Natalia Vodianova and Alessandra Facinetti attend
the Givenchy fashion show, during Paris Fashion
Week yesterday.Photo: Getty Images
So as you’ve probably guessed, we’re all in a tizzy getting ready for Fashion Week. We’ve started getting our invitations, we’re assigning photographers, and we’re going through the schedule and castings. As we looked at agency DNA’s list of models who are up for gigs starting next week, we spotted a familiar name: 25-year-old Natalia Vodianova. The beauty from a destitute Russian village turned British aristocrat’s wife is among the lovelies. It got us thinking about how Vodianova never seems to age. After nearly ten years of modeling, she still has the same baby face and baby hips. Like, not the kind that are made for the having of babies (even though she’s popped out three), but ones that a model for babyGap would take one look at and stop breast-feeding for a week out of sheer envy for them. Nothing she can do seems to shake that girlish figure. Vodianova gave birth to son Viktor on September 13, and while she sat out the New York shows in the fall, she hit the Paris runways less than three weeks later. This made us wonder about Vodianova’s other model-cum-mommy powers, so we went back and did the math on her past postpartum runway returns.
Child: Viktor
Born: September 13, 2007
RTR (Return to Runway): October 3, 2007
DOR (Duration of Recovery): Twenty days
Child: Neva
Born: March 24, 2006
RTR: September 14, 2006
DOR: Five months, 21 days
Child: Lucas
Born: December 21, 2001
RTR: March 11, 2002
DOR: Two months, 21 days
Crunching these numbers, we ran the emotional gamut from pure envy to sympathy pains in our lower backs and ankles to — dare we say it — something resembling genuine concern for her health. So we called Elizabeth Poynor, OB/GYN at Lenox Hill, to get a professional opinion. She tells us this:
Some women can experience rapid weight loss after pregnancy — sometimes women shed the pounds as quickly as three weeks. It all depends on their metabolism and how much pregnancy weight they put on. But as long as the mother is getting enough calories to breast feed and eating healthily, the weight loss is not necessarily detrimental to her health.
So for a superhuman like Natalia, this sort of post-baby shrinkage could be perfectly normal? Figures. —Irina Aleksander
