Supermodel Coco Rocha is known for her ability to strike a pose, but she says it wasn’t always appreciated.
Her modeling career began with catalogue work in Asia, where she recalled in a recent interview: “You can do up to 25 to 75 photos per day. To get the job, you go to these castings and you pretty much do a pose-off, so think of vogue-ing, but a 15-year-old girl who doesn’t know anything about movement doing it. And the client would say, ‘OK, today is sexy pose or today is natural. Today is cutesy pose.’ And you do whatever you think that is. You have a minute to do it.”
When she moved to New York, people thought she was overzealous with her posing, but what made her different ended up being appreciated — for the most part, she said.
“There were definitely some people going, ‘What are you doing? This is so wrong and weird. This is how you model,’” she said “... But, thankfully, there were some people at the beginning of my career that said, ‘No, that’s so cool, that’s so great. Continue doing that.’”
Rocha, 26, has been on the cover of Vogue, W and Harper’s Bazaar, and she’s walked the runway for Oscar de la Renta and Jean Paul Gaultier. She’s also landed ad campaigns for Versace, Zac Posen and Yves Saint Laurent.
Now she has compiled a coffee-table-style book of 1,000 poses titled, Study of Pose (Harper Design), with photographer Steven Sebring, to be published on Tuesday.
“We definitely hit many different genres,” she said. “[In] three days, we actually finished the whole book.”
Rocha hopes the takeaway is that it’s OK to have fun in front of the camera.
“It’s definitely good to have a personality when you take photos, especially [because] we’re in a time where we’re documenting everything,” she said. “... And we’re a little insecure in how we look, so we think we have to turn a certain way, put our chin up a certain way. For me, I’m trying to tell people you can be goofy, you can be fun.”
