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net-a-porterAfter almost giving up on her modeling career, trailblazer SUI HE insists that the secret to her success is knowing she can live without it. By HEATHER HODSON.
Sui He arrives for our breakfast on a bright Tuesday morning, flustered and full of apologies. She has been waiting outside a hotel in downtown Manhattan by mistake, she says in tentative English, her voice so soft you have to lean in to hear her, and now we don’t have much time. After our interview she has to catch a plane to Beijing, she apologizes, shaking my hand and hastily ordering a black tea.
He is dressed for the flight in an off-duty-model version of a long-haul travel outfit – olive-green Burberry sweatshirt, skinny jeans and silver Nike sneakers with a Givenchy tote in her favorite color, jade. Whippet-slim and tall, her face makeup-free and exquisite – eyes the color of dark toffee, angled cheekbones, delicate chiseled nose, and large, fleshy dimples – she appears, at 25, both beyond-her-years glamorous and sweetly girlish.
She is, she explains, always on a flight to somewhere. Last week she was in Sweden, this week it’s Beijing, Shanghai, Paris, and possibly Tokyo or Beijing again – she isn’t sure which. “The worst of it is not that you keep working, but that you never know your time,” says He. “I always have my plan, and it’s always broke! Every month this year I have planned to take a vacation with my friend, but I have to cancel every time. A job comes up and [the agency] says, ‘It’s very important for your career, you have to do it.’” He calculates that she once flew 100 hours in 20 days. “And I flew economy. It nearly killed me!” she laughs. “Hopefully, when I get a boyfriend, he will cut up my passport! I can’t do that but he can. If my agent asks me, I’ll say, ‘Oh, sorry, he did it!’” she giggles, dimples denting her cheeks.
This is the kind of globetrotting schedule that comes as standard with modeling success. In the last three years, He has appeared in campaigns for Ralph Lauren, H&M and Dior for Printemps; walked the runway for almost every major designer, including Chanel, Oscar de la Renta, Fendi and Dior, and appeared on multiple magazine covers, including W and Australian Vogue. In global model rankings, she has reached Models.com’s Top 50, an all-the-more impressive feat because she is breaking new ground: only a handful of models of Asian descent have gained international recognition in the fashion industry. He belongs to an exclusive contingent of models – including Liu Wen, Du Juan, Ming Xi and former The EDIT cover star Fei Fei Sun – whose visibility will increase as the Chinese luxury- goods market continues to swell. Hers is a powerful position to be in.
He was the first model from East Asia to open a runway show for Ralph Lauren; the second ever, after Liu Wen, to walk in the Victoria’s Secret shows; and the first Chinese model to become the face of Shiseido. But when I put it to her that she is something of a trailblazer, He squirms in her seat.
“Every time people say that to me, I feel really shy, because I didn’t do anything,” she says. “This is my job. I’m really lucky – I have this chance to work with the best designers, the makeup artists, the magazines. I still feel like I am a very normal person who got lucky working on this stage. So every time people say, ‘Oh my God, you’re my icon,’ or something, I feel really shy. I feel like, I’m not different from you.” And of her genetics that the rest of the world finds so alluring, she says: “It’s really nothing, [just] appearance.”
He was born in Wenzhou, a small city about an hour’s flight from Shanghai, where her parents, both government workers, still live. Her self-deprecation is, I suspect, the natural fallback position of someone who grew up in an environment where academic success is prized so highly. “When I was in school my family told me I could only wear the school uniform,” she says. “They said, ‘You cannot look at a mirror, you cannot think about beauty, all you should talk about is studying. Learning is everything.’ Because if a girl wants to be beautiful, they will waste their time on, ‘How is my hair? How are my looks?’”
He was a good student, twice class president in high school and swimming competitively for the city from the age of seven. Fashion was an anathema to her. “I didn’t know anything about styling or fashion. I was not interested in that,” she says. “In China, they always do it that way. In America or Europe they let the children choose what they want, but in China, they say, ‘I’ll buy the clothes for you.’” The one model He had heard of while growing up was Kate Moss, but when asked if she has fashion role models, her voice grows steely. “No. I think everybody should be themselves,” she says. “Including me. Everyone is different. I don’t need to learn from someone else.”
When He was 17, her teacher suggested she enter a modeling competition, and against He’s own expectations, she won. With the support of her father (“He said, ‘You chose it and I will support you’”), she moved to Beijing and began her modeling career. Things did not go according to plan, however. “I didn’t get a lot of jobs, I didn’t earn money,” she says, “so I thought I should stop modeling and do something else.” She took a university degree and, at 20, had just decided to give up on modeling, when she was scouted by an Italian agent. Six months later, she made her runway debut in the fall/winter 2011 shows. “I was the new face, and Asian faces [are rare] in Milan, so [my agency] said, If you can walk in four shows you will be huge’,” she recalls. “I did 13.”
At the time, He reassured herself the success wouldn’t last. “I’m that kind of person,” she explains. “I always make myself very clamped down. I don’t want to go up and down, up and down.”
No longer the fashion ingénue who arrived in New York three years ago, He likes to mix labels such as Balenciaga, Dries Van Noten and Alexander Wang with Acne Studios jeans and H&M basics. “I don’t like too much stuff together, I just want it to be simple, easy and chic,” she says. She also checks in each day with her exercise coach in China, who advises her on her diet and workouts (“I exercise not to lose weight, but to keep fit”).
Off-duty, He maintains a separate identity from her modeling life by leading a low-key existence. She shares an apartment on New York’s Lower East Side with two student friends, whom she says are refreshingly free from the complications of the fashion industry. “I love having non-modeling friends,” she says. “They never ask me about my jobs, the gossip. I don’t like [gossip].” And while she is friends with other Chinese models, they never talk shop. “We’re all good friends, but I don’t like talking about work,” says He. “I don’t want to compare.”
Asked what her plans are for the future, and He is sanguine. “I never have plans. I mean, this was a complete surprise, and it changed my life,” she says. “So now I try my best and maybe one day, when the chance comes to do something else, it comes. I just tell myself, you cannot be a popular model forever, because fashion is fast, it keeps changing. So I tell myself that if tomorrow nobody wants me, I’ll still be happy. If tomorrow no one uses me, I can live.”