Carmen Kass

[IncurableLunatic]

Scanned from Vogue Korean Oct 07, Bazaar Korean Nov 07 & Cosmopolitan Korean Nov 07

amazing thanks!

 

[sethii]

max factor ad in Glamour Uk April 2008, sorry about the watermark...

yesbook24

 

[van-kun]

Scanned by me from various magazines 2001

 

[papa_levante]

Carmen was so beautiful in the Max Factor commercial. It really made her the supermodel she is! All the gold, the runway, the cameras!

 

[IncurableLunatic]

^ well said

i love seeing her old campaigns and eds because she still looks the same yet different

 

[van-kun]

Scanned by me from various magazines 2001

 

[valentina_rocks]

the max factor one is nice

 

[helligirl]

fashionmag

 

[IncurableLunatic]

^she has a cute smile

 

[papa_levante]

Carmen has a great tomboyish face. And to think that she's a HF model too.

Some people just have it all.

 

[xPedro]

?

fashionbox

 

[wishbone]

?

fashionbox

Chanel 2003
miqrogroove.com
B)

 

[Mchunu]

even though i don't visit this thread as much as i should, i really do like Miss Kass. There's something very hot & sexy about her, especially in the Kors ads.

 

[valentina_rocks]

wow i didnt kno she had chanel ads..

 

[IncurableLunatic]

^didn't know either....

 

[Versace-Goddess]

Beautiful close ups.

 

[angel222]

I'm posting a few of the articles through the years about Carmen:

1.

NY POST...PAGE 6
MEGAMODEL Carmen Kass narrowly cheated death when she was submerged in shark-infested waters during a Caribbean photo shoot. The death-defying stunt for the British glossy The Fashion features the bikini-clad Vogue covergirl inside a protective cage surrounded by 60 hungry reef sharks. A team of "safety divers" wearing chainmail over their wetsuits was on hand to protect the comely Kass from becoming shark food. But things didn't exactly go as planned. The most harrowing encounter came when the divers threw bait in the water to attract the sharks, causing one 10-foot beast to invade Carmen's cage - the
door having been left open. "I saw this gray thing in front of my face," Kass told the London Daily Telegraph. "Then it opened its huge mouth. The safety diver jumped on me to take the bite on his body armor and I dived out of the door underneath him . . . I would say I was a little scared." The stunt was the idea of war photographer-turned-fashion snapper Taryn Simon, who declared, "I was talking with a stylist about the most dangerous shoot we could possibly imagine, and we came up with sharks. We loved the idea of taking Vogue's Model of the Year, putting her in a cage and feeding her to the sharks." "I'm not scared of animals," Kass declared. "I'm more scared of people . . . Besides, you only live once."


2.

NY POST/By JARED PAUL STERN
------------------------------------------
Kate Moss' Women modeling agency is experiencing turbulent times. On Thursday, Moss was rushed to the hospital after her Range Rover flipped over outside London; they thought she'd be well enough to fly to New York yesterday, but she wasn't.Now one of the agency's other biggest names, Kylie Bax, has given Women theboot for Elite. Bax, who's been living in L.A. for the past year and a halfpursuing her acting career, just returned to New York. Some career planning onthe part of her new agents at Elite is definitely in order following hersizzling nude bondage spread in Playboy.
In addition, Women nearly lost another of its top stars recently when Carmen Kass staged a "job action," threatening to walk out on them unless they gave her more money, sources say. Some have it that Kass actually did quit and stayed away for a week until Women made her an offer she couldn't refuse: Instead of the industry standard, in which the agency gets 20 percent commission from the model and 20 percent from the client, insiders say Kass now pays no commission and, in fact, gets half of Women's client cut to boot.Kass' boyfriend, Richie Akiva, denies that Kass ever left the agency but confirms that she renegotiated her commission. One rival model mogul who heard about the transaction complains, "They really shouldn't have done that - if this continues, they'll put us all out of business." Meanwhile, Czech bombshell Eva Herzigova, who left Women a few months back for IMG, has returned to Women, following in the footsteps of Naomi Campbell, who also came back to Women after a stint with DNA.


3.

Sunday Telegraph (UK)
May 9, 2004 p04
Review

The face of a new Europe
Charles Laurence

Carmen Kass, 25, is talking about her love life. "Threesome? No way.
Other women? Not interested," she says. The same salacious questions were put to her only the night before on "shock jock" Howard Stern's notoriously provocative New York radio show, and she is laughing them off as evidence of the fantasies that surround the modelling world, and the price she will pay for throwing her Philip Treacy hat in the ring for the June 17 European elections.

She has also brushed aside more damaging criticism that she is a
neophyte, with no political experience, not qualified for office.

"You don't need qualifications to be a politician, do you?" she asks,
defensively. "Look at Arnold Schwarzenegger. Because I am a model,
people have trouble realising that I am serious. I see my life in
politics going very, very far. I've had a taste of what it takes to be
fabulous and famous, and it is not that great for me. I want to do
something for my country, for Estonia. What I know is I can get people involved in the election because I am well known."

Kass has broken off campaigning in Estonia to fly back to her second
home in New York for the premiere of her first film: she plays the
briefest of scenes in a small-budget film Points and Shoot, opening at
the Tribeca Film Festival. She is an hour late for our lunch, which
even in New York is the privilege of movie stars rather than models.
She has her hair pulled back casually, no make-up, and is belted
tightly into a pale blue trench coat which looks a bit odd on a
glowing spring afternoon. Everyone is looking her way, necks craned
from the banquets of a downtown model hang-out; a couple of
acquaintances make a show of calling out "Carmen!".

The restaurant is owned by her boyfriend of five years, Ritchie Akira
(short, dark, shaven-headed), who joins us briefly. They make an odd
couple. He might be tiny, his body-language shouts, but he's a tough
guy with a supermodel girlfriend, a brand-new Discovery Vogue Range
Rover on the curb and a mobile phone that doesn't stop ringing. She
can be flirty, and she can be intense and surprisingly
straightforward, but she is always just a little bit distant, as if
watching her own moves with a chaperone's eye.

Kass made a big splash as a prospective MEP when she was photographed kissing Tony Blair at the party he gave for the New Europeans amid the imperial splendour of the Foreign Office in Whitehall. She was representing the youth wing of the conservative ruling party Res Publica, Estonia's second largest party. Its mandate: focus on the people; look to the future; let the people participate in politics - something which did not happen in the past.

In one click of the shutter, Kass appears to have achieved her first
ambition in politics: to become "the face" of the new, Euro Estonia.

For the moment, however, she plans to remain the face of Chanel as
well, and keep her fortune topped up with more of her frequent covers
for Vogue and Harper's Bazaar. Kass is estimated to be the
second-highest-earning supermodel in the world (behind Kate Moss). She was Vogue's Model of the Year in 2000, and reckons she could stay at the top of the catwalk (where she is able to command pounds 130,000 a show) for another 10 years.

She has a reputation for being very secretive. Until her MEP
nomination, she would never talk to the press. No one in the fashion
industry knows much about her background, other than that she sends a lot of money back home. She is portrayed in gossip columns as a lone tough nut.

At the age of 14 she was spotted by a model scout in a supermarket in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia. On her first modelling job in Milan
she vowed never to return, refusing to have her lips "redone". A
steely determination and years of hard slog have made her one of the
most consistently successful models.

Yet there is something odd about her. "She just doesn't fit the
mould," says one industry insider. "Backstage at the shows she's on
her own, working. Other models are having a ***, drinkin Champagne,
out clubbing with Galliano. Kass is always on her own. She's also
really bright. Most models aren't: they're flakes. I can absolutely
see her going into politics."

She is known to be fearless: one shoot had her lowered into
shark-infested water in a wire cage while dressed in a bikini (the
safety divers wore chain mail). Kass was the only model who would do it - "experiences like that don't come your way often," she says.

Yet she has avoided the more obvious temptations of the modelling
industry. "You have to be really self-aware. People want to drag you
down. You must be strong. Now I am 25, I don't even have that urge to join in. I'm thinking about where I want my life to go."

The theory goes that Eastern European models are so successful
because they don't have tantrums; they don't have tantrums because they've grown up on a diet of potatoes and they just knuckle down to work. Kass is a case in point. Self-preservation and making the most of a chance to earn good money come naturally, she believes, simply because she grew up in Estonia. It was Soviet-occupied from 1944 and life was tough - for the nation, and for her own family.

"I remember walking back from school one day when I was 11 and seeing these tanks roaring down the street in Tallinn," she says. It was 1990, a year before liberation. "They were so terrifying. I ran off
the road and hid under a bridge. They were Russian, and they had come to close the radio station.

"In Estonia, we are very protective and very cautious. It comes from
all the time of being occupied: someone was always trying to take
things away. So we are very reserved. It takes a long time to get to
know an Estonian." If that is true, Kass is being remarkably frank.

Her family were impoverished intellectuals, and she lived in a
one-room flat with her parents, older brother, Kutty, and sister,
Victoria. Her father was a part-time chess instructor, and Kass has a
reputation as a strong player herself. It is, she admits, exaggerated.
Not long ago, she did beat the Estonian Prime Minister, Juhan Parts,
well-known for his skill at the game. "He made one wrong move and I
caught him," she shrugs.

She has not played a tournament since she was a child. Asked for her
favourite opening, she blushes a little and says she just pushes a
centre pawn forward and waits to see what the other guy does. Asked what she would do to reply to "white first move e4", she taps her fingers over the table cloth, imagining a chess board, and answers, "e5". Not a surprising choice: that was how the great Estonian grandmaster Paul Keres always replied to e4.

Both parents worked as waiters. But when Kass was eight, they split
and her father, Viktor, disappeared to work at Chernobyl, later the
site of the world's worst nuclear reactor disaster. He had been an
abusive father and an alcoholic.

"For many years, he was out of my life and I knew nothing of him,"
she says. "I am not in touch now. But three years ago, I looked him
up. I thought, `everyone makes mistakes', and that maybe he would be sorry. But the first thing he did was ask me for money. That was it: I don't have feelings that he's my father. Just a man I met. I don't
have to talk to him." I catch a glimpse of the famous Carmen Kass
steel.

On her own, her mother, Koida, worked extra shifts to make ends meet and Kass's brother did much of the child-minding. "My mum is
everything to me. She is the most wonderful, strongest, smartest
mother you could want," says Kass, who has helped her considerably
since.

"She was working 24 hours a day, but she always let us know she cared for us. And she explained to us what life is, and how it works. She told us that we had to take care of ourselves, because there was no one else who would.

"It is sad but true, that you are born alone and die alone. How do I
know this at 25? Ah, I guess it is because I have an old soul." That
comes with a girlish laugh, but it rings true.

In Tallinn, where Kass is reputed to be the richest woman in Estonia,
and where she attracts more column inches than Victoria Beckham does in the British tabloids, her family is a source of controversy. Her
sister faces charges of drug smuggling: she spent a month in jail in
New York before being deported to Estonia, last September, and has
only recently been freed on bail.

"This is very painful for me - but I am also angry because I believe
my government is trying to make a showcase of it," she says. "When she was arrested, she was not carrying drugs. There is no evidence! They even searched my mother's house, which was new and where my sister had never lived. They took that house apart.

"On the one hand, I want to take this to the Court of Human Rights, I
am so upset." She takes a steadying breath: "On the other, I have to
tell myself that, even though this is my sister and I must believe
her, I must also wait for the outcome of the trial."

Kass is convinced that the scandal won't stop her from winning her
seat in the European parliament. She is almost certainly going to be a
shoo-in. Juventus, the youth wing of Res Publica, invited her to join
last year and it was its idea that she stand for Europe. This was not,
Kass believes, just for its public relations value, to put a "face" on
a country which few can place on a map, but to attract a new
generation into politics. Most Estonians, she points out, have grown
up in households where the perceived wisdom is that it is safer to
leave politics to someone else.

"Nobody really understood what it meant to be in the EU until a few
years ago. If anything, the idea of being a part of some big thing
seems dangerous," she explains. "To Estonians, being part of Europe
sounds at first like being part of the Soviet Union. So that is my
first task - I don't have a whole lot of policies worked out. I just
want to activate people to be a part of it, the political process; to
educate people on what it means to go out there and take up the
opportunities."

In Estonia, simply being Carmen Kass illustrates the new
opportunities for wealth and growth. "I've been lucky," she says. "I
have a model agency now in Tallinn, and I have property, commercial
and residential. I think people in Estonia realise that at least I can
represent the opportunity that the outside world offers them."

She may prove to be much more than that. Although Kass makes no
pretence of any expertise in government, she is certainly bright and
evidently determined. After all, if actors can become presidents and
body builders "governators" of California, why can't a model get to
the top of a small country in the Baltics?

 

[IncurableLunatic]

^nice articles! i like her steely personality
thanks angel222

 

[Foxie-Pooh]

Loved that last article...though there is no doubt that they tried to make her sound smarter for her campaign, you can see her strong personality seeping through the descriptions...She sounds smart, strong, and confident. What more could you ask for in a person

 

[angel222]

credit: vanityfair.com

My favorite article of her was from the Vanity Fair spread about the Eastern European models. The part where Carmen pulled a knife on her her Milan agent to get back her passport. Here is the article enjoy!!!!


Who knew freezing your butt off could look so hot? The temperature on Harbour Island, in the Bahamas, is around 60 degrees but feels like 50 with the breeze-not the sort of weather to venture out in wearing a bikini the size of an origami. To both keep warm and look gorgeous, the nine Eastern European and Russian models have mastered The Jump: arms flung gracefully into the air, hips thrust side to side, one long leg sexily descending at a time. No unseemly teeth-chattering here.

Patrick Demarchelier, one of the elite group of fashion photographers who, by believing in a young girl, can ensure her a sizzling career, tries to shoo them down to the water crashing on the shore.

"Queeck! Queeck! Big laughing. Yay," says Demarchelier, impossibly French and cool.

"Patrick, are you mad?" says 22-year-old Natalia Vodianova, the girl of the moment, her china-doll mouth in a heart-melting pout. "It's really ****ing cold!" She makes a beeline for Demarchelier and playfully leaps onto his back.

According to the Model's Code, jumping on a top photographer, swearing, and any kind of horsing around are the prerogative of supermodels only, which in this case includes Vodianova, Carmen Kass, and Karolina Kurkova.

Kass stomps in the chilly surf. "Our skin have goose pimples!" she says, her powerful voice raspy from 10 years of wild nights. "Good for nipples, for sure."

Kurkova, the very picture of healthy living and positivity, spreads her arms and leaps back and forth. "It's a workout, girls! And a-one and a-two and a-three!"

The lesser-known girls-Hana Soukupova, Marija Vujovic, Euguenia Volodina, Natasha Poly, Valentina Zelyaeva, and Inguna Butane-try to let loose as naturally as possible, but they're well aware of the pecking order. During the shoot, they say little-and only quietly and in Russian when they do-while they steal peeks at how the popular girls do it.

"Train back to Russia!" says Vodianova, choo-chooing like a steam engine, the other girls lined up behind her.

"We're not from Russia!" says Kurkova, in semi-mock outrage. "We're Czech. We're from Eastern Europe!"

"I'm not Eastern European," says Vodianova. "I'm Russian. It's different ... no?"

Whatever the distinctions, the girls from the former Soviet bloc have invaded the fashion world. Is it any wonder? The fall of the Iron Curtain gave way to Russian mobsters, Czech hockey stars, Romanian prostitutes, and Polish nato troops. Stone-cold foxes dripping in Versace were bound to follow. They are prowling the catwalks in record numbers. Their deep-set blue eyes and sculpted cheekbones are gracing the covers of top fashion magazines. They are the faces of the hottest labels: Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Dior, Chanel, Fendi, Karl Lagerfeld, Bulgari, Valentino, Versace, Dolce & Gabbana, Tommy Hilfiger, and Escada, in addition to L'Oreal, Gap, and Victoria's Secret.

"We have beautiful skin, beautiful faces," says Volodina, one of the newer models. "And the Brazilians are finished!"

Kurkova, typically, has a more nuanced explanation for why the Russians and Eastern Europeans, who for the most part came from grim beginnings, have climbed to the top of one of the most glamorous-and cutthroat-professions in the world. "We had no nannies," says Kurkova, who speaks without a trace of attitude. "We had to take care of ourselves and our siblings and do everything. Everybody cooks. My dad cooks!"

Masters of survival, the young girls had no choice but to believe that anything was possible. "I always knew that something would happen," says Vodianova, who at 14 ran her own fruit stand in the streets of Nizhniy Novgorod, in western Russia, "[that] I'm not going to stay poor and in a bad situation forever." The new face of Calvin Klein and L'Oreal, she, like the other supermodels, has a day rate in the six figures. In addition, she is married to the Honorable Justin Portman, an old-school bon vivant and one of the wealthiest men in Britain.

You can see it in their expressions. They don't have the cheeky cool of a British Kate Moss, the corn-fed simplicity of an American Cindy Crawford, or that fun-loving Brazilian Giselle thing. They exude, rather, a certain seriousness and toughness, even when they're smiling. "They are survivors," says David Bonnouvrier, from DNA, the New York modeling agency that represents five of them. "There's a difference between a Natalia and a Carolyn Murphy, who grew up with cable TV."

Then again, the explanation may be as simple as Demarchelier's. "It's a big country," he says with a shrug. "Lot of pretty girls over there."

"Excuse the alcohol breath," announces Kass, making her entrance at 6:30 a.m. into the room at the Coral Sands hotel that has been transformed into the hair-and-makeup station. She's wearing a sloppy pink sundress and a gray wool hat with long flaps over the ears, and she is smoking the end of a roll-your-own cigarette. In spite of her hobo appearance, she is ready for business-which is impressive, considering that only hours ago she, Natalia, and their respective men were knocking back vodka shots, a Russian custom that is proving hard to give up.

At 26, Kass calls herself the "grandmother of the group," and, indeed, she is nearing the end of her career, which began 12 years ago. Beneath her party-girl act, she has an iron grasp on her fortune and future. She is reportedly one of the wealthiest women in Estonia, the owner of two large real-estate companies, and last year she ran (unsuccessfully) for a Parliament seat in the European Union. She has a healthy sense of self-particularly of her importance in her home country-and she is undeniably funny. "I actually kind of worry about they selling newspapers while I'm not there," says Kass about her role in Estonia, as she sucks down the rest of her cigarette.

Two decades ago, Kass and her family were living in a one-bedroom apartment in a crime-ridden area of Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, which gained its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. She and her brother and sister slept in the bedroom, her mother and father in the living room. She has said her father ditched the family early on, leaving Kass's mother, Koida-her hero-to raise the family while working three jobs. "She taught us everything, basically. She would build up toys and cook for us." When anyone rang the doorbell, Kass recalls, "she would put all these pillows around us kids and give us knives."

Fendi bag-ettes were not exactly on the Kass-family agenda. "We would get these packages of clothes from Scandinavia. I would just mix-and-match crazy things. I can't even come along to describe it because it's pretty ugly," says Kass, who characterizes herself in those days as "rather like boy." So when a model scout approached the 13-year-old Kass in a Tallinn supermarket to ask if she'd be interested in modeling, her reaction was, "First of all, I don't know who the hell are you. Second of all, what is modeling?" But a year later, Estonia was becoming, well, way too boring for the young teenager. So when she happened to bump into the scout again, her curiosity was piqued. "I was like, Modeling, modeling, whatever it is, I want to get out of here! It's my chance to get and go and see."

Against the wishes of her mother, who wanted her to stay in Estonia and finish high school, the 14-year-old was off to Milan-and a new world of sharks and dirtbags. She had no friends, didn't speak a word of the language, and was told repeatedly that she had to do something about her thin lips. Finding the experience unbearable, she tried to leave, but her agent refused to let her and took away her passport. Kass did what any hard-bitten Estonian girl would do. "I threatened him with a knife," she says. "I didn't have a choice. Finally, of course, he had to give it to me because I was like, 'This I'll use.'" Kass returned to Estonia, but not for long. Something about the modeling world had gotten under her skin, and her boyfriend at the time encouraged her to give it one more try.

This time, she went to Paris. Equipped with a portfolio containing just three pictures, she was running around, going to 24 castings a day, trying to land a job. Her loneliness was slightly alleviated by one caring soul-supermodel, singer, and Mick Jagger girlfriend Carla Bruni-who checked in on her to see if she was O.K. Then came a dream opportunity: she was up for the Chanel campaign. She walked into 31 Rue Cambone and handed her meager book over to Gilles Dufour, Karl Lagerfeld's creative director at the time. "He has these sunglasses on, and I don't know if he even looks at me," recalls Kass. "He doesn't open the book, he doesn't ask me to walk. He just takes a minute, and then he gives me the book. He's like, 'Thank you.'" On her way down in the elevator, she cursed the pretentious jerk. "****ing *******, why couldn't he even actually look at my three pictures? Why didn't he let me walk, give me a little chance here?" Little did she know that by the time she got downstairs, she'd be the new Chanel girl. She didn't even have to change her lips.

Now, with a dozen major campaigns on her resume, more than 30 magazine covers under her belt, and a VH1/Vogue Model of the Year Award, Kass has achieved a status that allows her certain perks. She brings along her German boyfriend-chess grand master Eric Lobron-to every fabulous destination her job takes her. Kass, who happens to be the president of the Estonian Chess Federation, met him at a chess championship. (Apparently, chess is the Estonian football-good news for geeks everywhere.) She is free to make out with him at any well-populated dinner table. And she can get away with saying things like this to staff members of the magazine she's working for: "I'd like to thank all the little people who made this possible," adding as an afterthought, "and I count myself among the little people."


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