“Do you want to finish eating before we start?” someone asks quietly, almost cautiously, from behind a maze of video equipment.
It’s 10.30 a.m. on a Tuesday, the morning after the Met Gala, and in between mouthfuls of granola and yogurt, Irina Shayk is being transformed by her hair and makeup team in a cramped room on the ground floor of a gilded Manhattan townhouse. Shayk’s long hair is tucked under a sleek wig, the same bob that ignited a media maelstrom after its debut at the Golden Globes earlier this year—an ode to Christy Turlington in the ‘90s, she reveals—and it’s all being caught on camera.
“Why would I stop eating? It’s real!” Shayk shoots back with a grin.
This statement—“It’s real!”—is one the notoriously private model will repeat persistently over the next eight hours. There is a large BAZAAR.com crew shuffling around the house, setting up for Shayk’s digital cover and subsequent fashion shoot, of which "Upper East Side Power Mom" is the theme. At one point, Shayk, dressed in an I’m-all-business Burberry coat and four-inch stilettos, is posing on the sidewalk in front of the house’s quintessential New York stoop when a crew member requests adding a ‘50s-style pram to the shot. Shayk refuses. “It has to be real,” she declares, her heavy Russian accent betraying the slightest hint of impatience. “It’s just not me. I'm not a fancy uptown girl who's wearing fancy outfits, pushing a fancy stroller.” Later, someone asks if she’ll reshoot a scene for the video after an audio gaffe. She waves them off. “Why one more time? It’s fun, it’s real!”
I’m impressed, if not a little intimidated. Watching Shayk is like a master class in learning how to say no—something that women, conditioned people-pleasers, have long struggled with. She’s direct, unafraid to look her opponent in the eye and completely unfazed by who she offends, because, after all, that’s not her problem.
“If you feel strongly about something, you have to raise your voice about it,” she tells me the next day at her modeling agency, The Lions, not far from her apartment in the West Village. She’s leaving for Los Angeles tomorrow morning, where she has shared a house with her partner Bradley Cooper for the last few years, but more on that later. Right now, she’s focused on setting the record straight about something else entirely: “I'm not this stiff model who sits there and wants to look perfect,” she asserts between sips of peppermint tea. “I'm not perfect. I have bad skin days and bad hair days. Sometimes I don't look like a model. I'm just a real human being.”
So who is the real Irina Shayk? A cursory Google search reveals little about the model beyond career milestones and her childhood in Yemanzhelinsk, Russia, a tiny town close to the Kazakhstan border, some 1,500 miles from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster that would terrify the world just four months before she was born as Irina Valeryevna Shaykhlislamova in 1986.
She’s guarded in interviews, and her outward obsession with authenticity, with being portrayed as honest or flawed, appears in direct conflict with an ongoing reluctance to unveil her private life. Her official Instagram account shows no trace of her two-year-old daughter with Cooper, Lea de Seine, who she reveals is named after Shayk’s paternal grandmother, Galina. “The second part is the Seine, like the river in Paris,” she explains, offering one of the few morsels she’s willing to extend about her daughter. Throughout our interview, Shayk wears this dichotomy between guarding her real life and showing her real self like an outfit she’s unsure about. Her wide smile, with a set of welcoming dimples, creates an ease that pulls you into her orbit; she’s opinionated, and seems genuinely excited to share her innermost thoughts. Yet her piercing eyes remain suspicious, on edge and challenging, as if to say, Go ahead, I dare you to ask me about Bradley.
Shayk and Cooper’s relationship timeline has remained a source of almost morbid fascination for fans, despite—or more likely because of—Irina’s refusal to discuss it. Tabloids and glossies alike have tried to piece together details using the couple’s rare public outings. For those not up to speed, it goes something like this: they reportedly started dating in 2015, making their red carpet debut in March 2016, one month before becoming “Instagram official.” Shayk posted an obscure photo of the pair in what looks like a Jacuzzi, the image strategically cropped at the neck, which ultimately left her millions of followers unsure if it was even Cooper at all. Cut to November 2016 and Shayk walked the Victoria’s Secret runway approximately six months pregnant with Lea. There were engagement rumors, but the pair never married.
Subsequent “hot couple” appearances at the Golden Globes and the Academy Awards satiated fans who were hungry for details as rumors ramped up about Cooper’s relationship with his A Star Is Born co-star, Lady Gaga. (Of that duet at the Oscars, for which she gave a standing ovation, she has nothing to say.) But after Shayk stepped out solo at the Met Gala in May, rumors of trouble in paradise hit fever pitch, and four weeks after her BAZAAR.com cover shoot, reports surfaced that they had officially split. Still, neither party has confirmed the separation, and when I try to meet Shayk at the end of June for a scheduled follow up (to address what I gingerly referred to over email as her “most recent life developments”), the official response from one of her modeling agents was unceremonious: “Irina didn't comment on her personal life before, nor will she 'address recent developments' now.”
Pre-breakup, Shayk essentially shrugs at the public’s obsession with her private life. “I think it's just human beings: if you cannot have it, you want to have it. There's a curtain there, you want to open the curtain. It's curiosity I guess.” On the subject of marriage, she will contend to being a fan of the institution, but stops short of acknowledging whether it’s something she eventually wants for herself. “Everyone looks at it differently,” she begins. “Do I believe in marriage? Yes, of course. I'm not the kind of person who is against it.”
I do, however, have intel for prospective suitors: don’t try and slide into her DMs (she won’t read them anyway), avoid text and email, and if possible, put pen to paper the old fashioned way. Oh, and she loves tomatoes. “Every time people send me flowers, I'm like, just send me a tomato plant!” she laughs, before adding, genuinely disappointed: “Nobody's sending letters to anyone anymore. I really believe if you go for dinner with somebody, you don't have to send them a text or keep them updated on Instagram message. You freaking pick up the phone, call and say, ‘Let's have dinner.’”
In case you’ve searched in vain, Shayk isn’t on Snapchat—she doesn’t even know how to use it—and she generally won’t waste time hanging out with those she calls “cyber cloud” folk. “I think sometimes we want to slap some people and be like, ‘Come back to this world. Don't use your phone!’” she says seriously. And if she does eventually return your email, it’s likely because she’s in a bad mood. “When I'm upset it's a great time to follow up on emails that are never answered,” she smiles.
Unlike many of her contemporaries, Shayk doesn’t have a private Instagram account for Lea because, Who has time for that? Her relationship to technology mirrors her relationship to sharing her private life: She simply has no interest.
When our conversation eventually wends to motherhood, she is expectantly tight-lipped, but the idea of authenticity, of being real, is never far away. “You have to be really truly yourself for your kids, otherwise you're living in a lie,” she says emphatically. For Shayk, this means rejecting the idea of a mom uniform. She is adamant that no woman should have to lose her identity just because she’s given birth. “Tell me one reason why, just because you're a mother, you need to wear a longer skirt. No! I don't believe in that. I really don't,” she asserts, launching into an exasperated diatribe against society’s extensive expectations of women. “How is it that people think of this idea? Why should you have to change who you are and how you feel just because you become a mother? I'm like, tell me why. Tell me one reason! I don't believe in that. I don't understand why.”
Lea isn’t with her on this trip (“the thing with babies is they have to be on a sleep schedule,” she says by way of explanation), and I ask if that separation is challenging with a job that requires constant travel. “There is no real challenge,” she says of motherhood in general. “I really believe if you love something, you can prioritize your time. [Motherhood] is just an addition to your life.” It’s a ballsy statement to make, one that, without context, might prompt ire from exhausted mothers everywhere, but Shayk’s definition of challenging is different from most. Raised by her mother, Olga, her sister, Tatiana, and her two grandmothers—one of whom was a decorated WWII hero for her work as a teenage spy—Shayk grew up leaning in long before Sheryl Sandberg became the COO of Facebook. She knows her way around a vegetable garden out of necessity, and thinks the concept of a handyman is hilarious. “Women are the ones who can handle everything,” she says of her home country. “Women can raise the kids, women can do the job, and when she's back, she can cook and clean and do the heavy work too!”
Her father, a coal miner, died from lung complications when she was 14, and with her grandfathers already gone, his passing put in place a matriarchy that would forever alter her definition of female strength. “We never had men around. You have to learn how to put a nail in the wall, how to hang the curtains. I know everything about how to plant potatoes and cucumbers because in Russia, it’s how you survive the winter.” Her father’s death at such a formative age was “shocking” she says, but it was her paternal grandmother's passing, Galina, the war hero, that really shook her. Shayk feels lost without her and in a rare moment of vulnerability, she struggles to describe the loss through tears. “My father's mother was one of the strongest women in my life,” she says, softly. “Yea ... I won't cry.” The name Galina is tattooed on her ankle so that “she’s always with me,” she explains, adding, “it was really inspiring to grow up in a women's family because you learn so much from the strong women in your life.”
Today, Shayk still does everything herself. She doesn’t have an assistant, nor does she use a stylist. She likes to be in control, and if she’s being honest, she doesn’t trust anyone else to get it right. “People think I have a team of like 20 people, but it's going to make me more nervous to have somebody else to help me. I think I like to be not helped,” she laughs. “I'm a Capricorn. I really like everything to be in place. In my house, everything is perfect.” I ask if she’s the handyman in her own home, and she smiles. “If I need to put a nail in the wall or move a sofa, oh yea, I can do it.”
From another room you can hear Shayk yell, impatiently, “Is anyone ready for me yet?”
The crew is still finishing a strategic lighting setup, and Shayk, wrapped in a fluffy bathrobe and dripping in Bvlgari diamonds, wants to get this show on the road. When she eventually slides in front of a chess table for the last shot of the day, it’s difficult to believe that modeling was never part of her life plan. The video team barely has time to call “action” before she’s giving if looks could kill smizes straight down the barrel of the lens.
“I never was this kind of person who was like, ‘I want to look pretty,’” she insists. “I thought I would be, I don't know, a teacher, or something related to piano because I went to music school for seven years. I really didn't have a plan.” Still, she always knew she would escape her home village—a town with no college, no real movie theater, and one café—even if she wasn’t exactly sure how.
Shayk’s rags to riches story began in 2004 with the late Guia Jikidze, a legendary modeling scout who also discovered Natalia Vodianova, after he spotted her at a local modeling competition. Shayk had accompanied her sister to a beauty school in the city of Chelyabinsk (“the ‘beauty school’ was literally this room and my sister,” laughs Shayk), and there was a modeling school next door. “It was a joke,” she remembers. “It wasn't an elite model competition. We're not talking about a model competition in Europe or the U.S. We're talking about a model competition in a tiny city. It was more just for fun.”
Guia Jikidze took her to Paris, where three years later she became the face of Italian lingerie brand, Intimissimi. It’s been a whirlwind decade for Shayk, who, since her 2011 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue cover debut, has transformed from a lingerie model to the high fashion face of Burberry, walking every major runway from Miu Miu and Marc Jacobs to Versace and Givenchy—not an easy transition to make. Indeed, her modeling agent at The Lions, Ali Kavoussi, says it took several years of meticulous rebranding. “It's just been this long process of building a house from the ground up,” Kavoussi says of Shayk’s career over the phone. “Her look wasn't really what was happening in fashion. She was seen as a quirky ‘swimwear model’, so we rebranded her clothing, hair, makeup, styling.” Eventually, the influential French stylist Carlyne Cerf de Dudzeele put Shayk in a Mario Testino photoshoot alongside Doutzen Kroes, Miranda Kerr, and Karlie Kloss. “Every top model got a spread. That was her first high fashion thing,” Kavoussi says. Still, he admits, “people in high fashion are very fickle and Irina’s very overtly beautiful and sexy. They didn't want to touch her with a 10-foot pole.”
He offers Versace as an example. “They used to have her sit front row and dress her, but they would never consider her to walk. We did a lot of fancy footwork around getting her in there, and now she walks with them all the time.” The only thing missing was Carine Roitfeld’s seal of approval. Roitfeld, the editor-in-chief of CR Fashion Book and Harper's BAZAAR’s global fashion director, is responsible for skyrocketing the careers of many of the world’s top models, including Gigi and Bella Hadid, Kaia Gerber, and Halima Aden. So Kavoussi sent Roitfeld some Polaroids of Shayk “stripped down, very bare,” and she agreed to put her on a shoot with Bruce Weber. The rest, as they say, is history.
The way Shayk tells it, she was simply lucky with timing: a model "with curves" (Kavoissi's words) entering the industry at a moment when fashion began to celebrate women’s differences. “Fashion started to be aware of, ‘Oh, women really don’t have to be a size 0. Women can be different shapes, skin colors, she can look different,’” Shayk posits, and Kavoussi agrees: “Let's be honest, sample size is 0. Irina is a size 2, and on a bigger day she'd be a size 4. But she is the type of girl, when you book her, you book her for what she is—you embrace who she is.” Kavoussi laughs, “She's very good at saying no.”
Shayk believes her strong personality is an asset, one that has enabled her to survive an industry that has a history of exploiting, or taking advantage of, young women. “I had agents who said, ‘Oh, you have to cut your hair, lose the wig.’ And I was like, ‘Not happening,’” she reveals. “You have to know what you want and you have to stick with your decisions. People will tell you, ‘you're too skinny, you're too fat.’ You have to learn how to love you and be comfortable in your own skin. If you really love you for who you are, I think you can do anything.”
Wistful about how far she’s come, she recalls her first taste of modeling, in Paris, when she was 19 and living in a small apartment filled with other teen models hoping to make it big. “They give you pocket money and a map,” she laughs of her days traipsing around the city from casting to casting. “Now when I come back to Paris and I have my driver and I stay in a hotel, I really appreciate how I live and how lucky I am. Nothing comes easy in your life. From my childhood, in those times where there was no salary for my mom and dad, I think you’re in survival mode. It teaches you to work hard. It teaches you that nobody will come and give you something.”
Riccardo Tisci, Burberry’s chief creative officer, describes Shayk over email as an “incredibly iconic, timeless beauty.” The pair began working together when Tisci was at the helm of Givenchy, after Roitfeld made introductions at the Harper’s BAZAAR ICONS party. Soon after, Tisci cast her in her first high fashion runway show, for Givenchy, and they have remained close ever since. (Shayk wore Burberry to this year’s Met Gala.) “She is not only a very unique beauty,” says Tisci of her appeal, “she will always represent to me this iconic supermodel: extremely hardworking, incredibly loyal, and a fantastic role model for her daughter.”
As Shayk inches towards 34 in an industry that idolizes youth, she concedes the importance of flawless skin and readily admits: “I'm really lucky, it's genes ... and a healthy lifestyle, of course.” It’s for this reason that Shayk doesn’t drink or smoke, but the sun is her Achilles' heel. “I freaking love tanning,” she laughs. “I always jokingly say that ‘If you can't tone it, tan it,’ because when you tan, you'll just feel better. But stay away from the sun!”
She nearly jumps from her chair when I mention FaceGym—a toning facial massage that stems from the ancient Chinese technique, gua sha—which she’s been known to post about on Instagram Stories. “Girl, yes! I love FaceGym,” she declares excitedly. “I didn't grow up in this world where we use cucumbers and strawberries on the face, or have fancy cream facials. I believe in facials with the machines,” she smiles, before continuing with a PSA for all women reading this. “Look,” she starts, taking a deep breath. “If somebody wants to inject their lips because they feel bad, God bless them. I don't judge anyone. But I always promote natural beauty because I think we live in this perfect world where everyone wants to be perfect. But I'm not perfect. Sometimes I have a double chin. Perfection doesn't exist.”
She continues: “I'm going to have wrinkles and I have wrinkles. You just have to accept the idea of aging and of bodies at every stage, and just celebrate it. In life, we have to let it go and understand it's a human process not to be perfect.” Her strategy for surviving people intent on putting her down—also known as trolls—is to ignore them. She never reads comments on social media and believes a sense of humor is her best line of defense. “Sometimes my friends say, ‘Oh I left you a comment under this picture.’ I'm like, ‘Girl, do you really think I'm reading comments?’ Whatever you have to say, you can say it! But I'm not going to see it,” she admits. “And if I read [a headline] and it’s like, ‘She had injections, her lips look like dumplings,’ I just laugh because it just makes me, I don't want to say it makes me happy, but I think in this life you have to have a sense of humor. With everything that's going on in the world, you have to take it easy. Some people are going to love you, some people are going to hate you. It doesn't really disturb my life.”
It’s her close friends outside of the industry who keep her grounded and sane, she says. “Those people really care about me and would say the truth—not only about dress code decisions. They help me through life.” On the back of Shayk’s phone is a photo of her and her mom, Olga. She misses her, and her sister, who both live close to Moscow. She’s yet to take Lea back home, but says she’s teaching her Russian in preparation for future visits. “Oh my God. I love Russia. I really love spending time there, I'm a big patriot of my country,” Shayk pronounces. Would she ever move back? “I will always love Russia, I'm never going to give up my Russian passport, but I cannot move back there and live there ... I just got my green card.” We briefly bond over the shared experience of being an immigrant in the U.S., before she continues, admitting it’s difficult to be Russian in America. “I think Oprah said in her soul talk, ‘If you are born with an American passport, you are really lucky in life,’ and it's so true,” she laughs, hesitant to expand further. I ask if it’s tough with the allegations of Russia meddling in the 2016 U.S. election. “I'm not into politics,” she admits, cutting the conversation short. “I try to stay away from the news because every time you turn it on, it’s just another thing and another thing and another thing, and just, there's so much.”
It would be easy to mistake this deflection for a certain type of privilege or apathy. After all, it’s hard to get away with saying you’re not into politics in 2019–a luxury many Americans can’t afford. But the comment seems to come from an eagerness to avoid controversial headlines rather than a lack of compassion. Back home, Shayk is the official ambassador for the Russian charity, Pomogi, which provides care to sick children; and she and her sister have helped rebuild the children's ward of the only hospital in her birth village. “They had no baby cribs, no ... it was like a horror scene,” she explains. “When I started modeling, I was thinking, you have to start somewhere. It's not about ‘Go big or go home,’ it's just, you can do something small every day. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a charity project, it can be helping the earth with plastic. It's about exchange. You just have to give something back at some point in your life.”
For now, though, she’s focused on Lea and settling into the West Village, where she has moved, reportedly solo. “I have so many Russian friends in New York. We do Russian banya, Russian dinners with Russian traditions and celebrations,” she says. In a few days, they’ll be celebrating May 9, “a huge day of victory,” she explains excitedly. “My grandma, Galina, the one who passed away, was in World War II when she was 19 and when she was alive, it was the biggest thing that she celebrated.” It’s important to surround herself with these people, she says, because “when you wake up and you look at yourself in the mirror,” she pauses to clarify, “not that I run to the mirror first thing when I wake up, but the people who love you, who surround you every day, they see a different side of you than you see.” She looks at me intently and continues. “When you do an interview with somebody, you really have to trust who they are going to make you look like. I think the real moments is what shows who the person is. And my friends, they really care about the real stuff—they care about you just being real.”
Photography by Zoey Grossman | Styling by Charles Varenne | Prop Styling & Set Design by Isaiah Weiss | Hair by Harry Josh for Harry Josh Pro Tools at Statement Artists | Makeup by Tatyana Makarova for PatMcgrathLabs at Lowe and Co | Chief Visual Content Director, Alix Campbell | Executive Editorial Director, Joyann King | Fashion Director, Kerry Pieri | Entertainment Director, Nojan Aminosharei | Features Director/Interview by Olivia Fleming | Market Director, Aya Kanai | Design Director, Perri Tomkiewicz | Designer, Ingrid Frahm | Motion Design, Hayeon Kim | Supervising Video Producer, Kathryn Rice | Director of Photography, Robert Dumé | Camera Operator, Lauren McCall | Gaffer, John Komar | Swing, Carl Knight | Editor & Colorist, Erica Dillman | Executive Visual Director, Fabienne Le Roux | Visual Bookings Producer, Suze Lee | Special Thanks to On The Mark Locations
Olivia Fleming is the former Features Director at HarpersBAZAAR.com. Born in New Zealand, Olivia was raised with two basic beliefs: That deep respect for the earth is a given, and women are imperative to leading a successful, progressive country (two female prime ministers took office during her childhood). But after moving to New York in 2008, she quickly realized that her status quo was at odds with the rest of the world. In an effort to change that—and to legitimize women's duel interest in fashion, politics, and human rights—Olivia focuses on female storytelling. From long-form features and ambitious packages, to new podcast initiatives that elevate the magazine's content mix across platforms, she champions the stories no-one else is telling.
