One day at IMG I am interviewing Sasha. She is 22. Grew up in Moscow. One gets the sense that, more than others’, her life has been utterly transformed by modeling. She is so nervous about being interviewed-partly, I think, because her English is not so good- that she has printed out a list of questions that I sent her agent so that she could be prepared.

She wrote her answers out on the paper, and now she is reading them aloud to me, her hands trembling. I have to fight the urge to hug her. But all of the nerves disappear in an instant when I throw her a question that isn’t on the printout. Do you want to be a supermodel? I ask. She looks at me with that face and stares out from those Prada ads and says in her thick accent, “In Rrrussia, vee have proverb: Only bad soldiers don’t vant to be general.”