Swimsuit Beauty Kate Bock Is A Star
The model dishes on Twitter, stalkers, standing out in the crowd, and men who bark like dogs.
Kate Bock is reading messages from her Twitter feed, which consists mostly of over-the-top compliments: “You’re a perfect person.” “You’re a really beautiful, magical angel.” “You have an awesome smile.” “You are a fairy tale.”
It seems that a bunch of eager fans are staking their claims, I tell her. No, she replies with a laugh: These all came from one person.
Inspiring a certain degree of obsession—healthy and otherwise—is nothing new to the 5’11” beauty from Vancouver. She first unleashed awe as a Victoria’s Secret lingerie model. In 2013, she made the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue, one of just four new models. Photos of the novices were posted online, and, by popular vote, Bock was elected Rookie of the Year. Which, as we meet for a late breakfast in a quiet West Village hotel, brings us back to her social media. MJ Day, editor of the SI Swimsuit issue, warned Bock that her life was about to change as soon as the mag hit the newsstands. Lots of guys see the issue as a print version of Tinder and use social media to proposition models—not very artfully, it seems.
“Usually they send a winky face,” says Bock, with a not-too-serious frown. “You gotta step up your game a little higher than that. I mean, really? Just a wink?” If a guy does nothing but compliment her, “I don’t really know what to do with that. Stop sending winky faces, and make fun of me instead. That’ll probably get you further.”
What should we make fun of, Kate? “There’s endless material, if you get to know me. My family certainly has not run out of stuff.”
Kate Lynne Bock was first spotted by a modeling agent at a local swimming pool, when she was 12: “I had braces, and I was a little gangly. Not a little—I was really tall and gangly.” During summers, when other models went to New York, she went to camp. When high school ended, Bock began to take the modeling game more seriously and moved to Paris on her own; she’d attended a French immersion school for years and spoke the language fluently. She shared an apartment with other models and, as a pragmatic and responsible person, was shocked that some of them slept in instead of trudging to open castings. “You had to figure out your life by yourself. But I’m pretty tough, in that sense—very independent. I don’t get scared by much.”
Really? Nothing scares you?
She reconsiders. “I don’t like it when feet touch me. I’m a very clean person, and I hate it when dirty feet are near me. My older brother had a trick—if he wanted me out of a room, he’d just come at me with his toes, and I’d leave right away.”
Bock, who’s single, isn’t precious about modeling: “I’m a clothing hanger,” she says with a shrug. “I’m there to show off the outfits or the bathing suit. I appreciate that for what it is.” There are perks—she gets “tons of free bikinis” and spends most of her winters on tropical beaches. “The swimsuit-model thing is not so bad, I have to say.”
And because she doesn’t wear swimwear when she walks around New York City, her current home turf, she isn’t often recognized. “There are times when I get a lot of stares, like, ‘Should I know you? I think I know you.’ My whole life, I’ve always been the tall, thin girl with lots of blond hair, so I don’t notice it. But in New York, you’re just used to people being sort of crazy. In other cities, people are nice and polite, while here, they yell at me. A lot of people bark.”
Bark? You mean like a dog?
“More aggressive and louder than that, but yeah, you’re on the right track.”
In addition to emoticon-wielding Twitter lotharios and canine studs on the city streets, Bock occasionally has to deal with misbehavior on the set. Recently, she was posing for a photo on a bed, wearing jewelry and not much else, when she noticed an assistant “trying to take a selfie on his phone, with me in the background. He didn’t think
I noticed it, and he got very intimidated when I yelled at him.
“It’s a good thing I was comfortable telling him to fuck off. Otherwise, he was going to have pictures of my ass on his phone.”
Note to self: This is clearly not the way to curry favor with a supermodel. Next time, try Twitter.
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