DANISH MODEL Freja Beha Erichsen is experiencing the peculiar mix of relief and remorse familiar to any student fresh off exams. Yesterday she took a chemistry final at her childhood home in bucolic Birkerød, 15 miles north of Copenhagen, and, “It didn’t go very well,” she says ruefully. “It’s a hard subject to study [on your own]. That will remain my excuse.”*
Erichsen, 27, is currently pursuing her high school equivalency degree, “10 years later,” she points out. That’s because in 2005 she bowed out of her senior year to make her runway debut for Prada, before starring in ads for Jil Sander and Balenciaga and landing the cover of French Vogue. It was the beginning of a career that now includes multiple international Vogue covers as well as campaigns for Chanel, Tiffany, Saint Laurent, Chloé and Nicolas Ghesquière’s recent reboot of Louis Vuitton.
None of this was anticipated when a scout approached her on a Copenhagen street when she was just 15 years old. “I grew up playing soccer with the boys—quite far from reading magazines,” says Erichsen, whose father is a lawyer and mother runs the not-for-profit Danish Stroke Association. Modeling seemed like a way to earn pocket money. At her first job, when a makeup artist was painting a large circle around one eye, she thought, “What did I get myself into?”
But soon influential figures such as Ghesquière, photographer David Sims and casting director Russell Marsh noticed the self-described tomboy, who found the transition to fashion easier than she expected. “I became one of the androgynous models, which wasn’t that far out of my comfort zone,” she says. Her doe eyes hidden under shaggy bangs and laconic nonchalance didn’t hurt. “She’s like the anti-model model,” says casting director Ashley Brokaw. “She marches to the beat of her own drum—there’s something elusive about it. Everyone wants what they can’t have.”*
In an industry that’s always looking for something new, Erichsen’s versatility has granted her longevity. She’s played everything from a vampy vixen walking a panther in the Louvre courtyard to, more frequently, a Patti Smith doppelgänger. Off-set, her style remains true to her seven-year-old self, when her uniform consisted of 10 pairs of black jeans, 20 T-shirts and “this really cool leather biker jacket with big zips my mom got me,” she recalls. “And that’s been it ever since.”
Though her look has inspired legions of street-style bloggers, Erichsen eschews social media, unlike many of her fellow top models. Instead, she prefers to spend time hiking in locales like the British Lake District or visiting family in Denmark, where she collects mid-century Danish furniture for a townhouse she is renovating in Brooklyn’s Carroll Gardens neighborhood.
Inspired by her mother’s charitable work, she also undertakes projects to support organizations such as Doctors Without Borders. But she has no plans to quit modeling altogether just yet. “I love the process—collaborating with the photographers, traveling and seeing different cultures,” she says. “My mother always said I would regret it if I didn’t do it. And I think she was right.”