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The night before I met Natalia Vodianova, a snowstorm descended on south-east England. The Russian supermodel (‘SuperNova’, as Mario Testino calls her) was on her way back to her house in Sussex from a party in London when her car got stuck in the snow. Rolls- Royces may be the height of luxury, but it seems they are not suited to icy country roads. Luckily, her driver’s house was not far. ‘We couldn’t go forward or backward or anywhere. I walked to his house in my Christian Louboutin heels.’ You must be used to extreme weather conditions, I suggest. She fixes me with her pale aquamarine eyes and shakes her head. ‘It was a long time ago,’ she says.
Vodianova was born 27 years ago in the industrial motor-building city of Nizhny Novgorod, formerly known as Gorky, the fourth largest in Russia. Between November and March, there is almost permanent snow cover. But, as she says, it is more than 10years since she left the city to work as a model in Paris. She looks like a teenager and it is hard to believe that she is old enough for anything to have been a long time ago. But it has been quite a journey from a childhood of poverty to the idyllic converted water mill in the rolling countryside she shares with her husband, Justin Portman, the land-owning half-brother of the 10th Viscount Portman, and their three children.
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