Irina Shayk: ‘I think private life should be private. Irina is KGB-style’

The website High Snobiety has done their first print magazine, called High Style. Their first cover girl? Irina Shayk, who I have grown to love. She’s very Russian and her matter-of-fact interviews are always a pleasure. I basically only started to stan Irina after reading her interviews, and this piece was really fun. She’s 35 years old and enjoying herself, enjoying raising her daughter Lea in New York, enjoying her career and enjoying the fact that she can provide for her family. That’s all she’s ever wanted. She spoke to High Style about co-parenting with Bradley Cooper, aging and more – you can read the full piece here. Some highlights:

She gets dressed up for the school run: “You can’t leave your house with dirty nails and dirty hair — even though I really want to sometimes. But during lockdown, we had no red carpets. I was like, ‘I’ve got to make school runs fun.’ Sometimes my daughter is scared — she sees the paparazzi from miles away. She’s a KGB baby. We had to explain to her, like, ‘They’re just doing their job. By selling pictures, they make their living. You don’t have to be scared.’”

Working as a struggling model in the early ‘00s: “It was no Facebook, no Instagram. You had to go to different young photographers, get your test pictures. The agency would give you a map, okay? A physical map. I still remember it now. There was one studio — it was a nightmare to get there. You arrive and they look at your book, and then they’re like, ‘Okay, thank you. Bye.’”

She likes the changes in the modeling industry now: “Nobody wants an empty vessel. Now you have to bring more than just beauty. Everyone is fed up with perfect.”

When she moved from swimsuit modeling to high fashion modeling: “Usually, you see models on the slimmer side. I had an agency that said, ‘You’re never going to work if you don’t lose 15 pounds.’ I have boobs and a butt. When I was doing the Marc Jacobs show, Marc came for a fitting, I pointed at my boobs and butt, and said, ‘These are how I bought my West Village apartment.’”

She’s discreet about her love life: “My grandma was a secret agent in WWII. I think private life should be private. Irina is KGB-style.”

She won’t talk about Kanye West: “Tomorrow there is going to be a rumor that I’m dating my doorman, okay? Then after tomorrow, it’s going to be someone else. Look, there’s always something there, and I’m just keeping it to myself.”

On Bradley Cooper: “He’s a full-on, hands-on dad — no nanny. Lea went on holiday with him for almost two weeks — I didn’t call them once. Me and her father are very strict. When she finishes eating, she gets up from the table, takes her plate, says ‘thank you.’ Without ‘please’ or ‘thank you’ she’s not getting anything. It’s hard, because she has so many toys. I had one doll, and I still have this doll. Blonde, blue eyes, big Russian doll. My grandma used to make clothes for her. And I always explain, ‘Look, this is my doll. I had only one.’ Or sometimes, ‘You have this candy. I used to have candy only for Christmas.’”

Her vices: Her biggest vices, she says, are sunbathing and the occasional margarita on-the-rocks. “I never took drugs in my life,” she says. “I never went through a party phase.”

On getting older (for a model): “I’ve never been drawn to being a model. My goal was to help my family. I’m 35 and I’m still looking okay. But at 45? We all age. It doesn’t matter what I do for a living. Tomorrow? Maybe I’m not going to do it. In one year, maybe nobody will know me. It’s all about timing. And for me, this is my time.”

[From High Style]

I love “Irina is KGB-style” and Lea “is a KGB-baby.” That child is going to know her mother’s hard-scrabble Russian roots, by God! Anyway, Irina is a doll, I love her. I like how she and Bradley Cooper still seem really tight too. Their breakup wasn’t even that dramatic, and it doesn’t even seem like they “struggle” to get along for Lea’s sake. It sounds like they genuinely enjoy spending time together and they’re on the same page raising Lea too. They live close to each other too, they’re probably over at each other’s houses all the time. Also: whenever the 30-something or 40-something models talk about how different it is now, they really mean it. All of those women would have LOVED to have Instagram back when they were coming up.

MET Gala Departures 2021

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Instagram.

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19 Responses to “Irina Shayk: ‘I think private life should be private. Irina is KGB-style’”

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  1. Evening Star says:

    I don’t know, the repeated unprompted references to the KGB in conjunction with her pro-Putin tendencies is a major red flag to me. The KGB isn’t cute.

    • Normades says:

      I do not get the love for this woman. She certainly likes her pap strolls, high profile men and A-list ultra rich lifestyle.

      And yes to the pro-Putin stuff. I see her very much like a Wendi Deng type of character.

      • Melanie says:

        Exactly. The way that Irina, Bradley and other celebs try to pretend like they are being hounded by the paps when they are actually calling them is beyond annoying. Maybe I was naive, but when Bradley first started to become well-known, he seemed like he was actually a private person and certainly not someone who would have ever gotten involved with Irina, (or Suki Waterhouse) and engage in a ridiculous amount of incredibly staged photos.

    • Ry says:

      I’m russain. Born there. She sounds like every other russain friend I know. They have to be badass and throw in KGB and roots of their grandparents at all times to establish said badass-ness
      Lol. It’s just how we’re raised. That’s the dialogue and mentality. I could tell you stories, TOO, but what’s the point. It’s just taking your kid to school. Say nothing and go your way. She knew she was going to get photographed between her job and having a kid with Cooper. She knew and was prepared and now she’s being intense and all serious like going on a school run is Mission Impossible. Chill. No one is hunting you down for taking pretty pics.
      Dude. Take your kid to school already and stfu if you don’t want any attention. Leave the industry. Move.
      But you can’t. You wabt them to come so you can bitch that they won’t go away.
      Guarantee she also calls her mother every 2 hours to bitch about this. You cane here and you succeeded. Good for you. Have your nanny do a school run if you’re a nervous wreck who hates cameras, miss KGB LOL. Then bitch about that.

  2. minx says:

    She’s pretty chatty for someone who thinks private lives should stay private.

    • Ry says:

      Forget chatty; she’s an idiot. KGB are the ones that DO follow you and take pictures.
      Wtf. This one got all her brains in the looks department.

  3. Rapunzel says:

    Unless you are The Rock, talking about yourself in the 3rd person is obnoxious.

    And I really side eye the story of her telling her daughter, “I only had one doll. I only got candy at Christmas.” Like, I get trying to teach your child not to be spoiled or ungrateful, but she sounds bitter the way she references these things.

    • Amanda says:

      Amanda doesn’t like that generalization!

    • Another Nina says:

      Looks like Irina just remains Russian in her mind as she sounds very Russian to me. And it’s a regular thing for a Russian speaking to talk about yourself in 3rd person. I actually have a FB page opened right now and at least three posts on the page contain a sentence in 3rd person.
      And no, she doesn’t sound bitter to me referring to that one and only doll or lack of candies in her childhood…She just doesn’t want to get her child spoiled, I can’t blame her…Again, she has just a very Russian way of expressing her thoughts.

  4. Summergirl says:

    I have no issues with most of what she says here (which is quite self-congratulatory), but it’s very odd that she didn’t speak to her very young child for 2 weeks when she was on holiday with her father. She doesn’t have to hover over them, but I think it’s pretty traumatizing when you’re that age to have a mother so detached she goes 2 weeks without even a phone call.

    • Kizzy says:

      I mean it may be out if the norm for some people, but it isn’t necessarily traumatizing. At 4 years old children are barely beginning to understand the concept of time.

      • Summergirl says:

        @kizzy So imagine how long two weeks feels to a kid that age. Okay, maybe not traumatizing, but it’s a very long time to go without even a phone call. It’s odd.

    • Kari says:

      Oh yeah for sure not what we are used to, I agree with you there, but I also just find celebrity lifestyles odd to begin.

    • Lyds says:

      The “two weeks” thing was meant to illustrate how much she trusts Cooper’s parenting, but I felt the same way…like I would miss my kids like crazy not to see them for two weeks, let alone not check in or talk on the phone with them for that long. Adult-age kids, I understand but this is a 4 year old. Maybe I have just forgotten what life is like without kids…mine are 2 and 11 months and I haven’t been away from them for two days (not by choice…I too would love to have a break, but COVID etc) so that is an alien concept to me in every way.

  5. SarahCS says:

    “Nobody wants an empty vessel”

    On the one hand, yes we are finally seeing more variety in models while also seeing the rise of the totally vacant nepotism ‘models’ so it feels like two steps forward and one step back.

  6. Case says:

    “Tomorrow there is going to be a rumor that I’m dating my doorman, okay? Then after tomorrow, it’s going to be someone else. Look, there’s always something there, and I’m just keeping it to myself.”

    I like Irina enough but I have to laugh when celebrities try to pull this card. Rumors don’t pop up out of nowhere, nor do pap strolls. That’s what her and Kanye’s publicity teams did. Celebrities can live perfectly private lives if they choose to. The people who get excess attention are the ones who want it.

  7. Cindy says:

    Bit of an offshoot, but Russian women played a huge role on the Eastern Front in WWII. They even had their own aviation group. The Germans called them the “Night Witches”.

    Listen to Dan Carlin’s podcast “Ghosts of the Ostfront” if you have the opportunity to do so! You won’t regret it. Irina’s grandma was a badass.

    • Dani says:

      The Night Witches! Amazing pilots. They also had absolutely shit planes and had to fly especially low to the ground and still delivered a wholop to the Germans. A lot of these brave women sadly did not return home.

  8. MarqueeMoon says:

    I like her too. It’s hard for models to come across sympathetically to other women, as women are almost trained from a young age to see other women as competiton