When you look at Steven Meisel's pictures and you see girls rolling around in mud or cars are blowing up? It takes a tremendous amount of courage to be able to do that. I think you have to be malleable, and that's what makes a truly great model. It's not the perfect lip or the perfect face, it's your own ability to take on a character and that's, I think, something there's a misconception about.

Today they have to be three-dimensional. Technology's changed, the communication, the marketing and advertising community supports beautiful girls that can be articulate and smart. And also Anna Wintour doesn't want to sit next to some girl who can't say two words.

America has always been the most fertile ground for models - and they were always exported to other countries. When Eastern Europe opened up its doors to the rest of the world, a lot of the girls that were basically working there for $1 a month realized that if they were beautiful and that they could go to Paris and work for $1,000 a day versus the $10,000 that the other girls were demanding. So it created a huge imbalance in the financial structure of how clients could budget out campaigns. The market became flooded.

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.

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.

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."

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.