Chanel

July 1st, 2010

Hey Pretty Baby With The High Heels On

Images Doug Inglish Words Susan Locht Fashion Editor James Worthington DeMolet

When Chanel Iman walked into the office of icy perfectionist Anna Wintour, the coltish model was only 15 and didn’t realize she should be nervous. “I walked right up to her and kissed her on both cheeks,” she says. “I had just come from spending weeks in Paris, so I was used to greeting people that way. I didn’t know that this might have seemed a bit bold… The other people in the room were kind of stunned.” But Wintour obliged, and today Iman, whose fashionable names are, in fact, her given ones, credits the Vogue editor with shaping her early modelling career. “It’s funny; there’s so many experiences I’ve had with modelling that now, when I look back at them, were way bigger deals than I knew at the time.”

Since signing with her first agency in Los Angeles at age 12, Iman, now 20 and living in New York, has travelled the world extensively, walking shows for all the major houses, including Christian Dior, Jean Paul Gaultier, and Valentino, and gracing the pages of major magazines like Vogue, i-D, and Numéro. She’s been shot by an impressive list of heavyweight photographers, while most recently, she posed for Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott for DSquared’s F/W 2010 campaign, a gig she’d wanted for a long time. And earlier this year, with the help of her mom, she opened The Red Bag, a clothing boutique in Culver City. “There’s so much more I want to do, so many more things I want to try,” she explains. And since Iman just signed with powerhouse agency Supreme, this luminous beauty is likely to walk fearlessly into a few more big deals. “I want to be the best,” she says, “and I’m not going to stop until I am.”