Daria Werbowy, one of the most recognizable, acclaimed and beloved supermodels of our time—whose campaigns and magazine covers have been known to provoke haircuts and personal style reinventions and shopping sprees, and whose very name is synonymous with a very specific style of effortless cool— is on the phone, talking about throwing up. “There were days I just wanted to vomit, like, ‘Ah! I can’t look at myself!,’” says Werbowy. And the nausea-inducing element in question? The psychological drain of her latest campaign: a series of self-portraits for Equipment. While it’s hard to imagine anyone vomiting when looking at the model (let alone herself), there is more to Werbowy than a famously versatile visage. In addition to her being able to rattle off her favorite photographers (they include Henri Cartier-Bresson to Lee Friedlander, in case you were wondering), her Instagram @dotwillow is full of her own transfixing, ethereal photographs.
So it’s no surprise that Equipment tapped the model to shoot a campaign of self-portraits with an accompanying video shot, styled and starring Werbowy. Although taking a selfie has become a banal, everyday activity, Werbowy’s campaign became more of an introspective journey than an exercise in vanity. For over two weeks, Werbowy holed up in the bucolic countryside surrounding her home in Ireland. “I couldn’t really imagine doing it in a studio,” says Werbowy, who brought a series of wigs to wear for the shoot that she cut and styled herself. “I went kind of mental and just kept shooting to get over the nerves of the whole process. It definitely brought up things for me emotionally. I saw certain qualities about myself in the creative process and even some control issues I had. I think it is more of a true representation of myself than people have ever seen before.”
For someone who is as famously low-key as Werbowy, the thought of taking a series of self-aggrandizing selfies was mortifying. “I thought ‘Oh my God, how am I going to take five or six pictures of myself?’ It felt really gluttonous and self-indulgent,” the model says. “I’m always being put into other people’s creative ideas.” Looks like the time has come to let her share her own.
