After more than a decade in fashion, Vittoria is still getting butterflies before a show. Here, the supermodel talks protecting her privacy, growing into her voice and why she’s happier than ever in fashion.
At 5’10”, with a heart-shaped face and cheekbones sharp enough to cut through security glass, Vittoria Ceretti is runway catnip. Discovered at 14, the 28-year-old supermodel has since become a fixture on the fashion circuit, fronting campaigns for practically every brand a dogmatic sartorialist could rattle off: Prada, Alexander McQueen, Proenza Schouler, Alaïa.
Raised in Brescia, a city in Lombardy, northern Italy, Vittoria has since lived in New York City and Ibiza, and now splits her time between Los Angeles and Europe. When we speak on a mid-September morning, she’s in the former, preparing to fly to the latter, having just shot the cover of Wonderland in New York the week before.
“I was going to go in and out for the shoot. And then I was like, ‘Oh, actually, there’s no better time to be in New York than September.’ So I stuck around a little bit longer than I was supposed to, which was nice,” she tells me. Vittoria’s voice is soft like cashmere, with a distinctly American lilt. Her Italian cadence only surfaces when she drops into the names of fashion royalty, Donatella Versace, Miuccia Prada, each pronounced with the rich, unmistakable intonation of home.
And Miuccia is a name Vittoria mentions often. She’s the designer behind the clothes in the suitcase the supermodel tells me she has just packed (“It’s giving Miuccia”), and a figure she credits with catapulting her career to new heights. “When I first started, that first season, she didn’t think about it twice. She booked me for the campaign when I was just a new face.”
But it was being cast in the Proenza Schouler show – a harbinger of bigger things to come – that Vittoria first sensed a breakthrough might be underway. “I started with New York and I did the Proenza show, which was, at the time, a key to knowing that you were going to have a good season or possibly get cast for Prada in Milan, because it was the same casting director. And so that actually ended up happening. I went to Milan and I had my fitting for Prada, and that same season, I think I did about 30 shows. And then I got the Prada campaign right after with [photographer] Steven Meisel. Those six months were wild,” she reflects.
That season set the pace for a decade of traversing the globe for household-name fashion and beauty campaigns, zipping between London, Paris, Milan, and New York for fashion weeks, and walking more than 400 shows. But Vittoria’s maestro moment, one she still counts among her most memorable, came when she closed Karl Lagerfeld’s final Chanel show before his passing, as the Chanel bride: one of the industry’s highest honours.
She also cites opening Versace’s SS18 show, staged in tribute to Gianni Versace on the 20th anniversary of his murder. Vittoria sauntered down the runway in a canary-yellow leopard-print coat and lace-trimmed crocodile-print skirt. “Donatella Versace always believed in me,” she muses.
Right: Vittoria wears dress, bodysuit & earrings MARC JACOBS; boots LOEWE
Being discovered at the Elite Model Look contest as a pre-teen might sound like the stuff of fashion folklore, but it didn’t precipitate an instant – or particularly linear – rise. Discovery, after all, rarely does, despite the mythology built around it. Between being signed in 2014 and her breakout season in 2016, Vittoria recalls arriving at casting after casting only to be turned away.
“I tried really hard for a couple of years where I would go to all the castings and get absolutely nothing. I’d been going to London for months and months in the summer. Same thing with Paris. And when you do castings like that, it almost feels like you’re begging, you know? So I did a lot of begging and then finally, it was rewarded.”
Two years of rejection in the lead-up to a meteoric rise may not sound like long, but there’s a particular vulnerability to being a teenager, brusquely and explicitly assessed and rejected on the basis of your appearance. Vittoria remembers one disappointment in particular.
“There was this one show, I won’t say what brand it was, but I was friends with the designer. We were very friendly, and I flew for Fashion Week to where his show was and I geared up. I was ready, I was waiting for the call and it seemed like the call was always going to come at any moment. I stayed up all night the day before the show thinking, ‘Oh, they’re just very last minute. I’m going to get a call any minute. He’s a friend of mine. I know I can trust him. I know I’m going to be doing the show, otherwise he wouldn’t have called me all the way here.’”
“And then, like, two hours before the show was set to start, I was still convinced that I was going to get my look and I was going to walk the show, and it never happened. And I think it hurt the most because we were friends.”
There’s a dissonance between that image, a teenage Vittoria waiting by the phone, hoping for a look, and the position she occupies today. She may have 438 Models.com credits to her name, but this season that number climbed by just one, with her appearance at Vogue World in Milan. Today, Vittoria can turn down jobs when she wants to; a degree of autonomy that many models, and creatives more broadly, never reach. So why this season? Why abscond from the chaos now?
“I’ve never done it before. I’ve never skipped one fashion week since I started. I have a lot on my plate and I wanted to get it done and figure it out before campaign season, so I just decided to sit this one out.”
The gentle evasiveness is characteristic of Vittoria, who, in an industry where modelling is increasingly entwined with selling oneself as a brand, product and personality – usually via content creation – remains unusually private.
Granted, she has two million Instagram followers, where she posts a steady stream of campaign shoots, magazine covers and aesthetically pleasing, if deliberately nondescript, life photos. She is also regular tabloid fodder thanks to her relationship with one of the most famous actors in the world. But her social media presence rarely, if ever, offers a glimpse into her personal life, and she remains tight-lipped about anything approaching the intimate in interviews.
Unlike many celebrities who have learned the sanctity of privacy the hard way, keeping her cards close to her chest was always Vittoria’s modus operandi. This was true even during her high-school years, when most zillennials were chronically mining every relationship update, meal and social interaction for the attention economy.
“It always mattered so much to me ever since I was really young. So I was never one to publicise anything about my life, even prior to modelling, even when I was in school. So I was never really worried about it too much because I knew that I was going to be able to keep the things that mattered to me most private.”
Inevitably, given the Faustian bargain stars are expected to make with the gods of fame, and the increasingly porous boundary between celebrity and technology, Vittoria’s existence comes with a degree of public scrutiny, from online trolls to tabloid gossip. The former she sidesteps using the go-to celebrity coping mechanism: never reading the comments.
“I’m so good at not reading the comments, not reading the bad DMs. I only read as long as I see hearts and cute stuff. And then as soon as I start reading words that I don’t like, I just move on. So that helps a lot to begin with.”
The latter she mitigates by avoiding drama, or at least insulating it from leaking into the press, leaving TMZ grasping at straws, and in lieu of scandal, sharing perfectly ordinary moments with friends or her long-term partner, Leonardo DiCaprio.
“I think keeping your life private can be so rewarding because people will never know deep down your true self. And there’s something really nice about that, keeping that part private and when you’re with your friends and just keeping that private too. It’s a safe space that nobody can touch: your heart.”
Despite the industry making headway against ageism through the casting of older models – from Balmain to Batsheva – modelling remains, by and large, a young person’s game. It is also famously fickle: the model of the moment can be as seasonal as the clothes themselves. Some careers careen off the runway before their ordained time, the spotlight becoming too bright and the demands too dark.
Vittoria, though, has no immediate plans to disappear. She is clear-eyed about modelling’s occupational hazards, but equally clear about what keeps her coming back. “I grew up with this business and I grew up in the industry. I started when I was 14, and I still really enjoy it. I think when people get to my point – my age – and after so many years of working, they can start resenting the job and hating it, because it is a job that gives you so much, but can also take away. But I’m happy where I’m at, working.”
“I don’t know what’s going to happen later. It could be something still related to the industry. It could be something that’s absolutely different. Right now I’m still enjoying it; even more so now that I feel like I have a voice that’s a little bit more grown up, and I get to work with the creatives [on set] a lot more than I did before, say my opinion and I’m not afraid. It’s only getting better.”
“Every time I walk a show, I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is so exciting,’” she continues. “And I get the chills and butterflies in my stomach.”
Can she envision those butterflies ever ceasing their flutter?
“I hope not. If they ever go away, that’s the day I quit.”
Photography Drew Vickers
Styling Alastair McKimm
Words Juno Kelly
Hair James Pecis at Bryant Artists
Make-up Yadim Carranza at Art Partner
Manicurist Dawn Sterling at Bryant Artists
Set Design Stefan Beckman
Production Company LOLA Production
Casting Rachel Chandler for MIDLAND
Lighting Technician Nate Margolis
1st Photo Assistant Ashton Herman
2nd Photo Assistant Amelia Hammond
Digital Tech Mike Skigen
Fashion Assistants Taylor Wood, Jody Bain
Hair Assistants Beth Shanefelter, Kyia Jones
Make-up Assistant Aimi Osada
Set Assistants Levi Gittleman, Eli Tamarkin
Post-Production Artpost
