ELLE Interview: Irina Lazareanu has it all!

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Bohemian chic and little-girl innocence
Last year, Irina Lazareanu, the Romanian-born, quirky-looking girl from<br/>Saint-Hubert, Que., broke a record by strutting down 76 catwalks in one season, which earned her the nickname "the fashion tornado." Since most of the girls on designer runways are barely out of puberty, one might say that Lazareanu, at 24, is already a grande dame of the modelling biz. Her debut in 1999 was stalled because it coincided with the dominance of Brazilian bombshells like Gisele Bündchen. (While many adjectives describing Lazareanu's looks come to mind, "bodacious" and "buxom" are not among them.) Yet Lazareanu is glad that her career took awhile to become airborne. "It was just a case of bad timing," says ELLE's fashion editor, Denis Desro, who gave the model a helping hand at the start of her career.

By the fall of 2005, however, Lazareanu's rangy physique, luminous eyes, small, oval face, delicate yet unsmiling mouth and mod hair were garnering her all the attention a girl could want. She seemed to capture the spirit of the moment with her twitchy blend of bohemian chic and little-girl innocence. When Emmanuelle Alt, French Vogue's fashion director, saw Lazareanu's profile for the first time, all she could say was "So cool!"

A nudge from Kate Moss
It was Kate Moss who nudged Lazareanu into the modelling elite. When Moss was guest editor at French Vogue in December 2005, she cast Lazareanu in the fashion editorial "Extravagance de plumes...." The phone began ringing off the hook with job offers. Steven Meisel shot 70 pages of Lazareanu for Italian Vogue. Runway shows and photo shoots in Milan, New York, London and Paris soon became a part of her non-stop schedule. A typical day for Lazareanu at Milan Fashion Week: 7:15 a.m., hair and makeup for the first fashion show; 9 a.m., walk the show; 9:45 a.m., jump into a minivan to be driven to the next one; 10 a.m., hair and makeup -- again; 11 a.m., walk the show, then on to the next. Byblos, Ferragamo, Costume National, Prada, Versace...seven shows a day, with fittings late into the night for the next day's shows. She returns to the hotel at five o'clock in the morning, gets an hour's sleep and then showers, changes and does it all over again -- for six more days. "You have to be in shape and have a strong stomach," says Lazareanu, "since I only get to eat little bites of sandwiches and pizza on the fly."

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Image courtesy of Martin Laporte