THE NEXT STEP is where I sit with women I’ve spent my life alongside: models, mothers, women remaking themselves. I ask the questions the industry never did. Each has lived several lives inside one. Photographed in OSAY.
Conversations with women who’ve lived several lives inside this one.
Sometimes I feel like I’ve lived several different lives inside one career, Natalia Costa says. And she has. She left Brazil a couple of months after turning sixteen, and she is still here, more than twenty years later, still working, still curious, a single mother of two who has learned to build a life the way you build anything that lasts: one decision, one boundary, one small joy at a time.
But first there was a grey, misty morning in Milan, and a girl who owned no coat.
Milan, at sixteen
It was September, Fashion Week, and she had landed from São Paulo with a week of English from a tutor her parents had scraped together, enough to introduce herself and survive a basic conversation. Italian was a complete mystery, and she was mesmerized by the sound of it. Here I was, she remembers, a girl from humble beginnings on the outskirts of São Paulo, about to step into the greatest fashion houses. They collected her from the airport, drove her to the agency, handed her a list of castings, showed her how to read a paper map, and sent her out. No shower, no rest, no moment to absorb that her whole life had just changed. Just, good luck. And off she went.
One of her first castings was Giorgio Armani. She did the casting, then the fitting, not knowing that a fitting usually meant you’d booked the show. When someone said see you at the show, she started jumping up and down, the way any sixteen-year-old would. That feeling, she says, has never left her. More than twenty years later, every new job still feels like the first.
What no one told her
What surprised her was never the work. It was how little room there was for the human being behind the model. You arrived, you performed, you left. At sixteen, alone in another country, she was trying to understand adulthood while everyone assumed she already had. Being alone never frightened her; solitude suited her. She wasn’t lonely, she was discovering the world. But there was one thing she wishes someone had whispered to her: you have agency.
For years she believed the agencies held all the power. No one told her that; it was simply how it felt to enter the industry at sixteen. It took her years to learn the distinction that undoes it: professionalism is important; self-abandonment isn’t. And the irony, she says, is that learning to value her own voice never made her less professional. It made her better at the job.
The school her mother meant
Natalia had grieved the ordinary education she’d traded, until her mother reframed it: you are in a different school. What that school taught can’t be printed on a diploma: how to read a room, how to deal with people across continents, how to hold the delicate ecosystem of a set together when every energy pulls a different way. It is the rarest kind of intelligence, and the world has never quite known how to see it. She lights up talking about the other women who carry it. Together, we could take over the world if we wanted to. Not competitive about it, but moved. That is rarer in her industry than beauty: a woman who looks at other women and feels inspired rather than measured.
On loving what time has given
She will tell you, plainly, that she is happy to be aging, and she means it. I’m genuinely happy our industry has finally accepted that we all age, she says, that it has begun to embrace women beyond their twenties. For so long women were taught to fear it, and fighting the tide was exhausting. At eighteen, I thought beauty was enough. Now I believe presence is far more compelling. Cameras don’t only photograph your face, she has come to understand; they photograph your relationship with yourself, and the older she gets, the more interesting she finds that relationship. I love what time has given me.
The pain that had a name
It did not come without cost. There were years her body was in pain she couldn’t name, until she did the math and understood it was the marriage, quietly shrinking her, that had to end. We are the first generation that leaves for the kids, she read once, and it stayed with her. The pain left when she removed what was causing it. Afterward she wrote pages no one asked her for, releasing the old beliefs, deciding she was worthy of love. She still wakes before the sun for it, the one quiet hour that belongs to her, a hand on her heart. I’m safe.
A success you build
She has learned to trust her body more than her fear. The fear that comes from other people, from the industry, from the voice in her own head. Listening inward, she says, is one of the most valuable practices I’ve developed. For a long time she thought success was something you chased. Now she thinks it’s something you build. One decision, one boundary, one tiny joy at a time: meaningful work, the people she loves, her peace, her curiosity. That curiosity, she says, has opened every door she’s ever walked through, and it is still opening them, toward something quieter now, a longing that came out of a life always in motion: a place to gather and belong. She won’t force it. She’s simply curious to see.
At the end of the day, she likes to say, it’s a shoe, the part of you touching the earth. Hers has carried her from a girl with no coat in Milan to a woman who loves what time has given her, and it isn’t done.
With love,
Kenza
