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| Natalia Vodianova |
Interview
THIS MUCH I KNOW
Natalia Vodianova
'I have an animal sense for danger’
The supermodel, 34, on the humiliation of poverty, weekends in nightclubs and building a play park for children from the Beslan siege
Ruaridh Nicoll
25 February 2017
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| Natalia Vodianova |
Poverty is humiliation. You feel like there is something wrong with you, not with society, especially as a child. You see other children who are happy and you think it must be so incredible. You daydream a lot about not being yourself. Maybe that helped me model.
Boys in my school in Nizhny Novgorod hated me. I was unhealthily skinny because sometimes we had nothing to eat. They used to draw me like a stick. And the stigma against my sister [Oksana, who has cerebral palsy and autism] brushed off on me. They called me dirty.
I have an animal sense for danger and make decisions based on intuition. I arrived in Paris at 17, but changed agencies within the week. On the second night, I was taken to a nightclub with some guys. Nothing happened, but I was a young girl so I liked young guys, and these were not young guys. A day or two later the Viva model agency said: “If you ever want to change…” and I was like: “Yes, right now.”
