Ultimate Supermodel Girl Crush: Daria Werbowy

odels are kind of the movie stars of the fashion world, and despite the fact that they are supposed to disappear into whatever “look” they are portraying, some ladies just stand out. From the glamazons of the 60’s and 70’s, to the Supers of the 80’s and 90’s, to the social media personalities of today. We can’t seem to help but idolize these (literal) faces of fashion. We all have our favs – the girls who personify what we love most about the theater that is the fashion industry. But one lady that probably tops everyone’s list is Canadian beauty Daria Werbowy. In the early 2000s it was impossible to open a magazine without seeing Ms. Werbowy everywhere, and in 2009 she broke the industry’s record for the most number of shows walked by a model in a single season. In case you need any more reasons why Daria needs to be your #1 crush (other than looking at her), I’ve got six for ya':

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Daria has been in the fashion game a long time

By Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott

Daria Werbowy was discovered at 14. This is not unusual in the modeling industry, in fact it’s nearly commonplace. Longevity as a model is a lot harder to come by, and after 15 years, Daria Werbowy is showing no signs of slowing down. She is currently one of the highest paid models in the world, bringing home between $3 to $4 million every year. What’s really interesting is that you can watch her develop over the years. Apparently when Helmut Newton met her as a young model, he said “Whatever happened to women?” At the time, Daria was only 20. Looking at some of her fashion magazine images now, she’s would likely be one of his muses.

Her Instagram photos are awesome

Look, there are a lot of models on social media. Most of them give us sneak-peeks in to their personal lives or backstage access to fashion shoots and runway shows. It’s super happy fun times for fashion enthusiasts. But not all who appear in beautiful pictures are great at taking beautiful pictures. Sure, I’m a fashion enthusiast. But first and foremost I am an image enthusiast, and out of all the models on Instagram, Daria Werbowy hands down has the best Instagram pictures. The woman has a wonderful eye for composition, and captures her travels over land and sea. When you’re not getting coffee table book-quality landscapes, there are close-ups of critters in action (moth wings were made for Instagraming), and selfies that look like they came from published editorials. So perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that Daria Werbowy decided to officially take a step forward in pursuing a new career in photography. She even recently shot the fall 2014 campaign for the French label “Equipment” which featured a series of raw self-portraits. Check out Daria’s Instagram account here.

Daria Werbowy is an adventurer

Daria by Cass Bird for T Magazine

While she spends most of her time traveling the world, Daria’s real passion is the water. Werbowy’s love of sailing is so tied to her identity that Grace Coddington even made note of it in her memoir. This is not a “boats are nice, lets go out for a spin” love of sailing. Daria is hard-core. Like, sail across the Atlantic, hard-core. Like competing solo in the Volvo Ocean Race, hard-core. “Sailing is the closest I can get to nature – it’s adrenaline, fear, a constant challenge and learning experience, an adventure into the unknown,” explains Daria, “And of course there is nothing better than wearing the same T-shirt for days and not brushing my hair for weeks.” It takes real commitment to the rush to put yourself out on the open water, but with an avid sailing-fan father, she grew up with it. Basically, Daria is no amateur, and you should not try this at home.

She’s versatile

Obviously being versatile ranks high in the job description for models, and yet many models are known for a specific “look”.  Daria Werbowy seems to be able to bend her beauty to the aesthetic of the photographer, somehow simultaneously blending in and standing out. Not many models can go from a glamorous Testino shoot to raw and captivating for Juergen Teller, and manage to be convincing in both of them. With all of the magazine covers Daria Werbowy has been scoring lately, and her numerous campaigns (most notably Lancome), she easily and frequently dominates the pages of magazines. When we don’t immediately notice that the ethereal beauty in the makeup ads, the haunting woman selling us Celine, and the alien dressed in Balenciaga are all the same person as the Farrah Fawcett-haired cover model, then somebody is very, very good at her job.

Ms. Werbowy genuinely seems like a cool chick

There are the obvious signs of cool – her personal style of leather jackets and loose tee’s, the fact that Daria isn’t posing on red carpets, her general laid-back-ness in interviews. But what really sticks out is that she doesn’t take anything for granted. In addition to giving back (she worked with Lancome to develop a small line of makeup, with the proceeds going to charity), Daria seems genuinely grateful for, and self aware of, just how lucky she is. ‘The great thing about my Lancôme deal is I get to be not just a model, I get a voice,’ she says in an interview with Telegraph UK. ‘Sometimes I wish I didn’t have one because I get really insecure about what I say. But at the end of the day, it is what it is, and I always try to speak the truth.’

Daria is an amazing artist

Cover of Interview, by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott

Although infamously shy about showing her work to the public, Daria has been obsessed with art since her early teens. In fact, it was kind of the reason she got into modeling to begin with. The money she made was meant to fund her art supplies. As a knobby kneed 14 year old, Daria’s initial go at modeling didn’t go as well as she planned. Werbowy was about to give up when her father convinced her to give it one more shot before heading off to art school. “I returned to New York, met my agent and the next day I had an exclusive deal with Prada,” she says of that pivotal moment, “From then on it was all a bit of a blur.” Though she has yet to have a solo show, she has donated her work to charity art galleries where the proceeds went to help at risk youth. And if that doesn’t convince you that Daria is hands down one of the most humble, generous, inspiring not to mention beautiful models in the industry, nothing will.

Daria Werbowy by Mikael Jansson

One finds a variety of stylistic threads within the extensive body of work of Swedish-born photographer Mikael Jansson—from sun-kissed beachscapes to moody black-and-white portraits to high-wattage glamour shots. But Jansson's frequent subject, Canadian supermodel Daria Werbowy, whom he first photographed for Numéro in 2003, sees what ties it all together. "You like women," she says to him at the beginning of their conversation unblocked school. It was a woman who, way back in the 1970s, when Jansson was photographing concerts in Stockholm as a hobby, gave him his first break. A model he met waiting in line for David Bowie tickets hooked him up with his first job as an assistant to photographer Carl Johan Ronn. And for five years, Jansson honed his craft with Ronn, before moving to New York and landing a gig as an assistant to Richard Avedon.

Thirty years later, Jansson is still based in New York, though he frequently shoots in exotic locales for an international roster of big-name publications and brands like Louis Vuitton, Chloé, Calvin Klein, and Diane von Furstenberg. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he's not a star on social media and doesn't relish giving interviews, making him a photographer whose work everyone has seen, yet one whom few know by name.

In July, Jansson returned to Sweden, to his summer cottage on an archipelago near Stockholm, and to Werbowy, whom he photographed outdoors, in various states of undress. The final photo shows Werbowy posing with a poster for I Am Curious (1967), the controversial Swedish film that was banned for its portrayal of nudity and sexuality—and is still a good starting point, Jansson says, for a discussion today.

DARIA WERBOWY: Why don't we start with why you decided to include the picture from I Am Curious.

MIKAEL JANSSON: I thought it would be nice to talk about nudity. I grew up in Sweden around that whole ethos—the comfort with nudity.

WERBOWY: And you take a lot of nudes. For me, I'm very comfortable nude with you. You have a perception of women that I think women appreciate. It's very different from a random picture of a woman naked. Your perspective is more romantic and more respectful of the female body. It comes from a nice place. So, you obviously saw I Am Curious when you were younger. It was banned in a lot of places.

JANSSON: It was banned, but I think it was also the 12th most seen film in America in 1969.

WERBOWY: Nudity seems to be an issue that America can't get over in general. I wonder when the day will come when we finally become okay with it, with the human form.

JANSSON: Things are going backwards, in a funny way.

WERBOWY: When did you get interested in photography?

JANSSON: I got my first camera when I was 11. By 15 or 16, I had my own darkroom in the closet. I started taking a lot of pictures of bands that came to Stockholm. I met this girl when we were lining up for tickets for David Bowie. We slept in sleeping bags for three days and three nights outside the ticket office. The girl, who worked as a model, said, "Oh, I know a photographer who wants an assistant."

WERBOWY: Why do you think you liked Bowie so much?

JANSSON: I thought he was brilliant. I never photographed him and I always wanted to. I did this series of portraits of Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, and others, and we tried to get Bowie but he wasn't available. Iggy was superb and easygoing. He gave so much, like an entire concert. He said to his assistant, "Why don't you run out to the car and get the album Raw Power?" We put it on in the studio and he was just bouncing off the walls in there.

WERBOWY: And then another big part of your career was assisting Avedon.

JANSSON: I worked as an assistant in Stockholm for five years. The photographer was amazing and he taught me about Avedon and Penn and Cartier-Bresson. So I decided that I wanted to go to New York and work for Avedon.

WERBOWY: Careful what you wish for, right?

JANSSON: Exactly. I bought a ticket to New York, and my first phone call was to Avedon's studio. They said, "We don't need anyone now, but send a résumé." So I did. I was freelancing in New York for two months when they called me. I went to three different interviews, and then I got the job and worked there for two years with him.

WERBOWY: What was that like?

JANSSON: It was a fantastic experience. But you had to connect with him outside of photography. I was really into jazz, so I brought my music to the studio and he loved it. So he said, "Mikael is in charge of the music." I had shot Chet Baker in Sweden once before. I showed the picture to Avedon, and he said he wanted to photograph Chet. He said, "Let me know when Chet is playing next time." I said, "He's playing at a small jazz club downtown." He said, "Mikael, to be a photographer, you have to do these kinds of things." He sent me to the club to ask Chet if I could take his picture.

WERBOWY: With fashion now, we don't get as much time to work on something as we normally would.

JANSSON: It's less and less for sure unblocked games online. When I started, people traveled more. You went to a place for a week and took pictures. But now it's very tight schedules.

WERBOWY: We were lucky in Sweden with the summer days, 16 hours of daylight.

JANSSON: It made a difference, I think, in the way the pictures came out.

WERBOWY: It felt different. It didn't seem like there was as much pressure to check the boxes that we sometimes have to these days. What is the wildest, funniest, craziest time you ever had on a shoot?

JANSSON: Well, the nicest time I've had on a shoot was probably the one we just did. [both laugh]

WERBOWY: I was going to say, "Don't say, ‘The one we just did.' " When we went to your cottage by the lake, I felt like I was going back in time—like I was in an old Swedish movie with all the little boats going by. We forget that people live that way still, and we seem to think that it's so long ago and our lives are so quick and so fleeting and fast, and we come and go to all these places. But people do live well and happily and have nice lives in places like that. That jazz musician we were listening to while we were shooting, Jan Johansson—I've been listening to that nonstop.

JANSSON: I got that album when I was 15 and I've been listening to it ever since.

WERBOWY: After we finished shooting, I walked around Stockholm listening to it. They should play that music while you look through the magazine. When you're taking a picture, how involved are you?

JANSSON: I like to capture the moment. I don't want to overdirect, that's for sure. I like to stand back and see what's going to happen.

WERBOWY: That's much more difficult these days with fashion, isn't it?

JANSSON: But there are those little moments in between—like, if you're doing hair and makeup, and I steal a moment right after. There are always moments.

WERBOWY: Why don't you like doing interviews?

JANSSON: I think it's because I'm not that good verbally. I like to take pictures; it's like hiding behind a camera.

WERBOWY: There's truth to that. Words are difficult and photography takes the words away from things. It's difficult to talk about something that seems to come very naturally to you, to explain a process. A moment is really difficult to put on paper.

JANSSON: It happens in a funny way. Oh, we have to talk about the retouching, because I think you look so amazing that I haven't touched the pictures.

WERBOWY: I like that. It's so refreshing. Where do you think the obsession with retouching comes from?

JANSSON: We get carried away with the technique and with what you can do. You get sort of blind.

WERBOWY: Girls don't have knees anymore. Have you noticed that? I didn't know people thought knees were so ugly, but they wipe out all the knees. It's all kneeless people. I think it looks so great to see the real person. I'm not 14 anymore, and I think it's so much more of a celebration of the human existence to see it the real way.

Daria Werbowy: 'I’m still living the dream of backpacks and hostels'

As one of the most sought-after faces in fashion, supermodel Daria Werbowy has travelled the world in style. But she would rather be off-grid and indulging her passion for adventure

'I'm pretty under the radar,' Daria Werbowy says on the phone from New York , despite having appeared on Forbes' list of the highest-paid models in the world and fronted campaigns for most fashion super-brands since being scouted at 14, including this season being an ambassador for Lancôme and the face of campaigns including Céline , Isabel Marant and Lancôme Visionaire cream.
The Kraków-born Canadian-Ukrainian, now 30, splits her time between Ireland and New York.
Cagey about her private life, she has refused to name her boyfriend, a carpenter with whom she lives, until now. 'He's called Tom,' she says.

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Staying under the radar involves going off-grid for months at a time. 'I aim to work in chunks so I also have time to travel for pleasure. I go as far away as possible as often as I can,' Werbowy says, laughing. 'I'm still living the dream of backpacks and hostels. I didn't get to do that when I was 18, so now I'm doing it over and over.' She and Tom recently went on a three-month trip to northern India, touring on motorcycles and 'roughing it'. Bhutan is next. Her travel essentials include trusted beauty products - Sodashi face-compress kits, Lancôme Hydra Zen moisturiser - and her iPod, books and yoga kit.

When Werbowy says she is 'pretty outdoorsy and sporty in general', she is underselling herself. She surfs, sails, skateboards, cycles, hikes, and does ashtanga yoga for two hours every morning. She learnt to sail on Lake Ontario as a child and in 2008 spent 24 days sailing across the Atlantic with her father, sister, brother and three friends. 'It was one of the best experiences of my life. We were in such close quarters - it's amazing that no one was thrown overboard, but we got on really well. We exchanged beer and cigarettes for tuna and mahi mahi with Canadian fishermen who saw our Canadian flag. There was a week of crazy storms when we just drank powdered soups because we couldn't make food, then we had a week when the ocean was like glass. For me sailing is the way to disconnect from the fast-paced world we live in and reconnect with nature in a raw way.'


Daria Werbowy for Lancome. Photo: Alexi Lubomirski for Lancome 
 
Two years ago Werbowy took time out from her intense work schedule. On a plane every four days, she was waking up not knowing where she was and felt 'disconnected from her life'. She began to invest time in relationships, meditation, reading and yoga, and moved to west Cork. 'It's my favourite place on earth, with its Celtic mysticism and rolling landscape,' she says. Her perfect day is aptly understated. 'I get in my piece-of-shit car, a 1979 Vauxhall Viva, with my dog, Strawballz (I know, crazy name - it's a long story, he's a stray), some music, some lunch and a camera and drive around the countryside.'

Photographs of her Irish escapades, interspersed with selfies, have earned her Instagram account, @dotwillow (werbowy means 'willow tree' in Ukrainian), 42,000 followers. 'I used to be freaked out by social media . I saw friends with their phones permanently in front of their faces and thought, "I will never do that." Then a friend persuaded me to do Instagram because they wanted to know where I was in the world. I had nine followers for six months and then it exploded. I check it two or three times a day max, because it's a vortex where I end up losing two hours. I find it interesting from a sociological perspective to see how many likes I get. Something I love gets 45 likes, then, because of what I do, a picture of myself gets 5,000.'

Supermodel Daria Werbowy's Next Move

face of Céline is contemplating a second career—on the other side of the lens

EASY CHIC | Clockwise from left: Werbowy captured by street-style lensman Tommy Ton, 2013; as the face of Lancôme, 2014; in a 2011 ad for Céline, photographed by Juergen Teller Tommy Ton/Trunk Archive; Lancôme courtesy of Firstview.com; Courtesy of Céline

IN A FEW HOURS, Daria Werbowy will board a plane to Peru. She's not bound for a shoot— Mario Testino has already photographed her in the ancient Inca capital of Cuzco wearing haute-trekker garb—but rather intends to spend a couple of weeks in the Amazonian jungle working with a local family to establish a school. "Peru is kind of like my second home," says the Ukrainian-Canadian, who has been traveling regularly to the country for the past five years, in between starring in ad campaigns for Prada, Balenciaga, Salvatore Ferragamo, H&M and cosmetics giant Lancôme, where she has been on contract for nearly a decade.

Photos: Daria Werbowy Models Luxe Urban Clothes

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In fact, Peru may be more like a fourth home, if one also considers Toronto (where she grew up and began modeling at age 14), New York City (where she spends two months a year working, never consecutively) and her current residence in bucolic West Cork, Ireland. And that's not counting her many-months-long expeditions to destinations such as India and Iceland. "If I'm not moving around I feel strange," says the 30-year-old model, who has appeared on the cover of international issues of Vogue over 50 times. In 2008, she stepped away from modeling full-time after realizing that its relentless schedule would never permit her the peripatetic existence she craved. "If you live a fast-paced life, it's easy to lose touch with things that are important," she says. "At the end of the day, I wasn't happy, so I pressed the eject button." Werbowy now uses her free time to surf, sail and practice yoga, as well as work on projects that make use of her art school education, such as the restoration of renowned Irish music venue Connolly's of Leap. "If I'm working, I'll work hard. When I take time off, I take time off hard."

Extended vanishing acts are risky for anyone who earns millions of dollars a year in an industry where visibility is tantamount to livelihood (and where most models see shorter career arcs than professional athletes). But Werbowy's unavailability—as much as her fawnlike features, almond-shape eyes, and much-imitated tomboy style—has only cemented her status as a fashion favorite. In March, Kate Moss styled her for Moss's first official story as British Vogue's contributing fashion editor. And in recent seasons, Werbowy has acted as a kind of advertising proxy for cool-girl designers Isabel Marant and Phoebe Philo of Céline. She's also unafraid to use her body as a canvas, whether lying on a bed of nails for one of Helmut Newton's final shoots before his death in 2004 (she recalls him complaining she was "too skinny") or posing nude for a 2011 French Vogue calendar. "I still get self-conscious in front of the camera," she says, "and for some reason my coping mechanism is to take my clothes off."

 

 STYLED TO A TEE | Clockwise from left: On the runway for Balmain's spring 2010 collection; shot for American Vogue by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott, 2011; The Last Magazine, by Camilla Akrans, 2008; Shot by Patrick Demarchelier for British Vogue, 2013 Courtesy of Firstview.com; Mert Alas & Marcus Piggott; Patrick Demarchelier/Vogue The Conde Nast Publications LTD; Courtesy of the Last Magazine 

 

Still, Werbowy doesn't rely on risqué images to earn "likes" on her inscrutably named Dotwillow Instagram account. Instead, she uses social media as a platform to publish the artistically minded photographs she takes on her trips. She's considering photography, initially a hobby, as her second career. And this September, she unveils her first professional assignment: eight images for French shirt company Equipment that she styled, modeled and shot. Evoking Cindy Sherman, the ads show her in a Joan Jett–style wig, as a platinum-blonde futuristic flower child and in six other guises. "I'm interested in our obsession with identity, so this was a way to challenge myself with my own," Werbowy says. She's also discovering that such projects satisfy her yen for adventure. "Photography scares me big time," she says, before heading off to catch her plane to the South American rain forest. "I think it's important to do the things that scare you the most."