'I know what I want and I'm fearless about getting it': Natalia Vodianova on her mission to save the lives of disadvantaged children across the globe

Running a fruit stall in a poverty-stricken Russian backwater taught Natalia Vodianova that anything is possible: today she is one of the world’s highest-earning supermodels, a mother of four, and her partner is the heir to France’s biggest fortune. But it’s not enough, she tells Chloe Fox – now she wants to save the world’s disadvantaged children, with a little help from her friends in high places
Supergirl: Natalia Vodianova
Chloe Fo18 February 2015

Next month, Russian supermodel Natalia Vodianova, 32, will run her sixth Paris half-marathon in aid of her children’s charity, the Naked Heart Foundation. As every year, she will undertake this 13-mile ‘torture’ having done absolutely no training. ‘I really hate running,’ she laughs. But then the laughter freezes on her exquisite face. ‘Oh, I’m really dreading it. Two years ago, my toenail came off totally, which wasn’t so good later that day when I closed the Givenchy show. It’s horrible. Just horrible.’

Half-marathon in the morning; catwalk in the afternoon. There’s nothing of the diva in Vodianova. She’s a stalwart — a Russian doll with a core of steel — whose rags to riches story is nothing short of extraordinary. ‘I guess you could say I’m determined,’ she admits with a Slavic shrug. ‘I know what I want and I’m fearless about getting it.’

Vodianova’s is a mesmerising beauty, part-innocent, part-sophisticate, that has kept her at fashion’s helm for 15 years, and earned her an estimated £4m a year. Having garnered headlines for hitting the catwalk just two weeks after the birth of her first child at 19, Tom Ford cast her as the star of his 2002 Gucci campaign. From there, she went on to become the face of Calvin Klein and has since fronted campaigns for Louis Vuitton, Chanel and Stella McCartney among others.

In among all of this, the 32-year-old has given birth to four children. Lucas, 13, Neva, eight, and Viktor, seven, by her ex-husband, the English property scion Justin Portman, were all born before she was 25. The youngest, Maxim, by her current partner, LVMH heir Antoine Arnault, 37, arrived last May, when she was a positively ancient 31.

In the son of the richest man in France (his father Bernard’s luxury fashion empire is worth an estimated £40bn), Vodianova says she has found her ‘soul mate’. He is CEO of menswear label Berluti, and a world-class poker player to boot. They live a low-key — albeit fabulously luxurious — life. ‘Of course we are spoilt in terms of the comfortable life that we lead,’ acknowledges Vodianova, ‘but we are both hard workers. He is an inspirational man for me in that way. I’m often at home, working from my BlackBerry but being with my baby, too. But he is at his desk, without fail, every day.’

Acne Studios Sleeveless Jacket, £650; Diesel Black Gold Leather Bra Top, £450; Dolce & Gabbana Shorts, Poa; Givenchy By Riccardo Tisci Boots, £1,740

Evenings in the Arnault apartment — the same, overlooking Les Invalides and the Eiffel Tower, in which he spent his bachelor days — are ‘pretty boring. We spend time with the kids, do homework, watch movies, usual family stuff.’ The naturally antisocial couple, whose first date was spent chatting on a bench in the park, have, however, recently faced up to a serious problem. ‘We are crazily addicted to Dulce de Leche Häagen-Dazs,’ Vodianova sighs. ‘It’s become a real problem. We’ve decided that we’re going to have to go cold turkey.’

There is, admits the woman whose only concession to fitness is ‘a bit of Pilates here and there’, a side to her that still revels in the indulgences that were entirely lacking in her childhood. ‘An old soul’, according to her friend and mentor Diane von Furstenberg, Vodianova has lived more lives than most of us could even begin to imagine.

Born in the industrial Soviet town of Nizhny Novgorod (formerly Gorky) in 1982, Natasha’s (as she’s known to friends and family) father left home when she was a toddler. Her mother Larisa eventually remarried, but this marriage also floundered with the birth of Natalia’s half-sister Oksana, who was born with cerebral palsy and went on to develop severe autism. Against the advice of her parents and doctors, Larisa refused to institutionalise her child (fair game in a Soviet Union that didn’t tolerate otherness); the only person who stood by her decision was her older child. ‘I knew she was doing it for us and I wanted to help her so much,’ explains Vodianova.

And help the wilful seven-year-old did. Sharing the load of raising Oksana, Vodianova would often arrive at school — if she arrived at all — so tired she could barely focus. By the time she was 11, she was working on her mother’s unlicensed fruit stall outside the Volga car factory. When she was 16, a fractious relationship with her mother’s new boyfriend forced Vodianova to move out and set up her own fruit-selling venture. Business went well, but not so well that a $50 modelling gig in a local fashion show — enabled by her then boyfriend, who had paid the fees for her to attend a local modelling school — didn’t turn her head.

At the insistence of her maternal grandmother, ‘a real force’ in her life, who encouraged her to study and better herself, the 17-year-old Vodianova headed to Paris, petrified and alone, to seek her fortune.

‘I don’t feel any different today than I did the first time I arrived in Paris,’ says Vodianova. ‘I still work on the same principle, that in my life — in everything I do — there is nothing to lose.’ Would she change that early life in which she struggled so much? ‘No, of course not,’ she says, in her constrained way. ‘Because my childhood gave me some very important tools. I’m a fighter, you see. I used to fight for my survival but now I fight for a good cause. I am sure that I wouldn’t be able to handle so much, stay so positive, or have this fearlessness, if I hadn’t lived the life that I have.’

The photographer Bruce Weber wasn’t wrong when he described Vodianova as being ‘like a woman in a Chekhov play’. In person, she has a resilience and a depth that are very affecting. Straight-backed and poised, she moves almost in slow motion, thoughtfully searching the air for exactly the right words with which to answer a question.

Erdem Lace Dress, at Net-A-Porter.Com, £2,770; Givenchy By Riccardo Tisci Belt, Poa; Saint Laurent By Hedi Slimane Hat, £580

‘Modelling work is not so — how do you say it? — not so cerebral,’ she smirks. Up go those trademark tapered brows. ‘Really, really not.’ At the height of her success in 2004, she found herself feeling dissatisfied (‘my existence did not make sense to me’) and then Chechen rebels attacked a school in the Russian town of Beslan. Three hundred and thirty-four people were killed, 186 of them children. On a flight to Paris from Moscow, where she had been when the tragedy struck, Vodianova could not stop crying. How, she wondered, could she help the survivors to heal? ‘I thought about what was missing from my own childhood and it was that I had no play,’ she has said. And so, the Naked Heart Foundation was born, its mission a simple one: to raise enough money to build full-scale play parks and playgrounds across Russia.

To date, the Naked Heart Foundation has raised over £22m and financed the building of 133 play facilities in Russia and three in the UK. Four years ago, it developed another string to its bow: providing support services for Russian families raising children with special needs. ‘It’s hard for Westerners to comprehend, but in Russia there is very little understanding of the benefits of an inclusive society,’ Vodianova explains.

‘Do I feel like we’re getting somewhere? Yes, a little bit. People like my sister are treated like human beings in the Family Support Centres we have set up. Plus, we have our own educational programme, which is really showing incredible results — very autistic children, who would once have been considered hopeless cases, starting to read and count — but we still have a very long way to go.’

Givenchy by Riccardo Tisci Top, £1,470; Body, £590; Trousers, £1,220; Belt, Poa and Boots, £1,740

While the Naked Heart Foundation’s annual Love Ball fundraiser has become a coveted invitation on the international social circuit, Vodianova and her 14-strong team are under constant pressure to generate income. Later this month, during London Fashion Week, they will host The World’s First Fabulous Fund Fair, for which the Camden Roundhouse will be transformed into a custom-built fairground, with ‘stalls’ hosted by celebrities and sponsored by luxury brands, in exchange for donations. Highlights of the £1,000-a-ticket event will include the Guerlain Supermodel Kissing Booth, hosted by Vodianova herself; face-painting by legendary make-up artist Pat McGrath; Fashion Fortune Telling with Suzy Menkes; a Louis Vuitton Hook-a-Bag; and milliner Steven Jones’ Coconut Shy. Food stalls will be manned by fashion designers such as Stella McCartney — serving veggie hot dogs — and supermodel Karlie Kloss, Vodianova’s great friend and co-host, who will be selling her own brand of gluten-free Kookies.

It was Kloss, in fact, who gave Vodianova the idea for the event. ‘We were at a gallery opening together and everyone was going crazy,’ says Vodianova. ‘We had to do so many selfies! At the end, Karlie, who is a girl with a real sense of purpose, said, “You should charge people and give all the money to the Naked Heart Foundation!” That made me think about what a fun idea it would be to have a social media-orientated event, where people are paying for an experience.’

Ralph Lauren Collection Crop Top, £990 and Skirt, £4,890; Saint Laurent By Hedi Slimane Hat, £580; Givenchy By Riccardo Tisci Boots, £1,740

While she is ‘super-excited’ about the Fair (not least because her eldest son will get to see his favourite magician, Dynamo, live) Vodianova also feels pressured. ‘Before, when we were only building play parks, we were building what we could afford. Now we have a different responsibility: families we look after all year long are relying on us to fund them. No money; no services. It’s very stressful.’

It’s for this reason that Vodianova continues to do modelling, such as Stella McCartney campaigns — ‘I try to make up financially for anything the Naked Heart Foundation can’t’ — although she also admits to more complex reasons for wanting to earn her own money. ‘If you’ve been very, very poor, as I have, it makes you very proud. You experience such moments of hardship, that make you feel so ashamed, that all you want is to get yourself to a place where you don’t have to ask anything of anyone.’

Precisely because she is never far from the demons that haunt her, Vodianova is mindful of how gilded her life is now. The birth of Maxim seems to have ushered in a phase of particular contentment. ‘Motherhood feels very different this time because I’m so much calmer,’ she says. ‘It’s not that I’m doing anything different, I’m just more present in what I’m doing. There’s not so much noise in my head.’ You’re happy, I suggest. ‘Yes,’ she says hesitantly. ‘Yes, I suppose I am.’ But then she looks up at me with that fighter’s flame in her wide-set eyes. ‘I will never feel like a good enough mother, though. I will never feel like a good enough anything, because the minute you do, that’s when you go wrong. Complacent is the worst thing that anyone can ever be.’

For more information on the Naked Heart Foundation and the World’s First Fabulous Fund Fair, visit eventbrite.co.uk

Photographs by Camilla Armbrust
Styled by Orsolya SZABO

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