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.

If you look at the greatest models, it was because they were muses to photographers. They collaborated with the artist and they created the kind of images that become iconic.

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.

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.

Now people are much more receptive because they can just go online and just Google your name and make sure you're not, you know, psycho. But, before, I think lot of opportunities were missed by a lot of girls. Also parents! The girls would go home and would say, "Oh, you know, I was just scouted." And the parents were, like, "You're not going to be a prostitute."

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.

I think as a scout you have to pick. It is harder. You have to talk and explain that this is not just about standing one-dimensionally in front of a camera.