Natalia Vodianova: From Fashion Fairy Tale to Philanthropic Movement
The Russian supermodel nicknamed ‘Supernova’ for her spectacular rise will receive The Business of Fashion’s GLOBAL VOICES Award 2017 for her philanthropic and advocacy work.
BY OSMAN AHMED
NOVEMBER 23, 2017 05:26
PARIS, France — Natalia Vodianova is the first to admit that her life took a Disney-worthy twist when she arrived in Paris to pursue a career in modelling. She was a long way from her hometown of Nizhny Novgorod, about 400 kilometres east of Moscow, where she was forced to drop out of school at 11 to sell fruit on the street with her single mother, Larissa. Back home she suffered from the stigma and shame of her family’s poverty and local attitudes to the disability of Oksana, her younger sister who has cerebral palsy and severe autism. Like most fairy tales, her story was laced with the bitter taste of pain and hardship yet, unlike others, her route to heroine came by way of making fairy tales a reality for others.
“When I became a successful model, which luckily didn’t require lots of education, I knew I was leaving millions of people behind,” says Vodianova, with the assured light-heartedness that comes from a deep sense of self-awareness. There is a distinctly post-Soviet resilience about her demeanour. Vodianova talks about her past as though time is vertical and, not one to dwell on the gloom of her childhood, uses it as a driving force for affecting change, whether that’s building 186 play parks around Russia for children, addressing the treatment of disabled children in Russian schools, or creating an app that harnesses the power of social media to raise funds for local charities around the world.
When Vodianova arrived in Paris, she was a blank slate, ready for reinvention. She quickly became known as the girl with the icy blue eyes and heart-shaped visage — “like Romy Schneider,” as fashion people fondly coo. Still to this day, Vodianova’s captivating mix of angelic innocence and animal ferocity teeters the tightrope between girlhood and womanhood. In that sense, she followed in the footsteps of Brooke Shields and Kate Moss, both of whom preceded her as the gamine faces of Calvin Klein.
At the start of Vodianova’s career, she attended 12 to 15 castings a day. Her agency had arranged for her accommodation and a stipend of $100 a week, which was expected to cover her metro pass and living expenses. She managed to save money and send it back to her family, much to her pride. “I could never say that I would make it big. I just wanted to make a little money and not be a failure and bring safety to my mother and sister.” Her drive, borne from the harsh realities of her youth, soon separated her from the competition. As industry legend has it, Vodianova would arrive at castings and, without the means to speak a word of English or French, try to introduce herself in Russian with physical movements and animated cheerfulness. It was such a contrast to the sulking broodiness of other models that it instantly set her apart.
In the blink of an eye, the young model’s stardom ascended so precipitously that it earned her the nickname “Supernova” (today, it’s the name of her company). She quickly became the toast of the fashion world; a muse to designers such as Tom Ford and Calvin Klein, a supermodel-maker if there ever was one; a regular Vogue cover girl (in 2007, she became the first non-celebrity to grace the cover of the American edition in a decade); a billboard-sized face with lucrative cosmetics contracts and campaigns.
“How did I make it to this absolute fairy tale?” she gasps, almost in disbelief herself. At 19, she married Justin Portman, a Prince Charming-type who hailed from one of England’s wealthiest aristocratic families, and became a mother shortly after, resuming her career so seamlessly that she continued to do it another four times (the father of her youngest two children is LVMH executive Antoine Arnault).
“When I started [having children], it was absolutely seen as complete craziness, but I was very much in love and that seemed to rise above everything else. Of course, I would kill my daughter if she was pregnant at 18! But in my culture and where I had come from, it was absolutely normal to have children at that age — if you don’t have a child at 25, something is wrong with you.”
Elbi is a product of experience and frustration, with the aim to democratise philanthropy.
Although Vodianova still models occasionally — “mainly for being me, which is nice” — she is much more likely to be found in the Paris or London offices of Naked Heart Foundation and Elbi — an app that aims to bridge social media and philanthropy for a digitally-savvy generation — and home by 4pm to see to her five children. When she does dust off her supermodel shoes, it has the air of majestic return, like when she ran the Paris Half Marathon in the morning and walked a Louis Vuitton show the same afternoon in 2013. “I do miss those crazy transformations. These people around me creating something incredibly beautiful, and I would be at the centre of their world. It was inspiring, magical and empowering, and it made me want to give them so much in return.”
In 2004 came Vodianova’s higher calling. Armed separatists, mostly Ingush and Chechen, took 1,100 people, including 777 children, hostage for three days in a school in Beslan, North Ossetia, in the North Caucasus region of Russia. In response, Russian security forces stormed the building with tanks, rockets and other heavy weapons. By the bloody and tragic conclusion of the crisis, 385 hostages were killed, including 186 children. The tragedy triggered Vodianova to give back to the children of her homeland, who were still living a reality she knew all too well.
Vodianova’s mission was to create parks where children can play. “Play is something that I lacked when I was little. For me, the few occasions when I was carefree are the precious moments of having a childhood. It’s a therapeutic process and especially with autism, a lot of learning happens through organised play.”
Each of the 186 parks is equipped with special zones for children with musculoskeletal disorders or specially designed to meet the needs of children with learning disabilities. In 2004, when Vodianova started her foundation, there were only 10 parks in the whole of Russia that were of the standard of the ones she has built. She now builds them in partnership with local governments, who are responsible for the parks’ maintenance and upkeep, and Vodianova intends to build 500 of them.
The funding came from throwing lavish balls that would raise millions — so far, Naked Heart Foundation has fundraised close to $60 million. There’s the biennial Love Ball, where starry guests are dressed to the nines in haute couture, and the Fund Fair, an extravagantly themed Victorian fun fair with top-notch prizes and attractions: face painting by Pat McGrath; fortune telling by Kristin Scott Thomas; Karlie Kloss selling cookies; a coconut shy and Hook-a-Duck with couture as prizes, for instance. At Halloween earlier this year, the theme of the Fund Fair was “Jeff Koons,” with Vodianova hosting in an inflatable cherry-red Koons creation.
Whereas the Naked Heart Foundation’s primary source of fundraising comes from the ticket price and donations at these events, enabled by Vodianova’s little black book, a new platform that Vodianova has been developing aims to make charity fundraising more accessible to those who can’t afford a $40,000-a-plate gala.
“If you are a regular person and not Bill Gates, if you don’t have much time or know who to give to and how to do it, you wouldn’t know where to donate. Even with very large organisations, if you donate your $5 or $1,000, you never know the impact you create. Elbi is a product of experience and frustration, with the aim to democratise philanthropy.”
Vodianova’s pioneering philanthropy app, Elbi, connects users with small charities around the world. At the click of the “love button” a micro-donation of $1 is made to the charity, with the option to donate more, or to share the charity’s profile and story with friends. Each day, new charities are presented with engaging video and written content.
The idea is for users to accumulate points from donating, which will then be converted into “Elbi coins” which they can spend in the “Elbi LoveShop” which features one-of-a-kind products from brands including Louis Vuitton, Stella McCartney, Christian Louboutin, Berluti and H&M, curated by celebrity stylist Jenke Ahmed-Tailly.
We have to reform normal schools and help them to take on children with special needs.
“In the charity sector, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to attract a millennial audience,” says Timon Afinsky, Vodianova’s digital media advisor. The solution is harnessing the power of social media, storytelling and partnerships with desirable brands to gamify the experience for a younger digitally-native audience. However, a vital part of the platform is that every penny donated goes towards the charities (administrative costs are covered by the advisory board) and a key element is the feedback that charities give donors to show exactly what the donations have contributed to.
“It is in the charities’ interest to report the money they’ve received so that they can get more money,” adds Vodianova. “We are building a sophisticated rating system and, in the future, this process can be completely automated.”
The project has been four and a half years in the making as Vodianova’s antidote to the exclusivity of the galas she throws to raise money for her foundation. “I had been thinking about it for so long and we finally feel we have something that has legs. Ten years ago, we couldn’t envision eBay and Amazon or Alibaba making it so easy to just order anything online. Why can’t we do the same with philanthropy? Why can’t we fund what we want to fund? Today, young people want some kind of transaction, and for a brand it’s a fantastic way to reward young people [for] doing good. You don’t have a choice because consumers are so aware.”
Meanwhile, in the last year, the modelling world has been shaken by a torrent of accusations and allegations of sexual harassment that reached boiling point following the revelations of Harvey Weinstein’s sexual harassment cases. Subsequently, the fashion industry has come under the spotlight for its unregulated working conditions, which can often result in abuses of power by predatory figures, and one wonders what Vodianova — as a model’s model — makes of it all.
Earlier this year, Antoine Arnault, together with François-Henri Pinault of Kering established an unprecedented Model Charter to protect models working for both conglomerates’ roster of fashion houses. Vodianova insists she was lucky in her youth.
“I was treated like a princess. I was lucky to have fallen into the caring of hands of the right agents. If they represent you well, you can pick up the phone and tell them about something and ask them what to do about it. If you feel comfortable to speak to your agents, and you don’t assume that something is normal when it’s not, it’s an important factor for girls feeling safe.”
She’s a vocal supporter of the “Responsible Trust for Models,” a regulation committee led by Elizabeth Peyton-Jones. “Creating a standard for agencies is the first and most important step. [Peyton-Jones] is not asking for the impossible. There should be some kind of governing body that is giving licences to agencies as they are self-governing bodies.”
Vodianova knows a fair thing about the need to regulate autocratic institutions. In 2010, she expanded her foundation’s mission to include “Every Child Deserves a Family,” which provides support to families who have children with special needs, with the aim of reforming the Russian education system. “This is much more profound work, I guess. We are touching a very, very serious issue: children being abandoned into institutions, which often do not have very good specialists. We have to reform normal schools and help them to take on children with special needs.”
The trouble, she explains, is that admissions are often at the discretion of the heads of schools, some of whom are progressive, and others completely intolerant of disability. “We work with local governments to create state-run programmes for children with autism so that they can have all the evidence-based practises and help them become more adapted to society, but we can only suggest.” It doesn’t help that the education and social affairs budgets have been cut in recent years.
Vodianova is a firm believer that fashion can be a platform for social change, especially as the biggest businesses place ever greater emphasis on their corporate social responsibility. “The industry can be tricky — we either love or hate it — but it is incredibly powerful because of [its] financial power, and also because dressing is such an integral part of being human. Another thing is that the first question that young talented [recruits] who come for interviews at a company ask is, “What does this brand give back?”
The Business of Fashion is honoured to present the Global VOICES Award 2017 to Natalia Vodianova for outstanding achievement in fashion and exemplary impact on the wider world. VOICES 2017 takes place from 29 November-2 December in partnership with QIC Global Real Estate.
source: https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/voices/natalia-vodianova-from-fashion-fairy-tale-to-philanthropic-movement
The Russian supermodel nicknamed ‘Supernova’ for her spectacular rise will receive The Business of Fashion’s GLOBAL VOICES Award 2017 for her philanthropic and advocacy work.
BY OSMAN AHMED
NOVEMBER 23, 2017 05:26
PARIS, France — Natalia Vodianova is the first to admit that her life took a Disney-worthy twist when she arrived in Paris to pursue a career in modelling. She was a long way from her hometown of Nizhny Novgorod, about 400 kilometres east of Moscow, where she was forced to drop out of school at 11 to sell fruit on the street with her single mother, Larissa. Back home she suffered from the stigma and shame of her family’s poverty and local attitudes to the disability of Oksana, her younger sister who has cerebral palsy and severe autism. Like most fairy tales, her story was laced with the bitter taste of pain and hardship yet, unlike others, her route to heroine came by way of making fairy tales a reality for others.
“When I became a successful model, which luckily didn’t require lots of education, I knew I was leaving millions of people behind,” says Vodianova, with the assured light-heartedness that comes from a deep sense of self-awareness. There is a distinctly post-Soviet resilience about her demeanour. Vodianova talks about her past as though time is vertical and, not one to dwell on the gloom of her childhood, uses it as a driving force for affecting change, whether that’s building 186 play parks around Russia for children, addressing the treatment of disabled children in Russian schools, or creating an app that harnesses the power of social media to raise funds for local charities around the world.
When Vodianova arrived in Paris, she was a blank slate, ready for reinvention. She quickly became known as the girl with the icy blue eyes and heart-shaped visage — “like Romy Schneider,” as fashion people fondly coo. Still to this day, Vodianova’s captivating mix of angelic innocence and animal ferocity teeters the tightrope between girlhood and womanhood. In that sense, she followed in the footsteps of Brooke Shields and Kate Moss, both of whom preceded her as the gamine faces of Calvin Klein.
At the start of Vodianova’s career, she attended 12 to 15 castings a day. Her agency had arranged for her accommodation and a stipend of $100 a week, which was expected to cover her metro pass and living expenses. She managed to save money and send it back to her family, much to her pride. “I could never say that I would make it big. I just wanted to make a little money and not be a failure and bring safety to my mother and sister.” Her drive, borne from the harsh realities of her youth, soon separated her from the competition. As industry legend has it, Vodianova would arrive at castings and, without the means to speak a word of English or French, try to introduce herself in Russian with physical movements and animated cheerfulness. It was such a contrast to the sulking broodiness of other models that it instantly set her apart.
In the blink of an eye, the young model’s stardom ascended so precipitously that it earned her the nickname “Supernova” (today, it’s the name of her company). She quickly became the toast of the fashion world; a muse to designers such as Tom Ford and Calvin Klein, a supermodel-maker if there ever was one; a regular Vogue cover girl (in 2007, she became the first non-celebrity to grace the cover of the American edition in a decade); a billboard-sized face with lucrative cosmetics contracts and campaigns.
“How did I make it to this absolute fairy tale?” she gasps, almost in disbelief herself. At 19, she married Justin Portman, a Prince Charming-type who hailed from one of England’s wealthiest aristocratic families, and became a mother shortly after, resuming her career so seamlessly that she continued to do it another four times (the father of her youngest two children is LVMH executive Antoine Arnault).
“When I started [having children], it was absolutely seen as complete craziness, but I was very much in love and that seemed to rise above everything else. Of course, I would kill my daughter if she was pregnant at 18! But in my culture and where I had come from, it was absolutely normal to have children at that age — if you don’t have a child at 25, something is wrong with you.”
Elbi is a product of experience and frustration, with the aim to democratise philanthropy.
Although Vodianova still models occasionally — “mainly for being me, which is nice” — she is much more likely to be found in the Paris or London offices of Naked Heart Foundation and Elbi — an app that aims to bridge social media and philanthropy for a digitally-savvy generation — and home by 4pm to see to her five children. When she does dust off her supermodel shoes, it has the air of majestic return, like when she ran the Paris Half Marathon in the morning and walked a Louis Vuitton show the same afternoon in 2013. “I do miss those crazy transformations. These people around me creating something incredibly beautiful, and I would be at the centre of their world. It was inspiring, magical and empowering, and it made me want to give them so much in return.”
In 2004 came Vodianova’s higher calling. Armed separatists, mostly Ingush and Chechen, took 1,100 people, including 777 children, hostage for three days in a school in Beslan, North Ossetia, in the North Caucasus region of Russia. In response, Russian security forces stormed the building with tanks, rockets and other heavy weapons. By the bloody and tragic conclusion of the crisis, 385 hostages were killed, including 186 children. The tragedy triggered Vodianova to give back to the children of her homeland, who were still living a reality she knew all too well.
Vodianova’s mission was to create parks where children can play. “Play is something that I lacked when I was little. For me, the few occasions when I was carefree are the precious moments of having a childhood. It’s a therapeutic process and especially with autism, a lot of learning happens through organised play.”
Each of the 186 parks is equipped with special zones for children with musculoskeletal disorders or specially designed to meet the needs of children with learning disabilities. In 2004, when Vodianova started her foundation, there were only 10 parks in the whole of Russia that were of the standard of the ones she has built. She now builds them in partnership with local governments, who are responsible for the parks’ maintenance and upkeep, and Vodianova intends to build 500 of them.
The funding came from throwing lavish balls that would raise millions — so far, Naked Heart Foundation has fundraised close to $60 million. There’s the biennial Love Ball, where starry guests are dressed to the nines in haute couture, and the Fund Fair, an extravagantly themed Victorian fun fair with top-notch prizes and attractions: face painting by Pat McGrath; fortune telling by Kristin Scott Thomas; Karlie Kloss selling cookies; a coconut shy and Hook-a-Duck with couture as prizes, for instance. At Halloween earlier this year, the theme of the Fund Fair was “Jeff Koons,” with Vodianova hosting in an inflatable cherry-red Koons creation.
Whereas the Naked Heart Foundation’s primary source of fundraising comes from the ticket price and donations at these events, enabled by Vodianova’s little black book, a new platform that Vodianova has been developing aims to make charity fundraising more accessible to those who can’t afford a $40,000-a-plate gala.
“If you are a regular person and not Bill Gates, if you don’t have much time or know who to give to and how to do it, you wouldn’t know where to donate. Even with very large organisations, if you donate your $5 or $1,000, you never know the impact you create. Elbi is a product of experience and frustration, with the aim to democratise philanthropy.”
Vodianova’s pioneering philanthropy app, Elbi, connects users with small charities around the world. At the click of the “love button” a micro-donation of $1 is made to the charity, with the option to donate more, or to share the charity’s profile and story with friends. Each day, new charities are presented with engaging video and written content.
The idea is for users to accumulate points from donating, which will then be converted into “Elbi coins” which they can spend in the “Elbi LoveShop” which features one-of-a-kind products from brands including Louis Vuitton, Stella McCartney, Christian Louboutin, Berluti and H&M, curated by celebrity stylist Jenke Ahmed-Tailly.
We have to reform normal schools and help them to take on children with special needs.
“In the charity sector, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to attract a millennial audience,” says Timon Afinsky, Vodianova’s digital media advisor. The solution is harnessing the power of social media, storytelling and partnerships with desirable brands to gamify the experience for a younger digitally-native audience. However, a vital part of the platform is that every penny donated goes towards the charities (administrative costs are covered by the advisory board) and a key element is the feedback that charities give donors to show exactly what the donations have contributed to.
“It is in the charities’ interest to report the money they’ve received so that they can get more money,” adds Vodianova. “We are building a sophisticated rating system and, in the future, this process can be completely automated.”
The project has been four and a half years in the making as Vodianova’s antidote to the exclusivity of the galas she throws to raise money for her foundation. “I had been thinking about it for so long and we finally feel we have something that has legs. Ten years ago, we couldn’t envision eBay and Amazon or Alibaba making it so easy to just order anything online. Why can’t we do the same with philanthropy? Why can’t we fund what we want to fund? Today, young people want some kind of transaction, and for a brand it’s a fantastic way to reward young people [for] doing good. You don’t have a choice because consumers are so aware.”
Meanwhile, in the last year, the modelling world has been shaken by a torrent of accusations and allegations of sexual harassment that reached boiling point following the revelations of Harvey Weinstein’s sexual harassment cases. Subsequently, the fashion industry has come under the spotlight for its unregulated working conditions, which can often result in abuses of power by predatory figures, and one wonders what Vodianova — as a model’s model — makes of it all.
Earlier this year, Antoine Arnault, together with François-Henri Pinault of Kering established an unprecedented Model Charter to protect models working for both conglomerates’ roster of fashion houses. Vodianova insists she was lucky in her youth.
“I was treated like a princess. I was lucky to have fallen into the caring of hands of the right agents. If they represent you well, you can pick up the phone and tell them about something and ask them what to do about it. If you feel comfortable to speak to your agents, and you don’t assume that something is normal when it’s not, it’s an important factor for girls feeling safe.”
She’s a vocal supporter of the “Responsible Trust for Models,” a regulation committee led by Elizabeth Peyton-Jones. “Creating a standard for agencies is the first and most important step. [Peyton-Jones] is not asking for the impossible. There should be some kind of governing body that is giving licences to agencies as they are self-governing bodies.”
Vodianova knows a fair thing about the need to regulate autocratic institutions. In 2010, she expanded her foundation’s mission to include “Every Child Deserves a Family,” which provides support to families who have children with special needs, with the aim of reforming the Russian education system. “This is much more profound work, I guess. We are touching a very, very serious issue: children being abandoned into institutions, which often do not have very good specialists. We have to reform normal schools and help them to take on children with special needs.”
The trouble, she explains, is that admissions are often at the discretion of the heads of schools, some of whom are progressive, and others completely intolerant of disability. “We work with local governments to create state-run programmes for children with autism so that they can have all the evidence-based practises and help them become more adapted to society, but we can only suggest.” It doesn’t help that the education and social affairs budgets have been cut in recent years.
Vodianova is a firm believer that fashion can be a platform for social change, especially as the biggest businesses place ever greater emphasis on their corporate social responsibility. “The industry can be tricky — we either love or hate it — but it is incredibly powerful because of [its] financial power, and also because dressing is such an integral part of being human. Another thing is that the first question that young talented [recruits] who come for interviews at a company ask is, “What does this brand give back?”
The Business of Fashion is honoured to present the Global VOICES Award 2017 to Natalia Vodianova for outstanding achievement in fashion and exemplary impact on the wider world. VOICES 2017 takes place from 29 November-2 December in partnership with QIC Global Real Estate.
source: https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/voices/natalia-vodianova-from-fashion-fairy-tale-to-philanthropic-movement
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Vogue Italia December 2017: ”The Celebration Issue”
Natalia Vodianova by Mert and Marcus.
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Natalia Vodianova by Mert and Marcus.
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Natalia Vodianova’s New Video Series Tackles Every Single Period Taboo
Jennifer Ferrise Dec 11, 2017 @ 1:30 pm
From cramps to mood swings, most of us have experienced some unfortunate form of PMS. So why, in 2017, is it still so taboo to talk about it?
That’s a question that Natalia Vodianova is setting out to answer. In partnership with Flo, a leading women’s health platform and app, the supermodel is debuting a new weekly video series, “Let’s Talk About It. Period.” that features candid Q&A’s with tastemakers like Emily Ratajkowski, Soo Joo Park, and InStyle Editor-In-Chief Laura Brown about that oh-so-special time of the month.
By bringing humor to the conversation, Vodianova aims to free the dialogue that surrounds female wellness and sexuality, while also inspiring women to take control of their health. "I hope that very soon we will have different attitudes towards this [topic],” said Vodianova, of the project that is also supported by the UNFPA. “[If we can all] laugh about the fact that you stained your white perfect pants, that’s when something will click in everyone else's minds. And they’ll say it’s normal.”
The first video, which launches today on the Flo platform, features a frank sit-down with Vodianova and Victoria’s Secret Angel Alexina Graham, where they discuss topics like powering through painful cramps on set and the stigma that still surrounds menstruation. “I think it’s ridiculous how people don’t talk about it,” said Graham. “It’s still such a taboo thing, but it happens to every woman. People do get uncomfortable a lot—like too much information—but I talk about it all the time. I think it’s important."
Graham also points out that being on your period isn’t always so bad. When Vodianova asked her to name three reasons why she loves her monthly flow, she was quick to respond. “[It means] I’m not pregnant, I get bigger boobs, and I feel healthy, like it’s cleaning out my body,” she said. “Also, I can binge on chocolate!”
To see the full video, go to Flo.health to download the Flo app.
source: instyle.com
Jennifer Ferrise Dec 11, 2017 @ 1:30 pm
From cramps to mood swings, most of us have experienced some unfortunate form of PMS. So why, in 2017, is it still so taboo to talk about it?
That’s a question that Natalia Vodianova is setting out to answer. In partnership with Flo, a leading women’s health platform and app, the supermodel is debuting a new weekly video series, “Let’s Talk About It. Period.” that features candid Q&A’s with tastemakers like Emily Ratajkowski, Soo Joo Park, and InStyle Editor-In-Chief Laura Brown about that oh-so-special time of the month.
By bringing humor to the conversation, Vodianova aims to free the dialogue that surrounds female wellness and sexuality, while also inspiring women to take control of their health. "I hope that very soon we will have different attitudes towards this [topic],” said Vodianova, of the project that is also supported by the UNFPA. “[If we can all] laugh about the fact that you stained your white perfect pants, that’s when something will click in everyone else's minds. And they’ll say it’s normal.”
The first video, which launches today on the Flo platform, features a frank sit-down with Vodianova and Victoria’s Secret Angel Alexina Graham, where they discuss topics like powering through painful cramps on set and the stigma that still surrounds menstruation. “I think it’s ridiculous how people don’t talk about it,” said Graham. “It’s still such a taboo thing, but it happens to every woman. People do get uncomfortable a lot—like too much information—but I talk about it all the time. I think it’s important."
Graham also points out that being on your period isn’t always so bad. When Vodianova asked her to name three reasons why she loves her monthly flow, she was quick to respond. “[It means] I’m not pregnant, I get bigger boobs, and I feel healthy, like it’s cleaning out my body,” she said. “Also, I can binge on chocolate!”
To see the full video, go to Flo.health to download the Flo app.
source: instyle.com
This is a continuation thread, the old thread is [split]241863[/split]
_______________________
Natalia Vodianova’s New Video Series Tackles Every Single Period Taboo
Jennifer Ferrise Dec 11, 2017 @ 1:30 pm
From cramps to mood swings, most of us have experienced some unfortunate form of PMS. So why, in 2017, is it still so taboo to talk about it?
That’s a question that Natalia Vodianova is setting out to answer. In partnership with Flo, a leading women’s health platform and app, the supermodel is debuting a new weekly video series, “Let’s Talk About It. Period.” that features candid Q&A’s with tastemakers like Emily Ratajkowski, Soo Joo Park, and InStyle Editor-In-Chief Laura Brown about that oh-so-special time of the month.
By bringing humor to the conversation, Vodianova aims to free the dialogue that surrounds female wellness and sexuality, while also inspiring women to take control of their health. "I hope that very soon we will have different attitudes towards this [topic],” said Vodianova, of the project that is also supported by the UNFPA. “[If we can all] laugh about the fact that you stained your white perfect pants, that’s when something will click in everyone else's minds. And they’ll say it’s normal.”
The first video, which launches today on the Flo platform, features a frank sit-down with Vodianova and Victoria’s Secret Angel Alexina Graham, where they discuss topics like powering through painful cramps on set and the stigma that still surrounds menstruation. “I think it’s ridiculous how people don’t talk about it,” said Graham. “It’s still such a taboo thing, but it happens to every woman. People do get uncomfortable a lot—like too much information—but I talk about it all the time. I think it’s important."
Graham also points out that being on your period isn’t always so bad. When Vodianova asked her to name three reasons why she loves her monthly flow, she was quick to respond. “[It means] I’m not pregnant, I get bigger boobs, and I feel healthy, like it’s cleaning out my body,” she said. “Also, I can binge on chocolate!”
To see the full video, go to Flo.health to download the Flo app.
source: instyle.com
_______________________
Natalia Vodianova’s New Video Series Tackles Every Single Period Taboo
Jennifer Ferrise Dec 11, 2017 @ 1:30 pm
From cramps to mood swings, most of us have experienced some unfortunate form of PMS. So why, in 2017, is it still so taboo to talk about it?
That’s a question that Natalia Vodianova is setting out to answer. In partnership with Flo, a leading women’s health platform and app, the supermodel is debuting a new weekly video series, “Let’s Talk About It. Period.” that features candid Q&A’s with tastemakers like Emily Ratajkowski, Soo Joo Park, and InStyle Editor-In-Chief Laura Brown about that oh-so-special time of the month.
By bringing humor to the conversation, Vodianova aims to free the dialogue that surrounds female wellness and sexuality, while also inspiring women to take control of their health. "I hope that very soon we will have different attitudes towards this [topic],” said Vodianova, of the project that is also supported by the UNFPA. “[If we can all] laugh about the fact that you stained your white perfect pants, that’s when something will click in everyone else's minds. And they’ll say it’s normal.”
The first video, which launches today on the Flo platform, features a frank sit-down with Vodianova and Victoria’s Secret Angel Alexina Graham, where they discuss topics like powering through painful cramps on set and the stigma that still surrounds menstruation. “I think it’s ridiculous how people don’t talk about it,” said Graham. “It’s still such a taboo thing, but it happens to every woman. People do get uncomfortable a lot—like too much information—but I talk about it all the time. I think it’s important."
Graham also points out that being on your period isn’t always so bad. When Vodianova asked her to name three reasons why she loves her monthly flow, she was quick to respond. “[It means] I’m not pregnant, I get bigger boobs, and I feel healthy, like it’s cleaning out my body,” she said. “Also, I can binge on chocolate!”
To see the full video, go to Flo.health to download the Flo app.
source: instyle.com
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Natalia Vodianova: supermodel mum, five kids and £30m for charity
Catwalk, school run and raising millions: Natalia Vodianova, 35, explains how she does it all
Hilary Rose, December 9 2017, 12:01am,
Supermodels are not generally known for their good manners, but Natalia Vodianova arrives profuse with apologies for her lateness. “I hate,” she says, fixing me with her famous blue-eyed stare, “being late.” This is the woman whom Mario Testino calls Supernova, and you can see his point. Vodianova is a force of nature. This is a woman who has dragged herself up from a dirt-poor childhood in provincial Russia, made a fortune as a model and set up a charity that has raised £30 million. Along the way she has become a mother of five who now lives with her second husband, the heir to the LVMH fortune, in an apartment in Paris filled with children’s toys and expensive modern art. All of which is not bad for 35.
“My life is all about fight,” she says in fluent, Russian-accented English. “I constantly fight. It’s in my nature. That’s what I grew up doing. I’m still doing it.”
Vodianova is dressed in leopard-print silk pyjamas by Blumarine and Louis Vuitton high-heeled ankle boots, and is carrying an ostrich-skin Dior bag. Her only jewellery is a thin, barely there gold wedding ring and a watch with a crocodile-skin strap and a face circled with diamonds.
She grew up in Nizhny Novgorod, one of three daughters of a single mother. Her father left when she was a toddler, as did her stepfather when her autistic half-sister, Oksana, was born. Her mother juggled four jobs to stay afloat and taught her that the only person she could rely on was herself. Vodianova says that she comes from a family of “matriarchs and crazy women who are very self-reliant”. Scouted at 15, she flew to Paris at 17 and soon had to borrow $5,000 from her agent to stop her mother being evicted. The pressure was on her to earn.
“Those first castings were daunting. I would be in a queue of 50 European girls who were so cool, so beautiful. I didn’t speak English, I didn’t have that finesse, I couldn’t show that I had personality. But I was so excited to be there, and I guess I needed it more than the others.”
Ask her if, wandering around Paris now, she thinks back to that time, on her own, so young and far from home, and she shrugs. She’s not really the reflective type. Too busy. She was quickly picked by Tom Ford to front a campaign for Gucci and, having moved to New York, met her first husband, Justin Portman, the aristocratic heir to a property empire. By the age of 19 she was pregnant with their first child. It was after she had given birth to Lucas, now 16, that she says her career really took off.
“After giving birth, I lost weight. I went from having a baby-faced Lolita kind of bone structure to a model size. A year later my agent called me and said, ‘The brands are saying that you have put on 2cm everywhere.’ We’re talking two kilos,” she says, still outraged after 16 years, “which was me getting back to my normal healthy weight.”
So how did she react?
“I said, ‘Tell them to bugger off. Tell them to adjust their clothes.’ ”
The reason she could do that, she concedes, was that she had contracts with Calvin Klein and L’Oréal. She was lucky. She was sufficiently successful to dictate her own rules, and she worries about all the girls who are not in that position and are desperate to earn money. Nevertheless, she would have no qualms about letting her daughter, Neva, model when she is older, because she believes that she has instilled in her the self-belief required to stay afloat, and the confidence to say “No”.
She married Portman in 2001 and went on to have two more children — Viktor, now nine, and Neva, eleven — before divorcing in 2011. She said recently that the marriage failed because she is a workaholic and Portman wasn’t. Soon after, she was seen with Antoine Arnault, a businessman and heir to the multibillion-pound LVMH fashion empire. The couple have two sons, Maxim, three, and Roman, one, and she goes gooey-eyed when she talks about Arnault. He is, she says, The One.
“I think so, yes. It’s incredible. It’s close to impossible . . . it’s so tough to find that one person, because people are so distracted.”
It is partly because she has a daughter that Vodianova is lending her energies to an app called Flo and a campaign called “Let’s Talk About It. Period”. The app interprets data from its 12 million female users and helps them to track their cycle: when their periods will start and end, when they’re ovulating, what their symptoms might mean. A friend recommended she use it to track her own fertility, and she was won over.
“It’s an online community of anonymous women talking to other women. Flo helps with family planning and with ending the stigma around periods. Did you know that one in ten girls in the world drop out of school when they start their periods? And 45 per cent of girls in India? That’s staggering.”
I‘d love to say I cook for my family, but it doesn’t make sense. It takes too much time
She talks to her sons about women’s health and periods, so they don’t think that it’s something to s****** about. Until now, her philanthropic focus was on special-needs children, not female empowerment, thanks to her charity, the Naked Heart Foundation, which helps disabled children in Russia. Recently, though, she has been looking at women’s rights from the perspective of a mother, and she’s indignant about what she sees.
“A big group like LVMH, 60 per cent of employees are women, but when you’re talking about really high positions there’s definitely no equality.”
Her life now in Paris is packed — “I sometimes think that I work too hard” — and although her children’s upbringing is very different from her own, getting a job is non-negotiable.
“Of course they have to work. Luckily for me I’ve succeeded in raising a son who’s very ambitious. I’m very proud of him. I used to think, ‘How do I inspire him to be competitive?’ Especially in an environment where their father [Portman] doesn’t work, so they’re seeing an option where you don’t have to work.”
She has tried to teach them how fortunate they are by taking them to see her tiny childhood home, and to a Russian orphanage for special-needs children, where the conditions shocked them into doing as they were told for two whole days. Mostly, though, “it’s my past and my reality. I can have conversations with them about this, but I never get angry with them for not knowing what I know.”
There are at least no differences between her and Portman over who gets the kids at Christmas. She celebrates Russian Christmas on January 7, so Portman gets their children for December 25. Until then, weekends are family time, when she avoids making plans and tries to only glance at her phone. She and Arnault hardly ever go out, and instead enjoy eating round the table as a family. Ask her if she enjoys cooking, though, and she looks as if I’ve suggested she give her children a sharp slap before bedtime.
“No! Cooking would be so unrewarding. It takes too much time. If you have five kids and you can afford someone else to do the cooking, then unless you’re doing it with them you’re taking time away from them. I’d love to say I cook for my family, but it doesn’t make sense.”
She once said that she believed men and women should share the household chores 50:50. Does she practise what she preaches? “Oh, absolutely. I think at the moment he’s doing more than I am.”
Such as?
Well, you know, it’s getting up at night for the kids and . . . managing . . . looking for people . . . Yeah,” she trails off finally. “It’s hard work.”
Vodianova knows better than anyone that the rich are different. Perhaps especially, though, when it comes to the chores.
Natalia Vodianova is the ambassador for the Flo app, available to download on iOS and Android. For more information visit flo.health. The Flo ‘let’s talk about it’ campaign launches on December 11. To see Natalia interviewing the model Alexina Graham, visit youtu.be/6IRMnshmLo8
Natalia Vodianova’s perfect weekend
Slippers or stilettos?
Stilettos
TV or theatre?
TV
Do your own cooking or Deliveroo?
Delivery. Sushi. The children love it, even the babies
Pilates or personal trainer?
Pilates
Bonkbuster or classic novel?
Classic novel. The last book I read is sort of a blockbuster called Ready Player One. It’s like Harry Potter mixed with The Matrix
Wine or water?
Water
Family night in or glitzy night out?
Family night in
Croissant or kefir?
Croissant
I couldn’t get through the weekend without . . .
Fresh air
source: thetimes.co.uk
Catwalk, school run and raising millions: Natalia Vodianova, 35, explains how she does it all
Hilary Rose, December 9 2017, 12:01am,
Supermodels are not generally known for their good manners, but Natalia Vodianova arrives profuse with apologies for her lateness. “I hate,” she says, fixing me with her famous blue-eyed stare, “being late.” This is the woman whom Mario Testino calls Supernova, and you can see his point. Vodianova is a force of nature. This is a woman who has dragged herself up from a dirt-poor childhood in provincial Russia, made a fortune as a model and set up a charity that has raised £30 million. Along the way she has become a mother of five who now lives with her second husband, the heir to the LVMH fortune, in an apartment in Paris filled with children’s toys and expensive modern art. All of which is not bad for 35.
“My life is all about fight,” she says in fluent, Russian-accented English. “I constantly fight. It’s in my nature. That’s what I grew up doing. I’m still doing it.”
Vodianova is dressed in leopard-print silk pyjamas by Blumarine and Louis Vuitton high-heeled ankle boots, and is carrying an ostrich-skin Dior bag. Her only jewellery is a thin, barely there gold wedding ring and a watch with a crocodile-skin strap and a face circled with diamonds.
She grew up in Nizhny Novgorod, one of three daughters of a single mother. Her father left when she was a toddler, as did her stepfather when her autistic half-sister, Oksana, was born. Her mother juggled four jobs to stay afloat and taught her that the only person she could rely on was herself. Vodianova says that she comes from a family of “matriarchs and crazy women who are very self-reliant”. Scouted at 15, she flew to Paris at 17 and soon had to borrow $5,000 from her agent to stop her mother being evicted. The pressure was on her to earn.
“Those first castings were daunting. I would be in a queue of 50 European girls who were so cool, so beautiful. I didn’t speak English, I didn’t have that finesse, I couldn’t show that I had personality. But I was so excited to be there, and I guess I needed it more than the others.”
Ask her if, wandering around Paris now, she thinks back to that time, on her own, so young and far from home, and she shrugs. She’s not really the reflective type. Too busy. She was quickly picked by Tom Ford to front a campaign for Gucci and, having moved to New York, met her first husband, Justin Portman, the aristocratic heir to a property empire. By the age of 19 she was pregnant with their first child. It was after she had given birth to Lucas, now 16, that she says her career really took off.
“After giving birth, I lost weight. I went from having a baby-faced Lolita kind of bone structure to a model size. A year later my agent called me and said, ‘The brands are saying that you have put on 2cm everywhere.’ We’re talking two kilos,” she says, still outraged after 16 years, “which was me getting back to my normal healthy weight.”
So how did she react?
“I said, ‘Tell them to bugger off. Tell them to adjust their clothes.’ ”
The reason she could do that, she concedes, was that she had contracts with Calvin Klein and L’Oréal. She was lucky. She was sufficiently successful to dictate her own rules, and she worries about all the girls who are not in that position and are desperate to earn money. Nevertheless, she would have no qualms about letting her daughter, Neva, model when she is older, because she believes that she has instilled in her the self-belief required to stay afloat, and the confidence to say “No”.
She married Portman in 2001 and went on to have two more children — Viktor, now nine, and Neva, eleven — before divorcing in 2011. She said recently that the marriage failed because she is a workaholic and Portman wasn’t. Soon after, she was seen with Antoine Arnault, a businessman and heir to the multibillion-pound LVMH fashion empire. The couple have two sons, Maxim, three, and Roman, one, and she goes gooey-eyed when she talks about Arnault. He is, she says, The One.
“I think so, yes. It’s incredible. It’s close to impossible . . . it’s so tough to find that one person, because people are so distracted.”
It is partly because she has a daughter that Vodianova is lending her energies to an app called Flo and a campaign called “Let’s Talk About It. Period”. The app interprets data from its 12 million female users and helps them to track their cycle: when their periods will start and end, when they’re ovulating, what their symptoms might mean. A friend recommended she use it to track her own fertility, and she was won over.
“It’s an online community of anonymous women talking to other women. Flo helps with family planning and with ending the stigma around periods. Did you know that one in ten girls in the world drop out of school when they start their periods? And 45 per cent of girls in India? That’s staggering.”
I‘d love to say I cook for my family, but it doesn’t make sense. It takes too much time
She talks to her sons about women’s health and periods, so they don’t think that it’s something to s****** about. Until now, her philanthropic focus was on special-needs children, not female empowerment, thanks to her charity, the Naked Heart Foundation, which helps disabled children in Russia. Recently, though, she has been looking at women’s rights from the perspective of a mother, and she’s indignant about what she sees.
“A big group like LVMH, 60 per cent of employees are women, but when you’re talking about really high positions there’s definitely no equality.”
Her life now in Paris is packed — “I sometimes think that I work too hard” — and although her children’s upbringing is very different from her own, getting a job is non-negotiable.
“Of course they have to work. Luckily for me I’ve succeeded in raising a son who’s very ambitious. I’m very proud of him. I used to think, ‘How do I inspire him to be competitive?’ Especially in an environment where their father [Portman] doesn’t work, so they’re seeing an option where you don’t have to work.”
She has tried to teach them how fortunate they are by taking them to see her tiny childhood home, and to a Russian orphanage for special-needs children, where the conditions shocked them into doing as they were told for two whole days. Mostly, though, “it’s my past and my reality. I can have conversations with them about this, but I never get angry with them for not knowing what I know.”
There are at least no differences between her and Portman over who gets the kids at Christmas. She celebrates Russian Christmas on January 7, so Portman gets their children for December 25. Until then, weekends are family time, when she avoids making plans and tries to only glance at her phone. She and Arnault hardly ever go out, and instead enjoy eating round the table as a family. Ask her if she enjoys cooking, though, and she looks as if I’ve suggested she give her children a sharp slap before bedtime.
“No! Cooking would be so unrewarding. It takes too much time. If you have five kids and you can afford someone else to do the cooking, then unless you’re doing it with them you’re taking time away from them. I’d love to say I cook for my family, but it doesn’t make sense.”
She once said that she believed men and women should share the household chores 50:50. Does she practise what she preaches? “Oh, absolutely. I think at the moment he’s doing more than I am.”
Such as?
Well, you know, it’s getting up at night for the kids and . . . managing . . . looking for people . . . Yeah,” she trails off finally. “It’s hard work.”
Vodianova knows better than anyone that the rich are different. Perhaps especially, though, when it comes to the chores.
Natalia Vodianova is the ambassador for the Flo app, available to download on iOS and Android. For more information visit flo.health. The Flo ‘let’s talk about it’ campaign launches on December 11. To see Natalia interviewing the model Alexina Graham, visit youtu.be/6IRMnshmLo8
Natalia Vodianova’s perfect weekend
Slippers or stilettos?
Stilettos
TV or theatre?
TV
Do your own cooking or Deliveroo?
Delivery. Sushi. The children love it, even the babies
Pilates or personal trainer?
Pilates
Bonkbuster or classic novel?
Classic novel. The last book I read is sort of a blockbuster called Ready Player One. It’s like Harry Potter mixed with The Matrix
Wine or water?
Water
Family night in or glitzy night out?
Family night in
Croissant or kefir?
Croissant
I couldn’t get through the weekend without . . .
Fresh air
source: thetimes.co.uk
happycanadian
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StockholmFW
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StockholmFW
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US InStyle March 2018: Natalia Vodianova by Chris Colls
'Natalia'
Photographer: Chris Colls
Model: Natalia Vodianova
Stylist: Julie Pelipas
Make-up: Gregoris Pyrpylis
Hair stylist: Nabil Harlow
Nails: Alyona
awake-smile
'Natalia'
Photographer: Chris Colls
Model: Natalia Vodianova
Stylist: Julie Pelipas
Make-up: Gregoris Pyrpylis
Hair stylist: Nabil Harlow
Nails: Alyona
awake-smile
la veronika
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Does anyone have her Instyle interview? I heard she is discussing in depth her two marriages and career, like never before. Or at least that’s what I read.
StockholmFW
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Versace Spring/Summer 2018 campaign by Steven Meisel:
Elle France February 2018 Digital Edition via Lala Stone
Elle France February 2018 Digital Edition via Lala Stone
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