Paulina Porizkova said that from her childhood with a difficult mother to her early years as a model, she felt she had been trained to do as she was told, even if it meant taking off her top.
“When I started modeling at 15, it was the same story over and over again,” the former supermodel said of feeling like she had to put on a show to please her single mother, who paid little attention to her as a child.
“The quickest way to get out of a situation is to do as you’re told,” she said on the “Twenty Good Summers” podcast with her fiancé Jeff Greenstein.
“And if that meant taking off my top, and if that meant doing X, Y, and Z, I just did it because that was the easiest way to get away with it and the easiest way to please people.”
Porizkova explained that “being loved for who you are” was something that had eluded her until she was 58 years old.
She said that as a child, her parents “didn’t really like me unless I performed,” and recalled that when she was about three years old and attending a community theater show, her father urged her to go on stage.
“I remember the lights being incredibly bright. I couldn’t see my parents, I couldn’t see anything beyond the stage, and I was so scared,” the 60-year-old said. “I was so scared. So I thought the quickest way to end this problem was to sing a song. If I sang a song, they would chase me away.”
She said the audience liked her and she felt vindicated.
“I think my parents liked me more when I could do things like that,” she admitted. “Otherwise, they didn’t seem to be paying much attention to me.”
She added that she learned early on that “no one cares what I want or how I feel. It’s all about putting on a show. That’s the only way people will like you,” adding that she felt she had to always be on her “best behavior.”
Like many people, she said she spent her 20s figuring out who she was and “how to please people.” “The great thing about getting older is that you start to realize who you are, what you’re good at, and what you’re bad at.
“And after we’re 50, we women just become less visible. We just ignore other people’s assumptions and expectations and just be who we are. We just try to really become the person we always knew we were.”
Earlier this year, Porizkova detailed the sexual harassment she experienced in the fashion industry when she was 15 years old.
“The people I was meeting were some well-dressed people in their offices, some middle-aged men who lived in dirty apartments and just wanted to take a few casual photos of me, preferably topless,” she said in a social media post.
“I lost count of the number of men in open-necked bathrobes who greeted me in hotel rooms and apartments sent by agencies and clients.”
Porizkova, who made history as the first Central European woman to appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated Swimsuit in 1984, noted that progress wasn’t limited to a messy apartment.
She recalled how well-dressed older men often invited her to parties, yachts, and tropical villas.
For years, supermodels believed that these encounters were simply part of their paycheck.
“I took it all for granted,” Porizkova admitted. “My job is to learn how to undress, re-dress, and creatively fend off excited men without offending them and losing my job.”
