American girls are much more financially savvy - for example, if a girl went to Paris and she was going to do a fragrance campaign, she would say she wouldn't do it for less than half-a-million dollars. Whereas a girl from the Czech Republic would do it for $100,000. I think that's a really big imbalance that created the demise of the modeling industry - and it also created a gap in giving girls an opportunity to become or gain super-status.

American girls are much more financially savvy - for example, if a girl went to Paris and she was going to do a fragrance campaign, she would say she wouldn't do it for less than half-a-million dollars. Whereas a girl from the Czech Republic would do it for $100,000. I think that's a really big imbalance that created the demise of the modeling industry - and it also created a gap in giving girls an opportunity to become or gain super-status.

When you see someone, you automatically start putting those people together - the eyes and the lips. And what that does is that it creates an identity with that person, so when they actually start working, the audience sees exactly what you're seeing, and they become recognizable. So instant recognition is when certain women and men have features that look like other people. So baby Gisele is, like, Linda V - that's what she was called for a long time.

A lot of people don't make the correlation between acting and modeling, they think of them as two separate things. But I really believe that a model is an actress.

A girl's career today doesn't have the same kind of life span, whereas it used to be a collaboration and a partnership and it continued. Peter Lindbergh still uses girls - like, look at Amber Valetta - so there are some photographers that have relationships long-term with models. I also think that the industry can't support the amount of models that exist right now and therefore the relationships between photographers and models and even the clients is short lived.

Natural talent means to have the ability to transform, to evolve, to play and role-play with the photographer and the stylist. And really be an actress rather than just a mannequin. So that involves a tremendous amount of confidence and your ability to expose yourself to anything that will make a better photograph.

There's something I call telegenekicity, and it's not about just models. Of course, I can reference Iman, Tatiana Patitz, Kelly Emberg, Bonnie Berman - I go all the way back - but I think that you develop an eye to register iconic images - like Greta Garbo and Elizabeth Taylor.