the thing about freja...
As a person who takes great pleasure in shaming model-obsessed colleagues, I was somewhat taken aback with my own reaction when Freja Beha Erichsen opened the Louis Vuitton show this season. I think I may have elbowed the stylist sitting to next me, and I definitely remember mouthing, “OH MY GOD, SHE’S BACK!” to the person on my other side, who didn’t seem to get my model-induced excitement since, well, we were witnessing the first Nicholas Ghesquière show for Louis Vuitton and all. That aside, it was an eye-opening experience which made me embrace my Freja fandom, and realise just how much I had missed seeing this fabled mega model on the runway.
I think it took most of us about a season to realise it, but at some point in early 2013, it hit me that Freja had all but disappeared from the modelling sphere. After reaching the acme of model success from 2009 to 2012 – during which she held the number one spot on the highest-ranked-models-in-the-world list – Freja seemingly decided to take a step back from fronting every single campaign and walking every single show on the face of the Earth, and practically disappear into model mythology. And even though her work-by-year on Models.com begs to differ, 2013 felt like Freja wasn’t there anymore. Maybe it was because she stopped walking shows, or perhaps it was just the striking contrast to half a decade of seeing her everywhere.
Freja’s overwhelming success – which is possibly only matched by Kate Moss – wasn’t a case of hype, high profile breeding, or famous romantic pairings. Her path to supermodel superstardom was an immaculate collision of two factors: her looks and her timing. With her chameleonic androgyny, Freja bridged the gap between the divided model ideals that existed prior to her discovery by Jeppe Mydtskov of Unique Models in her native Denmark when she was seventeen. In one camp you had the ‘gorgeous girls’, best illustrated by Gisele Bündchen, and in the other, the ‘peculiar girls’, best represented by Lily Cole. With her shape-shifting abilities and gift for embodying the beauty, the bombshell and the boy, Freja combined the two camps of the late '90s, and changed the face of modelling from the early 2000s onwards.
By doing so, she effectively created the model ideal that materialised through the last part of the 2000s and which very much still prevails today in the shape of girls like Cara Delevingne, Suvi Koponen, Meghan Collison, and Sasha Luss. (I realise my self-proclaimed casual cool disinterest in models is rapidly disintegrating at this point in the story.) With her unparalleled versatility, Freja became the favourite of everyone from Chanel to Valentino and even Georg Jensen, which appeals to an entirely different segment than what Freja immediately represents. The demand gave her a kind of supermodel status not seen since the original supermodels, making Freja bigger than any of her peers.
Reportedly a tomboy who always remained unimpressed by the industry, Freja employed a privacy policy from day one of her career, which only added to her superior standing. By practically never doing interviews and never talking about her private life, elusive love life, views and beliefs, she created a mystery around her character, which – aided by her rare public appearances outside of work – turned her into a kind of Madonna of the fashion industry. I think it was Madonna’s brother who once observed that his sister was a bigger star than the others because she didn’t socialise with them and was so hard to reach. I remember an agent once saying that Freja would be “more comfortable in a dive bar than at the Met Ball”. So there you have it!
While Freja had slowly started getting back into some campaigns and some editorial work before she walked that Louis Vuitton show in March (in Interview and British Vogue, respectively), I’ve come to the conclusion that seeing her was exciting to me because she’s still that star she was three years ago: the model of models. And while I’d love to see Freja back on a hundred runways every year, the odd sighting is definitely more thrilling. In a world where Kate Moss is hunted by paparazzi, and Cara Delevingne is nearly a household name, still having someone like Freja in the industry, with her superstar aura of mystery and rock ‘n’ roll carelessness, is really quite something.