Coco Rocha rocks the runway

The breakthrough moment of her career took place during Jean Paul Gaultier’s fall 2007 show inspired by the Scottish Highlands, which Coco opened and closed by Irish dancing down the runway. Vogue called it the “Coco moment,” and suggested that it marked her status as a genuine supermodel. “It was exciting. When you usually dance, you dance in front of a crowd that has no clue who you are, so you can mess up, fall down, be exhausted and no one will really know in the end what you did. But [at the Gaultier show,] I was really nervous because everyone knew what my name was, and if I fell over and everyone was laughing, it definitely would have hit everyone’s radar. … I don’t think I’ll ever have a peak like that in a show. My grandma went nuts. I mean, at shows usually, all you have to do is walk, so I don’t get nervous, but that was a bit maddening.”

Besides setting herself apart through fashion and Irish dance, Coco has earned a reputation as an outspoken model that isn’t afraid to let her personality shine underneath the clothes. “In the industry now, models are [expected] to be seen and not heard, and I think there’s a few of us that are kind of wanting to push the envelope a little bit more and trying to get models back to what they used to be. We want to be out there so people know models are also role models too. It’s not just the singers, the actresses, the dancers, et cetera. Models can be people too. But the only way to do that is to kind of step up and keep doing new things that no one has thought of, from new websites to new blogs, a newscast, doing speeches, talking to kids, it kind of opens a new headline every time: ‘Oh, a model hasn’t done this before, a model hasn’t done that before.’ So I think it’s always being the new fresh person, which is hard because everything’s been done before. It’s just redoing it in a different way.”

Lately Coco has been speaking at schools about issues including body image and self-esteem, and is making a trip to Canada to help with a cousin’s cancer charity. In the past, parents and teachers have been wary of spokesmodels who seem to preach self-esteem in empty language without addressing the consequences of their industry’s focus on physical appearance, but it’s obvious that this is an issue genuinely important to Coco. “I think models have that huge say on self-esteem, because we were the girls that were nobodies in school and now have become the models. I think that every girl has a really sad story: nobody liked her, everybody hated her, and then once you do become a model, how things change.”

Speaking about the pressure to be thin in this industry, Coco expresses concern about models that resort to any and all methods of maintaining low body weight, but also emphasizes that not every designer wants the anorexic look. “When you start off you have to have a certain body type. I mean, that’s why we get [recruited] so young. Your body hasn’t even gotten to that peak yet. So when you start aging and your body is changing, people want it to stop, they don’t want that happening. … You can’t please everyone. If Client A and Client B want two different girls, are you somehow going to get both of them? No. If you don’t want me today, someone will want me tomorrow.”

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Nster.com