Jamie Bochert

With her masculine face that resembles something between Patti Smith and Marilyn Manson, Jamie Bochert does not possess an easy kind of beauty. However, it is precisely this New Yorker's atypical look that has the designers running after her, rendering her one of those models not like the others...

Bochert is one of those models whose appearance, as brief as it may be, makes a lasting impression. All she has to do is show up on a catwalk or in an ad campaign and everyone around her becomes invisible. To the uneducated eye, she may seem like the ugly duckling of the modeling world, but those like Marc Jacobs have another opinion of her entirely.

A New Jersey native, Bochert had a normal childhood filled with school, listening to music and dance classes. Over the years, dance became her main interest.

At the first possible chance, she left for L.A. in hopes of getting into a dance company there. As a teenager, she started running to auditions while working as a waitress in a bar. However, she quickly learned that she was too tall and too big-boned to be of interest to the choreographers.

Distraught, she accepted the first offer that came which happened to be from a modeling headhunter who had scouted her at work. Her gothic-like physique appealed immediately to Vivienne Westwood who gave her her first chance on the catwalk during the March 2002 Paris Fashion Week.

Bochert made a big impression, to the point that she soon graced the cover of ID, and then went on to pose for Terry Richardson for the Sisley campaign. Fascinated by her strange beauty, the controversy-hungry photographers like Richardson and David LaChapelle became infatuated with this long, lanky model.

However, despite the fact that in 2002 she was showing for all the big names (Givenchy, Lacroix, Gaultier), she realized that her time in the modeling spotlight could only be ephemeral. In 2004, she decided to retire and dedicate her time to one of her real passions, music.

She and her fiancé, actor Michael Pitt, composed electro rock music that they sang on stage. They made ends meet financially thanks to a Calvin Klein commercial that Bochert had done earlier.

However, in 2008, while the rest of the world believed that she had definitively quit the catwalks, she signed with Women Management in New York and Elite in Paris. At peace with her appearance, she had decided to take on two careers.

The casting dance started up again, not easy for Bochert as she was rarely booked. It was not until September 2008 that Marc Jacobs, hypnotized by her dark and scrawny look, asked her to open his show, giving her an unhoped for chance in the spotlight.

With this kind of support, Bochert was quickly solicited from all sides: she reappeared on the fashion week catwalks, squatted the pages of W, Numéro and ID, and graced the Vogue Italy cover.

All of this does not prevent her from developing her music with Pitt, whom she married.