The brunette beauty discusses her rise from Irish dance competitions in Canada to the pages of American Vogue — and beyond.
Coco Rocha
Ben Gabbe / Getty Images
BuzzFeed Fashion's "How I Made It in Fashion" series takes an in-depth look at the careers of the industry's most successful players. Ahead, model and The Face star Coco Rocha explains how she went from an Irish dance competition to international fashion stardom.
I was discovered at an Irish dance competition when I was 14. I was sitting with my friends and this older man came up to me and said, "Have you ever thought of modeling?" I actually thought he was one of the security guards or someone who worked at this dance competition, and he was going to tell me to remove my feet from the fancy tables. All of us thought it was some kind of joke — or that this man needed glasses.
If you think of a model, you probably think of a gorgeous, beautiful bombshell of a woman — not so much a lanky 14-year-old girl at an Irish dance competition. I was laughing hysterically, but secretly I was also kind of excited that someone thought I, of all people, could be a model. I told him to talk to my mom, who was also there at the competition. She was like, "No, no way are you having my daughter model."
But this guy didn't give up, and I kept seeing him at different dance competitions because his daughter danced as well. Finally my mom gave in. I don't know why — maybe she was intrigued by the idea too.
So he took me to get photos taken. I wore my [own] clothes — I had no style, and I had gotten my makeup done at the MAC counter. The photographer didn't want any wrinkles in the front of my shirt, so instead of Photoshopping them out, which he didn't want to do either, he would make me pull my top taut in front of me for every shot. It was just a big mess. If you saw the photos, you would have never said, "Yep, that's a model!"
Coco's first test shoot.
Courtesy of Coco Rocha
Despite all of that, I then went along to a modeling convention that agents from around the world were attending. Usually you'll get called back by one or two, but I got callbacks from all of them, which was kind of crazy.
I went to work with the agency Supreme in New York. At first they had about 75 girls. Then, all of a sudden, Supreme changed their agents and said they were removing [almost] all the girls. Only a few were invited to stay — in the end only two of us stayed. It was all part of a larger shift to a more androgynous look, where the agency wanted really skinny girls with edgy haircuts. Paul Rowland — the founder of Supreme and Women, who's no longer there — was trying to change the whole industry, which I think he did by signing all these really boyish girls. All the while, I was thinking, How exactly do I fit in this group?
When I was 15 I was sent to Asia, to [work in] Taipei and Singapore. I was sent there because I'm Canadian, and you need to have a certain amount of tear sheets and a few different covers to prove you're a model worthy of a visa in the U.S. I didn't have a lot of work under my belt at the time, so it made sense. In Taipei, I truly learned my "modeling 101."
Today I'm known for posing — I would definitely say that came from Taipei. At castings there, agents send you with a few girls in a car to go see a client. The client sits there at a table with about 10 people and says things like, "Our catalogue today is Hello Kitty" or "sexy" or "cutesy." And you depict what you think that means. You have a minute to give them all your poses, almost like a dance-off — but a pose-off. If you book the job you may get to do a catalogue of 75 photos. The new girls would always say, "What on earth am I doing?" And you're like, "It's normal. You'll get into it." I thought that's how modeling was, and I came back to New York and I'm doing all my poses and people were like, "What on earth are you doing?" They just couldn't understand the whole "dance" I was doing when I got in front of the camera.
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