5 August 2014
Bikinis and caribbean beaches go together like champagne and caviar.
The late English fashion photographer Norman Parkinson was one of the first to take his models to Caribbean shores for the ultimate tropical fashion shoot. Where better to photograph swimwear or the spring line but under Caribbean sun?
Today's top international models regularly make
the pilgrimage to the Caribbean – either on fashion assignments or to escape the hubbub of their workaday lives in the photographers’ studios or under the glaring lights of the catwalk.
Is there anyone further away from the idea of the English rose than rock chick Kate Moss? With chiselled cheekbones to die for she is the UK's most sought-after face. Despite her wild-child reputation and skirmishes with the British tabloid press she's still got it! She recently celebrated her 40th birthday and posed nude in Playboy’s 60th anniversary issue in December 2013.
In October that year she was snapped on holiday in Jamaica with her husband Jamie Hince and daughter 11-years-old Lila Grace.
Chums with Richard Branson, one of her favourite holiday spots is the mogul’s hideaway in Necker, one of the British Virgin Islands. She also has been famously photographed in a skimpy bikini on best friend's Sir Philip Green's yacht, Lionheart, cruising around St Barts.
While London, Paris and New York are all well-known fashion centres Germany too has a huge fashion industry (names like Hugo Boss, Jil Sander and Wolfgang Joop are German). And the country produced the great supermodel Claudia Schiffer.
Those great, long-legged gals of the 1990s (Naomi, Helena, Jerry and the rest) have been eclipsed. Today's top German model is Heidi Klum who has dual German/American citizenship.
In America Klum is a big TV personality – she won an Emmy in 2013 and has made guest appearances in Sex in the City and has been a judge on Project Runway and America's Got Talent. Her marriage to the English singer Seal ended in 2012. Her love of the Caribbean is well known and her image has appeared on a series of stamps from the Caribbean island of Grenada.
American models have long been blonde and breezy with smiles as big as their personalities (think Jerry Hall and Lauren Hutton).
Today's go-to-girl is Kate Upton. Last summer she famously shared photos of ocean views and selfies with her Twitter fans from an exclusive Nassau hotel in the Bahamas. Her rise in the modelling firmament has been meteoric.
Three years after being signed by a top model agency American Vogue was calling her the "hottest supermodel on earth". Eugenia Silva, another habitué of the Caribbean, grew up hundreds of miles from the sea in Toledo, Spain.
She was discovered at 16 and when she moved to New York she became the face of Oscar de la Renta. Her uncle, Antonio Hernández-Mancha, ran for the Spanish presidency. Another model who regularly holidays in the Caribbean is French filly Fillipa Hamilton. She was for long time the face of Ralph Lauren’s perfume Romance before a spectacular falling out in 2009 when the company released a digitally altered photograph in Japan of Hamilton with an unfeasibly tiny waist.
Doutzen Kroes is the Dutch model who became one of the most recognised faces of the lingerie boutique chain Victoria's Secret. She has a terrific figure and has often been found modelling swimwear with Caribbean palms in the background and unsurprisingly she adores water sports like surfing and sailing.
She was once memorably photographed with her then boyfriend DJ Sunnery James in Curaçao in the Caribbean island group of the Dutch Antilles. They married in 2010 and have two children. Joan Smalls was born in Puerto Rico and she is currently ranked number one model according to models.com. Thanks to American cosmetic giant Estee Lauder she became one of the most famous Latina faces in the fashion world.
Joan and sports superstar Usain Bolt of Jamaica were featured in the June 2012 edition of American Vogue in a feature celebrating the London Olympics. Joan is a supermodel and a role model.
She told W Magazine: “I just have something to prove. I know I’m representing a group – black, Latin, whatever you want to put me with...” She often returns to the island of her birth to visit her equally glamorous sisters
