From Veruschka to Kloss, Models Who Took Control of Their Image

Agents, clients, and editors shape most of a model's image and career. Coco Rocha, Karlie Kloss, Veruschka, Elle Macpherson, and others took those decisions into their own hands, through the contracts they signed, the brands they chose, t the photographers they worked with, the images they owned, and the work they walked away from.

Coco Rocha
Wrote Her Terms Into Her Contracts

Coco Rocha was 15 when an agent told her what it would take to succeed. "I remember at 15 being told point-blank by an agent that in order to 'make it' as a model I'd have to shoot nude," she told Flare in 2014. She refused, because "it was against my principles," and wrote her terms into her contracts. In a 2013 essay for Fashionista, she spelled them out: "In my contract today I state that due to my religious beliefs I won't shoot nude or sheer clothing, or with cigarettes, weapons or religious icons."

Her terms did not always hold. For a 2012 Elle Brasil cover, Rocha wore a bodysuit under a sheer dress, and the bodysuit was retouched out of the published image. "This was specifically against my expressed verbal and written direction to the entire team that they not do so," she wrote on her blog, as FASHION reported. "I'm extremely disappointed that my wishes and contract was ignored." She added, "I strongly believe every model has a right to set rules for how she is portrayed."

Rocha also decided how she would move in front of the camera. "I had developed my own very different way of moving," she told Models.com in 2014. Not everyone accepted it. "There were definitely some people going, 'What are you doing? This is so wrong and weird,'" she told the Associated Press the same year. She kept moving her way, and in 2014 she and photographer Steven Sebring published Study of Pose: 1,000 Poses by Coco Rocha.

She also decided which work she would take. In a 2022 TikTok reported by People, she said she "Always turned down" the Victoria's Secret show, adding, "Air kisses and spray tans were never my thing." In 2016 she left IMG Models for Nomad Management, where she became brand director and took an ownership stake, as Fashion Week Daily reported.

Karlie Kloss and Halima Aden
Chose Their Brands

Karlie Kloss had a contract with Victoria's Secret and ended it. "The reason I decided to stop working with Victoria's Secret was I didn't feel it was an image that was truly reflective of who I am and the kind of message I want to send to young women around the world about what it means to be beautiful," she told British Vogue in 2019, as ABC7 reported. She called it "a pivotal moment in me stepping into my power as a feminist, being able to make my own choices and my own narrative, whether through the companies I choose to work with, or through the image I put out to the world."

Halima Aden let others decide how her image looked, then took that decision back. Early in her career, stylists chose how her hijab would appear. "Oh, my goodness, I had jeans, at one point, on my head as a hijab. I had Gucci pants styled as a turban," she told NPR in 2021. "I let them style me and got comfortable," she told The National the same year.

In November 2020 she stepped away from runway work. "I can only blame myself for caring more about opportunity than what was actually at stake," she wrote on Instagram, as Al Jazeera reported. When she returned to modeling in 2021, she said on Instagram that she was "choosing to only work with brands that I really love and believe in," as News24 reported.

Emily Ratajkowski
Bought Back Her Own Image

Emily Ratajkowski took ownership of her image by buying it. Richard Prince had made a series of "Instagram paintings," posts from social media blown up and printed on canvas, and some of them were made from images of her. She bought one. In 2021 she made an image of herself standing in front of it and offered it through Christie's as an NFT titled Buying Myself Back: A Model for Redistribution, as Artnet reported. She announced it in a tweet as part of her "ongoing effort to reclaim and control my image," Decrypt reported.

Cara Delevingne
Moved From Modeling to Acting

Cara Delevingne moved from modeling to acting. "I ended up feeling a bit empty," she told the Wall Street Journal in 2015, as HuffPost Canada reported. "Fashion is about what's on the outside, and that's it. There's no searching, it's just creating pretty things."

Ashley Mears
Found the Paying Work Goes Unseen

A more common move is harder to find in print: a model shifting from editorial work toward commercial work. Sociologist Ashley Mears, author of Pricing Beauty (2011), explains why. Shooting for a high-end editorial magazine "may pay you a flat rate of $150 a day," she told NPR in 2011. "It may pay you nothing." Catalog and showroom work, she said, is "really lucrative" but "very low prestige," and "showroom models really don't get any visibility." Boston University's magazine, reporting on her research, put a day shooting a JCPenney catalog at $2,500. The work that pays is the work nobody writes about.

Veruschka
Invented Her Own Character

Veruschka, born Vera von Lehndorff, spent a year in New York without being booked. "I would turn up to castings and the photographers would be like 'ok, how pretty, thank you very much,'" she told Dazed in 2014. "I spent the year in America trying to get work and no one even noticed me." She changed her name to Veruschka because "it sounded so exotic and glamorous," and she "had a plan to become a whole new character." Instead of the usual poses, she decided to "try and invent strange poses instead." The character came together in the early 1960s, over a year in Italy working with photographer Johnny Moncada, as W Magazine reported.

Elle Macpherson
Postioned for Control

Elle Macpherson moved away from fashion work and toward a business of her own. "I didn't want to depend on being 'in fashion' or making sure I was the girl of the moment in order to get work," she told Stylist in 2010. "It was only when I left my modelling agency and started up on my own that things changed." She started a lingerie business and, instead of an up-front fee, took her fee "at the back end." She told Newsweek in 2006 that she had priced herself out of work she didn't want: "I didn't want to do half the stuff I was asked, so I just put my rates really high." The trade had a cost she accepted. "I may not have made as much money," she said, "but I've had more pleasure and I've learned."

Rocha Teaches These Decisions,
and Kitty Lever Makes Them

Rocha now teaches other models to make these decisions. Model Camp, which she runs, covers contracts, models' rights, agencies, social media, and branding alongside posing and runway, as Backstage and Good Morning America have reported. "I always have to remind the models that whatever feels wrong to you, you do not have to take on someone else's belief," she told Backstage in 2021.

Kitty Lever is making these decisions now. As I remember from her own posts, she signed with one agency that didn't know how to place her, and it dropped her. She leaned into her personality and into how she wanted to be represented, then found different representation that has been able to sell her story to brands. Before her current success, she was invited to coach at Rocha's Model Camp. In a 2026 LADYGUNN cover interview, she described modeling as "something I do for myself, for the people around me, for an audience that isn't necessarily making any sort of money, except maybe if you look at it long-term establishing some sort of personal brand or identity."

Norma Shearer
Took Control in 1929

In 1929, Norma Shearer arranged a session with George Hurrell to show MGM a version of her the studio could not picture, and she got the role she wanted. The models here have done the same thing by other means: a contract clause, a way of posing, a contract ended, a brand chosen, an image bought back, a new career, a new name and character, a business of her own, different representation. Each of them made the decision about her image herself.

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