![]() ![]() In a few months that year she grew several inches-to five feet ten-and filled out. ![]() We all did-with tissue paper or socks.” Then, according to Upton, “it all came at once,” right before she turned fifteen. (Kate won five American Paint Horse Association world championships before the age of seventeen.) On weekends, the whole family hung out at the beach.Īs a girl “she was stick-thin and flat for the longest time,” her sister Christie recalls. Kate’s older sister, Christie, and her younger brother, David, gravitated toward team sports, while Kate and her middle sister, Laura, focused on riding. She was twelve at the time, living with her ultra-active parents, sisters, and brother on five acres in Melbourne, Florida-a kind of Olympic-training center (basketball hoop, trampoline, swimming pool, arena for horseback riding)-where competition was constant. Upton first considered modeling when a scout from an agency approached her at a horse show. “Health is beauty, and confidence is beauty.” “Two things are extremely attractive,” she says. Von Furstenberg calls Upton the perfect role model, representing the idea that you should “embrace who you are”-curves included. “Listen, she’s extremely sexy,” says Diane von Furstenberg, president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America. It’s about a girl who’s enjoying herself.” You see her, and her skin is glowing she’s got a gorgeous smile. They were sexy, but they were also athletic. “It harks back to the seventies, when we first had models like Patti Hansen and Christie Brinkley. “When I look at Kate’s figure I think, This is a person who’s enjoying life,” Kors says. To Michael Kors, for instance, who hosted Upton at last year’s Met ball, she conjures an earlier era-when a model’s healthy shape went hand in hand with her sexiness. “I’ve always loved fashion,” she says, “but it’s not what I set out to do.” And while she may never be embraced as the darling of the fashion cognoscenti, there are designers who are taking her appeal to heart. Upton has retained a cheerful ambivalence about runway modeling. She deadpans, “It’s kind of funny to think, Oh, wow, the news is talking about whether I’m fat or not.” It doesn’t hurt, by the way, that Upton has a sense of humor about this subject. It’s what God gave me! I feel confident with myself, and if that inspires other women to feel confident with their bodies, great.” They’re natural! I can work out and I can stay healthy and motivated, but I can’t change some things. “The things that they’re rejecting are things that I can’t change. “You sit there and you’re like ‘Is something wrong with me?’ ” But she’s learned to ignore her critics-and come to regard her healthy body as a point of pride. “It was hard at first,” she admits of hearing such rumblings. This year’s Sports Illustrated cover-a shot of her in Antarctica, parka open to reveal a stunning breadth of cleavage-set off a fresh round of “Is she fat?” conversations across the Internet. (Descriptions of her figure tend to involve euphemisms for a single word: breasts.) And yet Upton’s body has sparked debate. That is most certainly not Upton’s profile. What makes the Kate Upton era so unlikely is that the things we love about her-those curves! that personality!-defy what the word model has come to mean, at least on the runway: a seemingly endless procession of lanky, expressionless wraiths. In 2012, she was the fourth-most-popular search on Yahoo-just behind Election, iPhone5, and Kim Kardashian. So I think this kind of gives me, as a model, a personality that people can connect with.” It seems to be working. “I like it if it’s authentic and in the moment and happening.” Growing up, she adds, “I didn’t buy the magazines that had models on the covers, because I didn’t know them. “It’s just me sharing my life,” she says about tweeting. Meanwhile she’s a regular on Twitter (more than 900,000 followers), and was an early adopter of the video-sharing app Vine. (The video has two million views and counting.) A subsequent clip was more risqué: Upton dancing the Cat Daddy in a skimpy bikini for Terry Richardson-and yet here, too, she’s goofy, disarming, improbably wholesome (that video has nearly sixteen million hits). She broke out in 2011, dancing to Cali Swag District’s “Teach Me How to Dougie” in footage shot by a friend at a Clippers game-her appeal a mix of blonde bombshell and homespun girl next door.
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