hit girls; Vogue's ten cover girls bring personality and attitude to spring's eye-popping prints.

Byline: Jonathan Van Meter

One Wednesday in February, in the middle of what is surely the coldest New York Fashion Week on record, I am sitting in a corner booth having lunch at Balthazar, the bistro in SoHo that crawls with fashion people during the collections. I'm meeting a model named Doutzen. It is pronounced Doubt-zin, not Doot-zen. Practice it a few times. Concentrate. This will only take a second: Doubt-zin . . . Doubt-zin . . . Doubt-zin. She is from Holland, and her last name is Kroes, but that's not important right now. What is important, however, is that you learn to say her first name correctly because in about ten minutes she will be everywhere-L'Oreal television ads, billboards, the pages of Vogue-and you are going to want to be able to say her name as if you have known it all along.

She arrives at the restaurant on time, in a great pile of beige and brown knit: a tangle of scarves, a giant floppy hat, a Louis Vuitton tunic sweater. "I love this weather," she says, and I think she is about to launch into a soliloquy about how the cold brings to mind bittersweet memories of her homeland. Not a chance. "It's perfect because it gives all these fashion people something to talk about," she says with just the right amount of sarcasm and affection. "What else would they say to each other?" She laughs and then mimics the endless weather talk: "It's so cold! . . . Stay warm!"

I first encounter Doutzen two days earlier, just as I am beginning what I come to think of as my week of model speed-dating: schlepping around from one agency to another to meet the ten girls who are on the cover of this magazine-at long last! models!-trying to divine their potential, see if they have what it takes to capture our attention and put an end to this god-awful supermodel drought once and for all. On day one, I find myself in the sleek, bright conference room at the agency DNA. Beyond the glass walls, gorgeous young people slouch about, while not-so-gorgeous agents and schedulers man banks of phones, all of them barking over one another and the New Wave sound track blaring over the speakers. I interview Agyness Deyn-the rangy 21-year-old from Manchester, England, with the peroxide crop who's been causing a stir in the fashion world-and Raquel Zimmermann, the stern-looking veteran from southern Brazil who, at 24, is the oldest of the bunch and has been modeling already for seven years. Both women are engaging, intelligent, genuinely enthusiastic about their success, and not at all vacant or too young or too skinny. Then, in walks Doutzen. Inside of five minutes I have a hopeless crush.

Putting aside for now the fact of her exquisite beauty-she reminds me of a softer, prettier Angelina Jolie-what strikes me most about Doutzen is how effortlessly she turns our interview into a conversation. She lets me know that she has read the last piece I had written for Vogue and quotes from it. Clever girl! She talks about Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born Dutch feminist and politician who has been exiled, which she finds deeply troubling. And she makes me laugh. Here, I think, is the whole package. Not just beauty, brains, and ambition, but a little attitude and a healthy sense of irony. We talk for a half an hour, during which her abbreviated life story begins to unspool. She was born in a rural town in northern Holland. Her parents met cute when they were both competing in a speed-skating match (today, he's a shrink and she's a teacher). Doutzen, who has a younger sister, had a "really good childhood being outside," building tree houses, riding horses, and speed skating. "That's where I get these from," she says, grabbing her thighs. "Compared with all the other girls, I have big thighs. But I am very happy with my body, and if they don't like me, too bad. I represent the woman."

"The woman" just turned 22 and wears a crystal around her neck to "protect me from mean guys." She is "ashamed" to admit that, unlike nearly every successful model, she was not discovered; she sent pictures of herself to an agency in Amsterdam when she was eighteen because she "needed money." Within a few months, she had moved to New ...