I was always a creative at heart. Growing up in Russia during the nineties, art was my refuge — I would sit for hours painting, transported somewhere else. When I was twelve, my work was featured in a local newspaper. It was the first time I felt the thrill of my talent being acknowledged, and I was hooked.

Back then, we lived through Perestroika. Money was worthless, even if we had any.

Out of necessity, I learned to sew. My grandmother taught me. I would take my mother’s old clothes and transform them into something entirely new. People would stare because they’d never seen anything like it—for better or for worse. I wasn’t sure if they were laughing or admiring, but it didn’t matter. I enjoyed being an individual, having my own unique style.

I remember when the Soviet Union collapsed and we finally started getting goods from the U.S.— the novelty of acid wash jeans felt like discovering color for the first time. A pair of Levi’s would cost around 200 Rubles. To put this in context for the time, this was over a month’s salary for an average engineer.

That inability to buy what I wanted taught me something invaluable: to create an iconic image, you must be creative and choose quality over quantity. It was a lesson born from scarcity, but it became the foundation of everything I do.

When I moved to the U.S. at sixteen, I landed in a Midwestern high school. Those were rough times. Being a teenage girl from Eastern Europe in Minnesota wasn’t easy. I dressed the same way I had back home, and this time I knew for sure people were making fun of me. But it didn’t make me flinch.

The moment I finished high school, I packed my bags and moved to New York City to pursue modeling. NYC was everything — you meet so many talented people who influence you in ways you don’t even realize at the time.