i hope alt can convince her to come back for the 100th anniversary issue. that would be amazing!
So sadly there is no new Daria content in the VP anniversary issue, but there is a whole feature on Daria, with pics from the archives and a long interview of Emmanuelle Alt about her. She is the only model to be highlighted in such a way in the whole issue. The interview is kinda sad, because they are talking about her as if she was dead... I guess she really is never coming back.
I tried to translate the interview in English, here it is below!
Daria & I, by Emmanuelle Alt
Interview of Emmanuelle Alt by Sylvia Jorif
Vogue Paris October 2021
Karl Lagerfeld had said of her, "She is much more than a model, she is a unique personality and beauty, a rare combination." Daria Werbowy has for sure entered the Olympus of supermodels. First, and it's almost a pleonasm to say it, because her unreal beauty has radiated the fashion industry. Her flexible physique, refined by a childhood spent on the shores of Lake Ontario where she learned to sail at the age of eight, or, even more surprisingly, her practice of rugby and her love for basketball, as great as the boys she could beat. Daria is not just beautiful, she has character. And then, and this is what helped to create the myth around her - her disappearance, her erasure from the world, leaving a breathtaking career for anonymity and total secrecy. For Vogue Paris, she posed a thousand times, after her decisive meeting with Emmanuelle Alt. Between the editor-in-chief of the magazine and the model, it was "love at first sight" and for more than ten years, they worked together in an almost exclusive relationship sealed by friendship. Emmanuelle Alt remembers her Werbowy years...
How did you meet Daria Werbowy?
EA - She came to me at the very beginning of her career, she was starting out, she was unknown, and immediately, it was her. A graceful and wild beauty at the same time. Right from the start, she was told that she would not succeed because her eyes were too wide apart: whoever said that had a nose for it! (
she laughs) She had everything going for her, which I had never seen on any other girl. We worked so much together, all the time. I think she was in every other issue of Vogue back then! We saw each other almost every month, and because I was also working with fashion houses, I took her on all my consultations. Daria and I became a joke, because we were always together. She was my very own model, my in-house model. It reminded me of my mother, who was also a model and who, at the time, was employed full-time by fashion houses. If I could have, I would have given her a contract and paid her too. I really liked the idea of the in-house model. We grew up together, experimented together. She was as important to me as the photographer. It was a real partnership.
Which photographer do you think shot her best?
EA - David Sims photographed her first. But it is impossible to take a bad picture of Daria. She is impossibly beautiful. I also really like the series we did with Mikael Jansson. Inez & Vinoodh have photographed her a thousand times. She was magnetic and the photographers were so inspired by her. People still talk to me about her to this day, young photographers tell me their regrets of not having known her.
What were her qualities?
EA - She was the key model of my career. I created so many characters and identities with her. She could do everything, embody everything. She was androgynous but also a sex bomb. She had a hellish body and at the same time she was very boyish. With make up or natural, with her hair pulled or loose, she was incredible all the time. I particularly like an editorial we did with Peter Lindbergh in Saint Barth. I absolutely wanted to see her through the eyes of this photographer, who had a unique ability to reveal the essence of a woman. And Daria is sublime in her truth.
What did you enjoy sharing with her the most?
EA - We traveled a lot. We went everywhere! Seychelles, Utah, St. Barth, Mexico, Las Vegas, the Greek Islands... and it was great to travel with her. She was very easy to live with. She had a great sense of humor, didn't take herself too seriously. She never acted like a supermodel, she wasn’t the type at all to ask for a luxury car and a driver. She arrived on location with her own dented car. She was easy-going, she could change in the bathroom of a café, in the street. I remember a shoot with Mert & Marcus in London, she was almost naked under a coat, she was undressing in the park behind some bushes, in the rain!
Was it a real fusion between you and her?
EA - I had a lot of fun with her, we would rent a car and go away together. She was one of the few models I liked to spend time with and see outside of the shoots. We were together so much that there was probably a transfer between her and me. On the shoots, she loved to rummage through the clothes, I think she would have loved to do my job. And for me, she was the perfect person to dress. We actually did a story where the editors of the magazine chose a model to transpose their style. Carine Roitfeld chose Anna S., Marie-Amélie Sauvé chose Diana Dondoe and I, in all simplicity, chose Daria (
she laughs).
How do you explain the meteoric rise of her career?
EA - Daria is a complex character. Deep down, she was having a hard time with being so beautiful. It disturbed her, as if her physicality had directed her destiny. As if the modeling had imposed itself to her. Becoming a model so young means leaving aside studies and instead, earn money easily and give another direction to your life. She got a contract with Lancôme very early on, which allowed her to not walk the shows, which she didn't like anyway - it didn't interest her. She had the luxury of not having to chase after contracts. She refused a lot of projects, she said no to almost everything, except to me! She worked very well, even if I felt that she did not enjoy being a model at all. She was very talented but it was not a pleasure for her. I remember a very long shoot in Vegas, a whole issue by Inez & Vinoodh. We were there for ten days, and I did the styling with Joe McKenna and Melanie Ward. Daria, after 15 pictures, she is fed up. There, we made no less than 75 photos with her. She was at her wit's end. And then she disappeared when she was at her best. Like Brigitte Bardot. At the height of her career, shortly after the Celine campaign by Juergen Teller, she withdrew firmly and definitively. She was offered everything, with millions at stake, she refused everything, she never came back. She is very discreet; she has really disappeared. I think she wanted to become a cabinetmaker.
Which memory do you want to keep of her, of all these years when she worked for Vogue?
EA - I think she embodies Vogue Paris like no other. She is universal, we don't know where she comes from, we can't give her a nationality. She became what I wanted. And then she had style, a very personal style, always in her torn clothes. She was completely grunge and yet so chic. ■
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