and that gives me a certain distance and quite a bit of humour.'

Maybe that attitude is down to her very non-fashion upbringing. Werbowy was born in 1983 and grew up in Mississauga, Toronto. A sporty child, she still has a tomboyish air to her. You can imagine her, had she not been so genetically blessed, leading a grungy existence devoted to her passions of snowboarding and basketball. But her looks made her destiny unavoidable. 'Modelling was kind of like a shadow that followed me everywhere since I was eight,' she says matter-of-factly. 'I'd have people stop me in the street or the supermarket and say, "You should try it."'

At 14 she did – joining her local agency Susan J Model & Talent Management before moving to the über-agency Elite. In high school she modelled part-time, but by the time she graduated was 'really anxious to get out in the world. I thought modelling was just the best thing on the planet. The freedom and the travelling all just sounded so glamorous.'

Many parents would have worried for their teenage daughter, but not the Werbowys. 'I've never had to rebel against my parents; I never had that sort of teen-angst thing where you didn't get along with them. My dad's always been my buddy. We hang out. He encouraged me to get out there, but then he has always believed in exploring. He used to shove us kids in the car on Sundays and say, "We've never driven down this street so today we're going to," when we were, like, "Dad! We want to sleep!"'

Family support was vital – especially in not-so-promising beginnings. Werbowy's first bookings as an adult were for eight catwalk shows for New York fashion week in September 2001. 'Obviously they were all cancelled and nothing else happened.' She then lived in Paris, London and Greece, where 'there were loads of castings, but no work. Looking back, it was one of the greatest times of my life. There was no responsibility, I was doing road trips with my boyfriend of the time, I met a lot of great people, but at the time it was depressing.'

A fter eight months of rejection, Werbowy returned to Canada. 'I was crying, saying, "Dad, I don't want to do this anymore, it's not for me." He said, "You wanted it. Get back out there!" I said, "Noooo!"' She wanted to go to art school and decided to raise the cash by giving modelling a final shot. 'I returned to New York, met my agent and the next day I had an exclusive deal with Prada. From then on it was all a bit of a blur.'

What followed were years of 'non-stop travelling, waking up in places and not knowing where I was'. Some memories, however, stand out, such as the 2004 American Vogue shoot with Helmut Newton, his last before he died in a car crash. 'I was actually really sick so he kept me at a 10ft distance. He made me wear rubber nipples and had me lying on a bed of nails and eating grass with a fork. It was all really… grrr!' As with most successful modelling careers, the photographer Steven Meisel – who booked her for that first Prada campaign and her first two Italian Vogue covers – was key, too. He taught her 'all the old-school tricks; how to move, how to jump, how to pull back my ears to prepare my face for the camera [this gives an instant face-lift]. Working with him is a little like modelling school.'

Werbowy is modelling gold dust: she has staying power. In 2004 she signed the Lancôme contract. Estimated to be worth about $1 million a year, it's a handy pension that has meant – perhaps inevitably – a slow-down in Werbowy's modelling output. Once known for opening the most number of catwalk shows ever in a season (an honour reserved for the most high-profile models), she is now scaling back her schedule. 'I really enjoyed them in the beginning. It was really empowering to stride out there, but eventually you start walking and on the way you're, like, "What am I going to eat tonight?" But I'm lucky now; I can come in and do a couple instead of the whole three-countries-and-six-shows-a-day thing, when you just get exhausted.'

While she is the consummate professional, it's clear throughout our interview that Werbowy is talking to me only as a contractual obligation. When Kate Moss's name comes up, she says, 'I always tell Kate she's lucky because she doesn't have to do interviews.'

Such remarks aside, Werbowy answers questions with polite consideration – something for which supermodels are not renowned. Respected in the industry for her lack of attitude, she also has a steely sense of self that makes her stand out from the crowd.

Werbowy gives much credit to her Ukrainian-Polish parents, Daniel and Anna, an engineer and a teacher, who left their home-town of Krakow for Canada when Werbowy, the youngest of three children, was three. 'I think what they did was really inspiring to move to a new country in their thirties with no English at all,' she says sincerely. 'But my father's always been an adventurer. He had an invitation from relatives so he just took a leap of faith. It's given me an immense respect for them.'

The irony is that the bohemian individualism that makes Werbowy so unique is precisely the reason she won't model for ever. Unlike many high-fliers, who are too insecure to turn off their BlackBerries, she took three months off this summer to sail across the Atlantic and Mediterranean with her father, siblings and three friends.

'It was the best thing I've ever done,' she says, catlike eyes glowing. 'For the first time since all this started I really felt I was on vacation, completely separate from the Western way of life and at one with nature. We left from New York and it was 24 days until we hit land. We saw whales, dolphins, had crazy storms with 15ft waves, things breaking and snapping off. I'm not really good at time-management. My agency gets really angry with me – "Why do you leave everything to the last minute?" – and I get stressed, but this time we didn't really plan anything. It was so great.'

Werbowy returned from her break 'definitely changed'. Now she is having 'an existential… not crisis, but wake-up. I'm asking more questions about life in general. It's like, "Oh my God, there's a whole world of things to learn about." So I'm just taking it easy.' She's considering studying philosophy or psychology and has also been spending a lot of time in her New York flat, painting and sculpting. 'Whether that'll ever evolve into anything I don't know. I'm still trying to search for what will be next.' Although she won't say what's in the pipeline, the work offers keep flooding in. Does she ever ask her agency to back off? 'I… they just sort of… Yeah, I tell them that a lot, actually,' she says, laughing. 'I shouldn't lie.'

She leads a resolutely unstarry life, rarely appearing in gossip columns, dropping no names and saying that most of her friends are snowboarding buddies from Toronto. In the past she has been romantically linked to the actor Josh Hartnett. Now, she says, she has been with the same man for 'a long time', although refuses to name him. 'That's my secret,' she says with a giggle, although it takes only a few seconds on Google to discover he's Kenny Jossick, a former assistant of the photographer Mario Sorrenti, who now makes intricate silver knives and jewellery, some of which I suspect Werbowy's wearing, though I don't dare ask.

Her priority still seems to be her family. She frequently drives from New York to Toronto to visit her parents in the house she recently bought them. 'It's great, but it meant selling our childhood house, and ever since I've really felt homeless. I didn't think it would be emotional, but it really has been.'

With such a strong family background, Werbowy unsurprisingly wants children and has firm ideas about their upbringing. 'For the first three years, I'm taking them sailing. I think it's super-important for kids to have an imagination, to create their own world as opposed to just being surrounded by televisions and toys. That was one of the great things about my first years in Poland; we were forced to go outside and make up our own games.' Before babies, though, her ambition is to sail solo round the world in the Volvo Ocean Race.

Werbowy has the intelligence to want to be considered more than a clothes-horse, but at the same time has the humility to know she is not entitled to anything. 'The great thing about my Lancôme deal is I get to be not just a model, I get a voice,' she says. 'Sometimes I wish I didn't have one because I get really insecure about what I say. But at the end of the day, it is what it is, and I always try to speak the truth.'

[penny-dreaddfull]

An interview with Daria in The Telegraph

Supermodel Daria Werbowy is the face you don't know you know

At 25, Lancome spokesperson Daria Werbowy is an elder stateswoman of the catwalk, with the world's top designers at her beck and call.

05 Jul 2009

Unless you work in fashion, it's unlikely you'll ever have heard of Daria Werbowy. You probably won't even be able to pronounce her surname (it's Ver-bo-ee, which is Ukrainian for willow tree). But while the Canadian 25-year-old may not be a household name, she's certainly a household face.

En route to Paris to meet her, I see that her translucent green eyes and ski-slope cheekbones grace the cover of British Vogue and feature in adverts from Roberto Cavalli to H&M. She's also been a spokesperson for Lancôme for four years – a title she shares with film stars such as Kate Winslet, Anne Hathaway and Juliette Binoche. She's translated this into a significant fortune – last year Forbes magazine declared her the ninth most highly paid model in the world, with annual earnings of $3.8 million (£2.3 million) – and serious clout.

'I can't analyse my appeal. If I did I'd be in a straitjacket,' says Werbowy. Sitting in a hotel basement, wearing a black silk shirt and harem pants, she is surrounded by tasteful photos of herself, all bare honeyed limbs (at 5ft 11in she has an extraordinary body that is both skinny and voluptuous) and luxuriantly layered brown hair. Like many models, in the flesh Werbowy has a slightly alien air about her as she towers above me, her almost too-perfect features unmade-up. 'I sometimes find myself staring at it because I don't really know who that girl is,' she says, gesturing at a picture of herself. 'I guess a lot of people don't realise, but I'm always playing a character when I'm working. When you're always having people's images projected on you, who "Daria" is as a person sort of disappears.'

She's no bimbo, that's for sure. Werbowy seems to enjoy the fashion game but knows that the only way to preserve her sanity is to keep a distance from it. 'I am very lucid in relation to the reality of this industry, the ephemeral nature of beauty and fame,' she says, 'and that gives me a certain distance and quite a bit of humour.'

Maybe that attitude is down to her very non-fashion upbringing. Werbowy was born in 1983 and grew up in Mississauga, Toronto. A sporty child, she still has a tomboyish air to her. You can imagine her, had she not been so genetically blessed, leading a grungy existence devoted to her passions of snowboarding and basketball. But her looks made her destiny unavoidable. 'Modelling was kind of like a shadow that followed me everywhere since I was eight,' she says matter-of-factly. 'I'd have people stop me in the street or the supermarket and say, "You should try it."'

At 14 she did – joining her local agency Susan J Model & Talent Management before moving to the über-agency Elite. In high school she modelled part-time, but by the time she graduated was 'really anxious to get out in the world. I thought modelling was just the best thing on the planet. The freedom and the travelling all just sounded so glamorous.'

Many parents would have worried for their teenage daughter, but not the Werbowys. 'I've never had to rebel against my parents; I never had that sort of teen-angst thing where you didn't get along with them. My dad's always been my buddy. We hang out. He encouraged me to get out there, but then he has always believed in exploring. He used to shove us kids in the car on Sundays and say, "We've never driven down this street so today we're going to," when we were, like, "Dad! We want to sleep!"'

Family support was vital – especially in not-so-promising beginnings. Werbowy's first bookings as an adult were for eight catwalk shows for New York fashion week in September 2001. 'Obviously they were all cancelled and nothing else happened.' She then lived in Paris, London and Greece, where 'there were loads of castings, but no work. Looking back, it was one of the greatest times of my life. There was no responsibility, I was doing road trips with my boyfriend of the time, I met a lot of great people, but at the time it was depressing.'

A fter eight months of rejection, Werbowy returned to Canada. 'I was crying, saying, "Dad, I don't want to do this anymore, it's not for me." He said, "You wanted it. Get back out there!" I said, "Noooo!"' She wanted to go to art school and decided to raise the cash by giving modelling a final shot. 'I returned to New York, met my agent and the next day I had an exclusive deal with Prada. From then on it was all a bit of a blur.'

What followed were years of 'non-stop travelling, waking up in places and not knowing where I was'. Some memories, however, stand out, such as the 2004 American Vogue shoot with Helmut Newton, his last before he died in a car crash. 'I was actually really sick so he kept me at a 10ft distance. He made me wear rubber nipples and had me lying on a bed of nails and eating grass with a fork. It was all really… grrr!' As with most successful modelling careers, the photographer Steven Meisel – who booked her for that first Prada campaign and her first two Italian Vogue covers – was key, too. He taught her 'all the old-school tricks; how to move, how to jump, how to pull back my ears to prepare my face for the camera [this gives an instant face-lift]. Working with him is a little like modelling school.'

Werbowy is modelling gold dust: she has staying power. In 2004 she signed the Lancôme contract. Estimated to be worth about $1 million a year, it's a handy pension that has meant – perhaps inevitably – a slow-down in Werbowy's modelling output. Once known for opening the most number of catwalk shows ever in a season (an honour reserved for the most high-profile models), she is now scaling back her schedule. 'I really enjoyed them in the beginning. It was really empowering to stride out there, but eventually you start walking and on the way you're, like, "What am I going to eat tonight?" But I'm lucky now; I can come in and do a couple instead of the whole three-countries-and-six-shows-a-day thing, when you just get exhausted.'

While she is the consummate professional, it's clear throughout our interview that Werbowy is talking to me only as a contractual obligation. When Kate Moss's name comes up, she says, 'I always tell Kate she's lucky because she doesn't have to do interviews.'

Such remarks aside, Werbowy answers questions with polite consideration – something for which supermodels are not renowned. Respected in the industry for her lack of attitude, she also has a steely sense of self that makes her stand out from the crowd.

Werbowy gives much credit to her Ukrainian-Polish parents, Daniel and Anna, an engineer and a teacher, who left their home-town of Krakow for Canada when Werbowy, the youngest of three children, was three. 'I think what they did was really inspiring to move to a new country in their thirties with no English at all,' she says sincerely. 'But my father's always been an adventurer. He had an invitation from relatives so he just took a leap of faith. It's given me an immense respect for them.'

The irony is that the bohemian individualism that makes Werbowy so unique is precisely the reason she won't model for ever. Unlike many high-fliers, who are too insecure to turn off their BlackBerries, she took three months off this summer to sail across the Atlantic and Mediterranean with her father, siblings and three friends.

'It was the best thing I've ever done,' she says, catlike eyes glowing. 'For the first time since all this started I really felt I was on vacation, completely separate from the Western way of life and at one with nature. We left from New York and it was 24 days until we hit land. We saw whales, dolphins, had crazy storms with 15ft waves, things breaking and snapping off. I'm not really good at time-management. My agency gets really angry with me – "Why do you leave everything to the last minute?" – and I get stressed, but this time we didn't really plan anything. It was so great.'

Werbowy returned from her break 'definitely changed'. Now she is having 'an existential… not crisis, but wake-up. I'm asking more questions about life in general. It's like, "Oh my God, there's a whole world of things to learn about." So I'm just taking it easy.' She's considering studying philosophy or psychology and has also been spending a lot of time in her New York flat, painting and sculpting. 'Whether that'll ever evolve into anything I don't know. I'm still trying to search for what will be next.' Although she won't say what's in the pipeline, the work offers keep flooding in. Does she ever ask her agency to back off? 'I… they just sort of… Yeah, I tell them that a lot, actually,' she says, laughing. 'I shouldn't lie.'

She leads a resolutely unstarry life, rarely appearing in gossip columns, dropping no names and saying that most of her friends are snowboarding buddies from Toronto. In the past she has been romantically linked to the actor Josh Hartnett. Now, she says, she has been with the same man for 'a long time', although refuses to name him. 'That's my secret,' she says with a giggle, although it takes only a few seconds on Google to discover he's Kenny Jossick, a former assistant of the photographer Mario Sorrenti, who now makes intricate silver knives and jewellery, some of which I suspect Werbowy's wearing, though I don't dare ask.

Her priority still seems to be her family. She frequently drives from New York to Toronto to visit her parents in the house she recently bought them. 'It's great, but it meant selling our childhood house, and ever since I've really felt homeless. I didn't think it would be emotional, but it really has been.'

With such a strong family background, Werbowy unsurprisingly wants children and has firm ideas about their upbringing. 'For the first three years, I'm taking them sailing. I think it's super-important for kids to have an imagination, to create their own world as opposed to just being surrounded by televisions and toys. That was one of the great things about my first years in Poland; we were forced to go outside and make up our own games.' Before babies, though, her ambition is to sail solo round the world in the Volvo Ocean Race.

Werbowy has the intelligence to want to be considered more than a clothes-horse, but at the same time has the humility to know she is not entitled to anything. 'The great thing about my Lancôme deal is I get to be not just a model, I get a voice,' she says. 'Sometimes I wish I didn't have one because I get really insecure about what I say. But at the end of the day, it is what it is, and I always try to speak the truth.'

thank you very much, OlgaMaria!! what i love about this article is that she reminds me so much of christy turlington... with her intelligence

and attitude and view on life...even wanting to take classes -=itd be so cool if she got a degree while modelling like christy did!!=-

its so fitting because i see her as the only model out there in todays modelling world who comes close to christy

in smarts,humanitarism and class -=just like christy, you never hear anyone in the industry bad mouth her,and you never hear any negative stories about her=-

an awesome article that makes me dig her more!!!!! :wub:

[Vogue Girl]

Thanks Olga, i think than Daria rewinds me a new Christy, but i don't compare these women because they are diferents.

[OlgaMaria]

Vogue Paris August 2009

Ph: Inez & Vinnodh

[scanned by Thefrenchy]

[CrazyGEN]

I'm disappointed. The cover looks pretty boring, and according to the review, it's not at all a Daria special issue as previously reported

Well I'm waiting to see the rest anyway.

[penny-dreaddfull]

she looks gorgeous as always... i am a wee bit disappointed

i shall really be bummed if it isnt a daria issue ala lara stone -=pout=-

[OlgaMaria]

^It is not Daria issue as it was rumored She appears inside in pretty huge ed alongside many other girls.

Daria definitely deserves homage from VP and hopefully one day she will get it.

[penny-dreaddfull]

i agree with you Totally, olga

and if she doesnt get it soon, we need to go on strike!! lolol

[OlgaMaria]

^French people like strikes

Snaps of the ed (by Thefrenchy)

[Vogue Girl]

Wow!!! i like this cover, Daria never disspointed, thank you Olga.

[Vogue Girl]

The HQ pics of Vogue Paris August

AngelScans from TFS

[CrazyGEN]

Thanks Vogue Girl!

I love the Balmain shot!

[Vogue Girl]

You're welcome

[Vogue Girl]

US Vogue July 2009

"City of Dreams"

with Caroline Trentini

Photographed by Mario Testino

HQ

/monthly_07_2009/post-21801-0-1593842164-02422_thumb.jpg" class="ipsImage ipsImage_thumbnailed" alt="city-caroline-daria-mt-vogueUS-june09-3.jpg">

herfamedgoodlooks.com

[Japlo]

US Vogue July 2009

"City of Dreams"

with Caroline Trentini

Photographed by Mario Testino

HQ

herfamedgoodlooks.com

finally

thanks

[Anja]

The HQ pics of Vogue Paris August

US Vogue July 2009

"City of Dreams"

with Caroline Trentini

Photographed by Mario Testino

HQ

2 great editorial - i like both very much! Thanks! Daria's great as she always is!

[Vogue Girl]

You're welcome guys.