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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.