Natalia's playground.(Natalia Vodianova)

Byline: Robert Sullivan

Fashion is fickle, as we all know. What's in one season, our year-end credit-card statements often remind us, is out the next, due back in some new permutation in a decade (or, lately, sooner). And yet, hemline after hemline, the immutable attributes of great fashion are worth more than any price tag can measure-for instance, the kind of ineffable quality that we often associate with success but that also has to do with a person's particular elegance. Call it tenacity, stick-to-itiveness, or a resoluteness about the world's potential wonderfulness. It is this quality, it turns out, that is the not-exactly-secret weapon of Natalia Vodianova, the model-that and her looks.

Natalia arrived on the scene in 1999. And yet here she is, still, even after-can you believe it?-two kids, a marriage to a husband who has put his career on hold to follow her around the world as she pursues an old-school approach to modeling, and eight years, an amount of time that is to fashion what the Mesozoic period is to the history of the world. At the height of her newfound fame she locked in with Calvin Klein the way models used to lock in (if anyone can remember the fashion-faithful days of Brooke Shields). Her appearances, limited to the CK runway, became all the more momentous, making the story of her discovery less like a job history and more like a Russian folktale.

But, as a story, it isn't over. She's still working on her big dream-to build playgrounds in her home country. If she's a little frustrated in reaching her goal, the hard work has made her all the more impressive. Or so says the architect and artist Adam Kalkin.

"The amazing thing about her is that she's very persistent," Kalkin says. "She's smart, and she's got a head for business. And she's got this terrific attitude about getting things done. She's not just some silver spoon plucked from the rich life. She has lived the hard stuff." He speaks as someone who has followed her to Russia and flown (nervously, in a small, old, propeller aircraft) to Natalia's hometown,

Nizhny Novgorod, a notoriously weary city. In the time of Ivan the Terrible, Nizhny was a great trading post in the valley of the River Volga, spared by the Mongols in their relentless attacks. Today, it is host to one of the largest automobile factories; it is the Detroit of Russia. "It's bleak," says Kalkin.

"It is very bleak," confirms Natalia, who was raised there by her mother, a single mom and fruit seller. Natalia sold fruit, too, to help support herself and her brain-damaged sister, but also drove the long trip to the fruit wholesaler, where by age fourteen she'd become famous for her hard-bargaining tactics. In 1999 a visiting modeling agency ...