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.

think it's easy to find girls in climates where their bodies are exposed. Obviously, if you go scouting in Alaska, you're not going to find anybody because they're always covered up. Anywhere there's a beach is great for scouting. And state fairs. I've gone to a lot of state fairs.

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.

You have to look for a unique quality in that person and it's not just always physical. I don't think models are great models because of their face or their body. Obviously, I think their physical characteristics are important, but I think it's very much about your personality and inner beauty and really understanding how to be a great model instinctively. And that's where it all comes from.

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.

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."

Lack of discipline. First of all, I think some of them fail because they just don't have natural talent, and they shouldn't even be in the business to begin with.