You can become blase about beauty. Second-hand beauty, that is — the kind that has been prinked and preened and pinned to the page of a glossy mag or trapped behind the lens of a travel program. But at first hand it dazzles, whether it’s the glittering turquoise of the Mediterranean or the smile of a supermodel sitting opposite you at an Italian beach cafe and asking the waiter if he wouldn’t mind reading the label on the back of her dress.
The smile belongs to Eva Herzigova, the Czech model better known for her Wonderbra curves. The cafe is modest but marvelous, a serving hatch dispensing leafy salads and fresh prawns. And the dress? Stella, pronounces our smitten waiter, who naturally wouldn’t mind, not a bit. A gauzy wisp of a garment, all strappy back and plunging decolletage, it looks like it might have been swiped from a Swan Lake ballerina. In fact, it is from Stella McCartney’s latest collection, and like the rest of her clothes it is ethically made, which is Herzigova’s new passion.
“People have this idea that you have to look like a hippie. I’m trying to show that you can look glamorous and sharp and elegant and smart,” she tells me.
PHOTO: AGENCIES
Until recently, Herzigova was into luxury. Luxury inspired her swimwear collection and defined her portfolio after she won the Chopard account. After she was discovered in a competition in Prague, aged 16, her career became so hectic that a few years ago she craved a private jet — the ultimate eco sin.
At 35, she still loves luxury, but her definition has changed radically. Her epiphany came when she wandered into Blockbuster last year and spotted former US vice president Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth. She watched it lying in bed, beached by the late stages of her pregnancy, with her long- term boyfriend, Italian entrepreneur Gregorio Marsiaj, at her side. “Al Gore turned my world upside down. I got really scared,” she recalls, her English accented by home, but also by stints in Paris, New York and, recently, Italy.
Her awakening deepened with the birth of her son George, who has just turned one. “Once you have a child, you become aware. It sounds simple but I want him to be able to see the sun and play in the garden. That seems like a real luxury these days.”
PHOTO: AGENCIES
Though she lives in London, this pretty yet humble town on the Riviera is where her boyfriend came for his own childhood summers. The arrival of George has made the couple’s three-month seasonal sojourns here all the more important.
Off-camera, her manner is girlish but not girlie. There is a gangly carelessness about her that has probably become studied over the years but was undoubtedly natural once, and she has the kind of features that become even more radiant when she speaks. Asked when she first became aware of the power of her appearance, she will claim that she still isn’t. “The glossy images, the retouched covers — I’m the opposite in my personal life.”
However she really feels about her appearance, Herzigova has grown up in modeling and been educated in the lucrative potency of her image, with more than 100 covers bearing her face, along with the traffic-stopping Wonderbra billboards. But pregnancy enabled her to turn her attention inwards. “Suddenly things have to have shape,” she says. “You have to have a routine. I love that change, because I grew up with it, but I haven’t had it for the past 18 years because you live a gypsy life as a model, traveling around, depending on other people’s decisions. Suddenly you have to make decisions of your own, and I love it!”
PHOTO: AGENCIES
Her environmental concerns might seem Miss Worldish — just another celebrity having her green moment — yet Herzigova’s perspective is subtly different. While sanguine about any significant impact that she might have, she learned as a teenager that “little drops add up to something.” Standing shoulder to shoulder with her compatriots in Prague in 1989, candle in hand, she watched change sweep through Czechoslovakia with the Velvet Revolution.
She is still careful to switch off lights and to not waste water when she brushes her teeth: “I do those things because I’ve done them since I was a little girl — and not from an ecological but an economical point of view, from growing up in a family of five from a modest background.”
The daughter of an accountant mother and an electrician father who was a professional swimmer before settling down, she grew up in Litvinov, a conurbation of mountain villages. She was a middle child, determined to compete with boys in everything from tree climbing to cross-country skiing. Sport, she says, was akin to religion in Communist Czechoslovakia, encouraging a steely engagement with the natural world that was cemented by weekend stints in her grandfather’s garden, weeding and learning to prune cherry trees. But there was a darker side to this rural idyll, as Litvinov also happens to host the Czech Republic’s biggest crude oil refinery, which exploded when she was a child and left the local trees leafless.
Much has changed since she left at 16 to embark upon the three-month modeling stint that has so far lasted 18 years. “In Czech cities, there’s this wanting — people want the cars and they want the TVs,” she says. “People think more is better. They like to consume — they need it. There’s a lot of therapy going on.”
Not that she is at all dreamy about the past — poverty isn’t something to be romanticized, she insists. “There isn’t more appreciation of nature. I think, actually, wealthy people become much more aware of how priceless it is. Life goes in circles; I would not be surprised if, through wealth, we will reach the agricultural lifestyle we had before.”
For Herzigova, ecological, ethical and economic concerns are tightly bound. Her parents live in an energy-efficient house built by her father, which features a mini wind farm funded partly by Herzigova.
”I think a lot of people are like me: they want to be part of the whole environmental issue, but they don’t really know how to start. I’m not running for president or anything — I feel completely ignorant about the scientific side of things — but I do what I can, and doing things little by little will add up to a big difference. In that way, I think I’m a perfect ... what’s the word? Not ambassador ... model.” And she is. A very un-model-like model in some respects. After the interview is over she pauses to pick some chewing gum from the toe of her ankle boot before wandering up the road back to her house and baby, swinging a bag full of fruit and vegetables left over from the shoot. Waste not, want not — it’s the kind of unglamorous common sense that we should all be embracing.
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