A Fashion Fairy Tale

Natalia Vodianova’s rags-to-glamour rise may be the fastest on record: in less than
four years, a dirt-poor Russian teenager became the supermodel wife of British
aristocrat Justin Portman. At 22, Vodianova has exclusive multi-million-dollar
contracts with Calvin Klein and L’Oréal, a jet-set schedule, and a son whose
childhood will be the opposite of her own. With the fashion industry still
hyperventilating, Krista Smith finds its newest star loving every moment.

July17, 2014 By Krista Smith

Fashion week in L.A. is still a far cry from those of Milan, Paris, and New York,
but at least Natalia Vodianova happens to be in town, having just spent the weekend
deep in the California desert posing for photographer Steven Meisel for Calvin
Klein’s latest ad campaign. When I meet her and her husband, Justin Portman, 35, at
L’Ermitage hotel, in Beverly Hills, they have just woken up and seem a little
hungover. “We went to a couple of sad parties and then one really good party,”
Portman mumbles. Vodianova, who’s adapting well to her role as one half of
fashion’s new global “It couple,” orders a fresh-squeezed orange juice for herself
and a Bloody Mary for her husband, and demurely smiles when the waiter asks if
she’s over 21. In fact, she’s 22 and the mother of a 3-year-old boy, Lucas, but she
doesn’t look a day over 16. Even in the morning, without makeup, she is enchanting,
with luminous skin and crystal-clear bright-blue eyes. Her husband isn’t half bad,
either, with his playful blue eyes, shaved head, strong jaw, and cashmere-and-denim
elegance. Portman is quick to make a disarming joke about himself, Vodianova, and
all the fuss being made about them. Both of them are entirely without pretense:
they smoke cigarettes, finish each other’s sentences, and eat hearty breakfasts.
While Vodianova and I talk, Portman attends to their mobile phones, each of which
rings at least six times over the course of the meal.

Natalia Vodianova’s story isn’t necessarily unique, but no one’s ever done it quite
as well or quite as fast: poor, starving Russian girl gets discovered and lands
multi-million-dollar modeling contracts, marries a rich, handsome British
aristocrat, and delivers him a male heir—all in less than four years. Today, the
couple has a loft in New York City and a flat in London, but they also spend time
in Moscow, Paris, and Monte Carlo. Vodianova wants her son to be educated in both
England and Russia. “I would love to move for some time to Moscow,” she says, “so
he actually gets a little more of the culture and the language.”

Grace Coddington, the creative director of Vogue magazine, has been in the business
for 36 years and recently published a book, Grace: Thirty Years of Fashion at
Vogue. It is common knowledge in the fashion industry that if she fancies you, your
success is all but assured. “I saw a picture of her and I wanted to know who she
was,” Coddington says of Vodianova. “She came in and she was just amazing to look
at and amazing as a person, and she was like this kid, kneeling on the floor of my
office showing me all her baby pictures.” What separates her from the common crop
of models? “Well, she just wasn’t model-y. She’s all about her baby, her husband,
and, obviously, her background. She’s incredibly generous—she realizes that she’s
very lucky and she wants everybody to be as lucky as she is.”

From the beginning, Coddington was impressed by Vodianova’s subtle work in front of
the camera. “She’s worldly-wise and she has intelligence to her face,” she says.
“She is kind of an actress but at the same time a model. She doesn’t just give you
pose No. 1, 2, and 3. She actually thinks about what she is doing.”

Bruce Weber also thinks Vodianova has the qualities of a fine actress: “I really
wish Truffaut were alive because he would love putting her in a movie,” he says.
Weber is just one of the top photographers Vodianova has worked with. In addition
to Meisel, there’s also Annie Leibovitz, Mario Sorrenti, Patrick Demarchelier,
Mario Testino, and Michael Thompson. “I think Natalia is all about desire,” Weber
says. “She desires to be a good mother, she desires to be a good wife, she has a
desire to be more like an actress in a photograph, and she has a desire to remain
mysterious. I think that anybody who could come from where she did to where she is
now so fast has a lot of desire.”

It was precisely this desire that captured the attention of Fabien Baron, creative
director of Baron & Baron, which handles Calvin Klein’s fragrance and fashion
advertising. He was in New York, casting models for the Council of Fashion
Designers of America Awards, when he saw Vodianova, who was then relatively
unknown. His immediate thought, he says, was “My God, she’s perfect for Calvin.
She’s just like a Calvin girl.” How come? “She’s sexy, she’s beautiful, she has a
European flair, and she knows how to tease the camera. She’s shy, but at the same
time very knowledgeable about sexuality.” Another year passed, however, before
Calvin Klein signed her to an exclusive deal. “It was when [Calvin] saw her in
person that he clicked, because you come across this type of girl rarely,” Baron
says. “I remember when we first brought Kate Moss to Calvin. It was the same
thing.” Vodianova’s contract with Calvin Klein began with the 2003 spring
collection, but she was able to walk the runway in Tom Ford’s last show, for Yves
Saint Laurent in March 2004.

The investment in Vodianova paid off almost immediately for the company when she
starred in its most instantly recognizable ad since Brooke Shields vowed never to
let anything get between her and her Calvins. This past year, billboards in cities
around the world showed Vodianova provocatively biting the naked rear end of a man
barely wearing his Calvin Klein jeans. (“I want to bring a shotgun to those
shoots,” Portman jokes.) The campaign has launched Vodianova into the financial
stratosphere and earned her a permanent place alongside such paragons of beauty as
Moss, Gisele Bündchen, Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, and Christy Turlington. “She
really will stand out in model history,” Coddington declares.

Vodianova’s exclusive deal with Calvin Klein doesn’t apply to cosmetics, and last
year the makeup giant L’Oréal made her its new international spokesperson. “We
intend to have a very long and happy relationship with Natalia,” says Nicolas
Hieronimus, international managing director of L’Oréal Paris, who describes
Vodianova as “young and fresh,” with “natural class.” The Calvin Klein and L’Oréal
contracts are two of the most desired and lucrative in the industry. No one will
say on the record exactly how much they’re worth, but the total clearly amounts to
millions of dollars. It’s not a bad living for a girl who hasn’t always known where
her next meal would come from.

Natalia grew up in Nizhniy Novgorod, Russia, an industrial city 250 miles east of
Moscow that’s best known for its auto factory and vodka distillery. Like many
Russian cities, however, it also has a healthy share of cultural venues, including
a university. Until she was six, Natalia lived in her grandparents’ house with her
single mother, Larissa, who is now 40. But when Larissa gave birth to a second
daughter, Oksana—who was born with brain damage—she and the two children had to
move elsewhere.

Natalia would still visit her grandparents’ house, where everything was strict and
proper, but alone with her mother she could run wild. “I do think I have two
sides,” she says. “With my grandparents, I always had to wear a napkin, always say
please and thank you. And then I would have to go back to my mother and this life
was just complete survival. I remember no food sometimes.”

By then, Natalia’s father was long gone. She is still estranged from him, but she
plans on seeing him the next time she’s in Russia. With emotion in her voice, she
tells me, “I don’t really know him, but I do want to now. I do want to give this
man a chance to excuse himself and give him a chance to know me.” With an invalid
daughter and a third child on the way, Larissa worked around the clock trying to
keep her family afloat. One of her jobs was selling fruit from a small stand early
each morning. Natalia helped out, but she soon realized that she was a more
effective entrepreneur than her mother. By age 14 she was making a daily one-hour
drive in a friend’s car to the fruit wholesaler’s. “I would wake up very early,”
she remembers. “Eat a banana. [Fruit] is all I ate because that is all I had around
me. I was very healthy, actually. I got up and went to see the Georgian and
Chechnyan guys. I would get the prices down, try to steal as much fruit as I can,
and then go and sell them.” “She’s a really good bargainer,” her husband
interjects proudly. “She would beat them down.” “So that would be pretty much what
I did every day,” Vodianova continues, “and then of course I was going to school,
cooking, and looking after my sisters. Every day I would have to wake up and
survive that particular day and I would never look into the future. I would never
look into what is going to happen in a week.”

Vodianova stresses that her family was educated, “especially in the cultural way.”
Being poor, she says, doesn’t mean you can’t be culturally sophisticated—least of
all in Russia. Most of that education came at the insistence of her grandmother.
“With my grandparents we would go to see the opera, go to different concerts,”
remembers Vodianova, who took classes in theater and ballet as a girl and loved
them all. “It was about being alive. That is what culture is: seeing life and being
in touch with people.”

By 15, Natalia had moved out of her mother’s house and into an apartment with her
best friend, Oksana Marchukevich. Natalia’s boyfriend at the time was a 22-year-old
model who moonlighted as a debt collector. “He broke people’s legs,” Portman
cracks.

In 1999 a Parisian modeling scout came to Nizhniy Novgorod and held a general
casting call. Vodianova’s boyfriend demanded that she go. “He threw me out of the
apartment,” she says. “He just kicked me out and said, You have to go.’ And I did.”
She needed a miniskirt, so she stopped by her mother’s house and took a pair of
scissors to one of her skirts. The agent liked what he saw, told her to learn
English, and sent her to Paris. If she had remained in Russia, Vodianova might have
become just another tragic heroine, but instead of jumping in front of the train,
she jumped on it.

“When she was about five or six, she knew that she was going to do something else,”
Portman says of his wife, who adds, “I knew that I would be O.K. My grandmother has
nine grandchildren, and she is very different with pretty much all of them. And she
just sort of picked me out and always told me, ‘Don’t miss your chance of being
something.’”

It was a struggle to adapt to life in Paris, but Vodianova was resilient and
learned basic English in two months. (Today, she speaks the language with no accent
at all, and she credits her husband with being an exceptional teacher.) Her
relationship with her Russian boyfriend did not survive the transition. “I started
to change so quickly, and it’s such a different education. I started to gain
experience so fast,” she says. “And he, unfortunately, was still in the same
place.” Vodianova never forgot all he’d done for her, though, and when she began to
make money she bought him a Mercedes.

About a year after she arrived in Paris, Vodianova went to a dinner party at
Georges, the restaurant at the top of the Pompidou Center. It was there that she
met the Honorable Justin Portman, the third son of the late Ninth Viscount Edward
Henry Berkeley Portman and a member of the 22nd-richest family in Great Britain. In
the 16th century, Henry VIII himself gave the Portman family its ancestral lands—
more than 100 acres of central London, including Oxford Street, Portman Square, and
Marylebone. Today, the clan has homes on Antigua and in Australia, not to mention
the 3,000-acre spread in Herefordshire, in the West Midlands, where Justin grew up
—“where the cows come from,” as he puts it. He was educated at the exclusive Harrow
School, in northwest London, and went on to pursue a career as an artist. He had a
show in London and sold every piece. He was quite the eligible bachelor.

At the Parisian dinner party, Portman changed his chair to sit next to the
beautiful, headstrong young model who had caught his eye. As it happened, he got
much more than he had bargained for, and by the end of the evening he was in love.
“I was back and forth like a Labrador after a bone,” he remembers. “And, believe
me, the last place I wanted to go was Paris. I had lived there for eight years.”
Vodianova, meanwhile, played hard to get. “Maybe a little too hard,” she admits. To
Portman, “it seemed like eternity. I think it was two months before I got my first
kiss.”

When Christmas came, Vodianova went to England to meet his family. “The mother is
very important,” Vodianova says. “I think it went really well because I wasn’t
scared of her. Basically, I ignored [Justin] and tried to be nice and sweet and
just normal.” He, in turn, traveled to Russia to meet Vodianova’s family. Not a
word of English was spoken. “Vodka is the common language,” Portman says. “A couple
of shots and you understand everything.”

This is stuff Jane Austen would have drooled over: the foreign ingenue invading a
world of privilege and wealth, the titled aristocrat bonding with commoners over
vodka. But leaving aside their obvious differences, Portman and Vodianova have some
very important things in common. First off, they appear to be madly, genuinely in
love with each other. Also, they both come from fairly complicated backgrounds
(Portman has five siblings but says, half-jokingly, “We avoid each other at all
costs”), they’re both very close to their grandmothers, and they both positively
ooze joie de vivre. “I think what we really do like is experiencing things that we
haven’t done together,” Vodianova says. “And then we can experience it together and
exchange opinions, so it is very exciting.” Yesterday afternoon, for instance,
Portman spent the better part of the day at the Los Angeles Gun Club. “It’s not
really my thing, but I went nuts in there,” he says. “I think I fired 2,000
rounds.” But despite the adrenaline rush, something was missing. “I wanted her to
be there.”

Today, Portman has put his art career on hold and spends most of his time with
Vodianova and Lucas. Portman adores chess, but admits he is not a player: “I’m a
chess fan. Which is really sad.” Next up for him is poker. “Oh, that’s my thing,”
he says. “I am going to the world championships in May.” Talking to her husband,
Vodianova tries to find the words that best describe him: “Every single idea you
come up with, you keep it cool, because you are a very cool guy, and then every one
else in about a month starts to like the exact same thing.” In a word, he’s a
trendsetter.

Vodianova was 19 when she gave birth to Lucas, on December 22, 2001. Very shortly
thereafter, her career took off. “I lost a lot of weight for my height,” she
explains. “In two weeks after giving birth to Lucas, I was on the catwalk. I was so
skinny and the clothes just sat on me incredibly and no one could believe it.
Everyone wanted to put me in their shows. I did everything.” She opened and closed
the Yves Saint Laurent show in Paris, which made her the most important model of
the fall 2002 season, then shot that fall’s Gucci fragrance campaign with Mario
Testino. More than 40 runway shows followed in rapid succession. Almost overnight,
she acquired the nickname Super Nova.

On September 1, 2002, Vodianova and Portman, who had married in a civil ceremony
before Lucas’s birth, had a Russian Orthodox wedding at St. Vladimir’s Cathedral,
in Saint Petersburg. A lavish reception at the Palace of Catherine the Great
followed, which included a seven-course dinner and Cossack dancers. There were 110
guests and one very overwhelmed translator. Tom Ford, one of Vodianova’s earliest
supporters, designed her pearl-gray satin wedding dress. “I love Natalia, and I
think she’s probably—if not the, then certainly one of the most beautiful women in
the world right now,” says Ford, who has officially retired from fashion, “but when
I see her with Justin and their son I love her even more. I mean, the three of them
—they’re just adorable.”

Modeling has already supplied Vodianova with unimaginable opportunities,

experiences, and riches, and she’s only just begun. “I do love it still and I
really appreciate all the people I met and how amazing they were to me,” she says.
Still, what really seems to excite her now is the good she can do with the money
she’s earned. She has already taken care of her family. She bought apartments for
her mother and her grandparents, hired a caregiver for her sister Oksana, and
enrolled her eight-year-old sister, Kristina, in an English school. “She’s so
trusting,” Natalia says of the girl. “She’s a real baby. That is something I missed
in my life. I never really was a child.”

She has also created the Naked Heart Foundation, a nonprofit organization for
underprivileged children in Russia. “It’s quite frightening sometimes, because you
don’t realize how not so far ago it was,” she says of her own battle with poverty.
“It’s amazing how quickly you forget. It’s not that I had such a bad life before.
It was actually a happy life, and I do miss the excitement of being a survivor in
the world. That’s why I wanted to start my charity, because it keeps you in touch
with reality.”

For now, the couple’s main address is their Tribeca loft, but Vodianova’s modeling
schedule ensures that they’re never there for very long. “We’ve been in virtually
eight countries in the last week,” Portman says with a sigh. Eventually, they hope
to settle down and have more children. “I have always dreamed about having
children, a lot of children,” Vodianova says. “I actually want to have very soon
another one.”

Justin Portman and Natalia Vodianova lead a charmed life, with their exotic
adventures, private-plane rides, glamorous parties, luxury-hotel stays, and homes
all over the world. Each of them has more money than they could ever spend, but
neither the husband, who always expected to live this way, nor the wife, who never
could have dreamed it, has let that spoil anything. They are down to earth, they’re
a team, and they’ve got each other’s back. As Vodianova says, “Now that I have
money, I understand that it’s not the most important thing in the universe