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How Natalia Vodianova is leading the way for a better world

Photo credit: Cedric Bihr for Harper's Bazaar
Photo credit: Cedric Bihr for Harper's Bazaar

Natalia Vodianova clutches her scalp with both hands and rubs it energetically back and forth, leaning into her Zoom screen to show me exactly what she's up to.

"Can you see how hard I'm doing it?" she asks, scrubbing away. "It's really good for the hair too - it sends a lot of blood to the roots... I also do massages to get rid of wrinkles." She switches to manipulating her forehead with her fingertips. "All you need is to do this for one minute every couple of hours; you have to do it very hard and it's painful," she says. "But if you do it for one week, you'll see. I've never had Botox, nothing." Vodianova sits back in her chair and smiles at me, her pale skin now flushed and finger-marked, her blonde hair wildly tousled.

Photo credit: Cedric Bihr for Harper's Bazaar
Photo credit: Cedric Bihr for Harper's Bazaar

This routine is frankly not what I was expecting when I asked the supermodel, who turns 40 next year, for her favourite beauty tips. But for all her Snow Queen aura, and the polished luxury of her lifestyle as a globe-trotting superstar, designer muse, tech entrepreneur and the wife of Antoine Arnault, one of the heirs to the LVMH empire, there remains something undeniably earthy and unpretentious about Vodianova – as our cover shoot shows. Dancing around barefoot in the Jardins de Bougainville, she resembles a wood nymph, albeit clad in Dior and Louis Vuitton finery. The concept of the shoot was inspired by her grandmother Larissa, a great nature-lover; Vodianova rapturously recalls her childhood mushroom-picking excursions, and long summers spent swimming in lakes and roaming the forests near their home in Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod) in central Russia.

Photo credit: Cedric Bihr for Harper's Bazaar
Photo credit: Cedric Bihr for Harper's Bazaar

"She celebrated nature everywhere she went; for instance, she could never step on an insect," she explains. "And whenever she saw a beautiful tree, she always said, let’s hug it. She said that when you hug a tree, you receive this very special energy from Earth, from nature, that is life-giving. You can feel better, you can leave your worries and issues here with this tree... I love nature, it’s really where I get my energy from. I like to hike, and this is how I rest my body and most importantly, my spirit and my mind."

Vodianova is talking to me today from her Paris apartment, swaddled in a cosy Loro Piana knit, her extraordinary, angular face innocent of any trace of make-up. Surrounded by green leafy wallpaper, she still looks dryad-like, sipping matcha tea and stroking her imperious tawny cat Galileo, who is lounging on her desk.

Photo credit:  Cedric Bihr
Photo credit: Cedric Bihr

At periodic intervals, the two youngest of her five children, Maxim, who is seven, and five-year-old Roman, burst in, demanding her attention, but she remains unfailingly calm, patient and funny in response. "It's something I practise a lot," she says, of this serenity. "It comes from an accumulation of life lessons."

She cites her yoga practice, and her friendship with the designer Diane von Furstenberg: "She has always been a great support and great role model in this. She always, always has this Zen feeling about everything and it's really helpful because you can go through life thinking that everything is important, but in the end, there is very little that is truly important."

Photo credit: Cedric Bihr for Harper's Bazaar
Photo credit: Cedric Bihr for Harper's Bazaar

But it’s hard to believe that the main influence was not Vodianova’s own tough upbringing, and the lessons it taught her in resilience. Her father left the family when she was a toddler; her stepfather also abandoned her mother after the birth of Oksana, her half-sister, who has cerebral palsy and severe autism. At the time, it was usual in Russia for disabled children to be put into institutions, but her mother refused; instead, to keep the family together, she took cleaning jobs and ran a fruit stall, leaving Vodianova to run the house and look after Oksana; at school, she was stigmatised for having a disabled sister, and bullied by her classmates.

By the time she was 11, she was manning the fruit stall herself. "That was my reality and we felt very isolated," she says. Far from being resentful, however, she is deeply admiring of her mother, and devoted to Oksana and to her youngest sister Kristina. "My mother showed me a very different side of life. She taught me great resilience. She was really an exception, keeping a severely disabled child, because every parent was encouraged to abandon them at birth. My mum was a fighter, and she never gave up on Oksana. Although it was very difficult for all of us, she persevered, and she loved us equally."

Photo credit: Cedric Bihr for Harper's Bazaar
Photo credit: Cedric Bihr for Harper's Bazaar

Fashion provided a Cinderella-style escape: Vodianova attended a model-scouting event, was spotted, and taken to Paris, where her elfin, otherworldly beauty made her sought-after for campaigns by brands such as Chanel, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Calvin Klein and Prada, earning herself the admiring sobriquet of ‘Supernova’. A multimillionaire in her own right, she was soon able to support her mother and Oksana in comfort. By the time she was 19, she had married Justin Portman, the aristocrat and property scion, with whom she had three children – Lucas, Neva and Victor, who are now all teenagers – before the couple divorced in 2011. That same year, she began dating Antoine Arnault, the chairman of Loro Piana and CEO of Berluti; he is the father of her two boisterous youngest offspring.

But although Vodianova presumably no longer has a financial imperative to work, the drive and grit instilled in her by her childhood has never left her. Attempting to keep up with her numerous projects, whether personal, professional, philanthropic or entrepreneurial, is almost impossible – even, sometimes, for Vodianova herself.

Photo credit: Cedric Bihr for Harper's Bazaar
Photo credit: Cedric Bihr for Harper's Bazaar

Alongside her modelling schedule, the demands of her numerous family and her dedication to fitness (she’s a keen long-distance runner), there is her work at the Naked Heart Foundation, which she set up after the Beslan school siege in 2004, when she was just 22, and which has built more than 190 play parks in Russia, as well as campaigning on behalf of children with disabilities. Her close relationship with Guerlain, whose ambassador she has been for over a decade, was cemented for her by a contretemps that took place a couple of years ago, when she was booked to shoot an advertisement for its Shalimar fragrance in India.

"I realised that I had double-booked myself, and there were 10 kids with autism coming from Russia to Disneyland for the first time, for the trip of their lives. It was a complete disaster. So I asked Guerlain to cut their production short by two days and that I’d work 14 hours a day, but I couldn’t let these children down. They said it was no problem. Things like that make me very loyal and grateful..."

She is also a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Population Fund, sits on the board of the Special Olympics and is an investor in numerous tech start-ups, from E-gree, an app designed to democratise legal agreements such as prenups, to the period-tracker Flo and Loóna, an app designed to help users sleep. "We always look to create impact and we always work with founders whose end goal is to use the amazing tech tools that are now available and to change the lives of people for the better."

Photo credit: Cedric Bihr for Harper's Bazaar
Photo credit: Cedric Bihr for Harper's Bazaar

How, I wonder, does she attempt to instil this laudable sense of purpose into her own children? "I definitely believe that the only way to educate your children is to be an example yourself," she says. "I have five children, it’s a great responsibility. And it’s probably the most important role in my life, to empower my children and to make sure that I can pass on some of the incredible lessons that I've received from my life in a way that will not be invasive." Yet the sense of purpose she derived from a hand-to-mouth upbringing will not be so easy to find for her offspring, brought up as they have been with no material wants, I suggest.

"It’s a good point – I didn’t have a choice," she muses. "To be honest, I sometimes feel very compassionate towards my own children, because I think that in some way, they got the other extreme... It’s not about having all, or having nothing, it’s more the pressure they put on themselves, seeing who I am and how I live, and their step-father as well, who is himself a great role model. You know: who am I, what am I going to do with my life, how am I going to find myself? For me, it’s really more about teaching them to be happy. I always explain to them that they have their own gifts... and that’s what they need to look for. I think that’s the role of a parent, to be there always, and to try to help them find themselves."

Photo credit: Cedric Bihr for Harper's Bazaar
Photo credit: Cedric Bihr for Harper's Bazaar

The pandemic has assisted this endeavour, by curtailing her constant travelling over the past year and a half. "I realised, at the end of March last year, that I was waking up naturally and not feeling sleep-deprived for the first time since I was six years old," she says, laughing. "You prioritise in a very different way when you’re not exhausted."

Vodianova found herself revelling in domesticity for the first time. "I knew how to cook, because I had cooked since I was very little. But I really loved it, actually. Having this routine of waking up and making lunch, and then having a little break and starting to cook dinner. This feeling of feeding my family was very beautiful. And everyone knew where to find me." She set the seal on this domestic bliss by tying the knot with Arnault last September in a small civil ceremony, wearing a dress by her friend, the designer Ulyana Sergeenko.

Not, of course, that Vodianova has any plans to take things easier in the long term. Right now, she’s working on two major projects: a collaboration between UNFPA and a big fashion brand, and producing a biodegradable and eco-friendly alternative to medical disposable masks. "I’m very concerned after watching Seaspiracy," she tells me. "Our household is slowly but surely consuming much, much less meat and fish. But I don’t lie awake at night worrying about anything, because I’m not that kind of person," she says. "I’m a doer, rather than the worrying type." A Supernova indeed.

Photo credit: Cedric Bihr for Harper's Bazaar
Photo credit: Cedric Bihr for Harper's Bazaar

The September issue of Bazaar is available on newsstands from 5 August.

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