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Natalia Vodianova

Evelyn

By Evelyn
in Female Fashion Models

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pautinka

pautinka

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Thank you sunshine, for the memory lane.. Natalia is so gorgeous... and she needs to go back to her natural hair color. The images with her darker hair simply make it so clear that her complexion is currently washed out by the blond locks. I also miss all of her slicker up-dos such as these...

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Sunshine06

Sunshine06

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Telegraph.co.uk

On the school run with Natalia Vodianova

At 11, she was selling fruit illegally to make ends meet. Today, the face of Natalia Vodianova has brought her fame and fortune. Luke Leitch meets her.

BY Luke Leitch | 10 October 2012

Natalia Vodianova at the Dior show in March Photo: Rex

In our hour at the bar of a five-star hotel on the Rue Faubourg St Honoré, the supermodel Natalia Vodianova takes tea and offers some new twists on her life story.

She delivers a deft nod to the business of the day (the alliance of "SuperNova", as she is known around the world, with Russian company Bosco) that has brought her here. So far, so fashion. She wears a long, pleated floral dress over flats, fiddles with a ring of two entwined tentacles set with pave diamonds and, after a hesitant start, talks - only rarely pausing for breath - in her excellent, Russian-accented English.

As she speaks, she seems oblivious to the double-taking passers-by who pause to soak up the blue-eyed, full-lipped, riotously eyebrowed, clear-skinned, and utterly symmetrical contours of Vodianova's genetically endowed rollover jackpot: her face. That face is what delivered her from the most unpromising of beginnings and made her one of the world's best-paid and most-photographed models.

And when the hour is up, that should really be the end of it. But instead, Vodianova invites me to come along and talk some more as she collects her children from school. Which is how, half an hour later, I find myself standing on a street corner in a swanky arrondissement with Vodianova's driver, Fox ("Natalia calls me Foxy - but no one else does"), watching a paparazzo approach. He's across the street, the LCD screen of his camera visible in his open bag, preparing to shoot Vodianova and two of her children as they walk from school-gate to car. "This is the first time it has happened here," says Fox darkly. Vodianova's son Lucas, 10, and daughter Neva, six, have been at their new school for only a few days.

By the time she's back across the street, the photographer has bagged enough frames to sell to various websites.

Door slammed shut, Vodianova seems both furious and rattled. "How did they find the school?" she wonders aloud: "I hate this - hate it." In the back seat, the children jostle for the iPad. They didn't even notice the photographer.

The paparazzi do not stake out every common-or-garden supermodel and her offspring. But Vodianova, 30, finds herself of interest to the French gossip press because she is newly arrived, children in tow, to move in with her boyfriend, Antoine Arnault. He is the tousle-haired, crooked-smiled and - surely no coincidence this - luxuriantly-eyebrowed eldest son of Bernard Arnault, Europe's richest man. Which makes him dauphin to King Bernard's £25 billion Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy empire - the largest fashion and luxury conglomerate in the world.

Natalia Vodianova's first 'Vogue' cover in September 2003; her latest one for the glossy in May 2011 PHOTOS: Vogue

Add to that Vodianova's split in 2010 from Justin Portman - the British property scion she married when she was 19 and who is father of Lucas, Neva, and five-year old Viktor - and you have all the ingredients for an easily digested narrative of a penniless beauty from the back of beyond who traded up from millionaire to billionaire and is now sitting pretty as one half of fashion's most potent power couple. To cook up to perfection, simply add those paparazzi photographs.

Yet despite her fortunate habit of falling in love with fabulously wealthy men, Vodianova does not in person come across as a flint-eyed adventuress. Born in 1982, she grew up with her sister Oksana and her single mother, Larisa, in the industrial city of Nizhny Novgorod (formerly Gorky), which she volunteers is noted in Russia as a fertile breeding ground for successful criminals ("And in fact to be a great criminal, you have to be smart as well!").

Although the household was so poor that she worked after school from the age of 11, surreptitiously selling fruit at an unlicensed stall outside the Volga car plant, and was often left at home as her mother worked to look after Oksana (who was born with cerebral palsy), Vodianova was able to take shelter ("when times were really tough") in her grandparents' more affluent household.

Her grandmother, also named Larisa, was, says Vodianova, "raised by war" and had savings salted away. She also has a spiky relationship with Vodianova's mother - "she didn't want to help her. She wanted my mother to be independent and to realise that her actions have consequences. My mum made this incredible effort with the very little that she had and my grandmother was the opposite. As a child, I wasn't even allowed to open the fridge without permission."

But she was also, says Vodianova, "my fashion icon. She always dressed well, had beautiful things - shoes, gloves, scarves - and kept everything in the house pristine. She would get up at 6am, run in the park, swim in the frozen lake, and prepare breakfast by the time I woke up."

Furthermore, it was her grandmother, now 82, who ensured that one of Vodianova's most celebrated physical assets - those eyebrows - would arrive on the catwalks of Paris unsullied. As a teenager, Vodianova says she was "very severe and distant" and therefore ignored by boys. Her two best girlfriends were not - and also happened to be enthusiastic eyebrow-pluckers. Vodianova resolved to join them. "But when my grandmother saw me plucking she said: 'Don't. You will regret it. One day you will wake up with no eyebrows and think how stupid you were. Your eyebrows are the most beautiful thing about you.' "

At 15, encouraged by an eyebrow-appreciative boyfriend, she attended modelling school. At 17, after a crash-course in English, she arrived in Paris and found near-instant success. Two years later, she met Portman, had given birth to their children by 25, and continued a career so liberally bestrewn by big-money contracts and top-tier magazine covers (US Vogue's Grace Coddington says Vodianova "could make a paper bag look good") that she was able to retire from the catwalk in 2008. She says: "For one month, twice a year, fashion week and the people in it were my family. I have three children, I have school runs and doing fashion week, well, it is my idea of a nightmare."

She does, though, acquiesce to the occasional catwalk comeback - most recently for Stella McCartney, whose business is half-owned by the Arnaults' chief business rival. "I remember before Stella's brand took off, people were saying: 'Really? She going to do it without leather or fur? How will that work?'

"Now she's done it - her brand has grown 40 per cent in the past five years - and you want to support her bravery and this brand that has no violence." Although from a fur culture, Vodianova says: "I could never afford it then, and now I can afford it I don't want it."

Forbes magazine estimates Vodianova earned more than £4 million from her modelling last year. Much of her time now goes on Naked Heart (nakedheart.org and facebook.com/NataSupernova) a foundation that has paid for scores of new playgrounds to be built in Russia. Centro, one of Russia's largest footwear retailers, stocks a new Vodianova-designed shoe collection called Fairy Tale whose profits are all diverted back to funding more playgrounds.

Most recently, she agreed to become brand ambassador for Bosco, a Russian retail group that operates GUM in Moscow and whose sportswear brand (rather alarmingly) outfitted the Russian, Ukrainian and Spanish teams at the London 2012 Olympics and Paralympics.

Natalia Vodianova backstage at the Louis Vuitton show with Marc Jacobs and boyfriend Antoine Arnault

In part because of Oksana, Vodianova is keen to publicise the Bosco-outfitted 2014 Winter Paralympics that will be held in the Black Sea city of Sochi. She says: "Disability in Russia is a real stigma - it is pushed away. Even more since the Soviet time. So I want to highlight that. London's Paralympics set such an incredible example and I know that the Russian Games are going to be very significant for my country."

She returns to her homeland - where the two Larisas still live - every fortnight or so. And she has, she says, contemplated moving back for good, "especially when I separated from my husband. Because what I'm passionate about is my charity. But it would be wrong for me, and I think it wouldn't be right for my children either. And as soon as I am there, what is overwhelming is how much need there is." Which leaves her in Paris, dodging photographers and settling into her new home.

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