“I want to feel strong”: Danish supermodel Josephine Skriver is entering a new chapter

Spending almost half her life in the hard-core throes of the modelling game, Josephine Skriver is no stranger to an early call time. But for the last 12 months or so, in lieu of blaring iPhone alarms, the 31-year-old has instead reliably risen before dawn each day with her infant daughter, Aurora James. That is, when jet lag isn’t wreaking havoc on the body clocks of mother and baby – as happens in New York on the morning we’re scheduled to chat.

Effusively apologetic for the delay, Skriver texts me that she’s grabbing her laptop and appears moments later on our call wearing a black hoodie, her slightly dishevelled hair swept back into a bun. The LA-based Dane’s chameleonic face is flawless, her eyes are bright – she really did just wake up like this. There are soft cries of a baby in the background, the sounds of her family getting ready for the day, yet she’s poised and focused, ever the professional.

At the time of our conversation, the exact reason that Skriver is in New York hasn’t been publicly announced yet, but she doesn’t beat around the bush. “It’s been total VS fever,” she blurts out, referring to the highly-anticipated and hotly-debated return of the Victoria’s Secret runway show happening in just two days’ time after its six-year hiatus. Synonymous with supermodels, the show’s Angel status has long been one of the industry’s most sought-after castings. Skriver earned her wings in the 2010s and established herself as a consecutive catwalk mainstay amongst the world’s biggest names in modelling – following in the footsteps of fellow Danish beauty Helena Christensen, who was an Angel in the late 1990s.

Along with most others walking the show, news of Skriver’s return has been kept tightly under wraps and even for her, the process had been shrouded in mystery for the longest time. “We had a group WhatsApp chat going around with the other girls, and we were trying to puzzle together what was happening, asking ‘Does anyone know anything?’ ‘Do they want a completely new team or do they want us older girls back?’,” she says. But Skriver need not have doubted whether the lingerie powerhouse wanted to recruit her back as one of the legendary “older girls” (she’s 31) – eventually she got a direct green light while at home in LA. “All I had to do was send in photos and a video and I got confirmed,” she says in her no-nonsense way.

Now, the girls have made it out of the WhatsApp chat and arrived in New York, where Skriver describes reuniting with the other Angels with “hugs in the hotel lobby or high-fives at the gym”. But moreso, Skriver’s comeback casting to the infamous feather and diamond-encrusted showcase, after its silent interlude, has book-ended some major life milestones. “A lot of life has happened in the last six years,” she says. “Not just for me, but also Taylor [Hill], Candice [Swanepoel], Jasmine [Tookes]... everybody is either married or has become a mum, or both, by now.”

Speaking of angels, a cherubic blue-eyed button of a face suddenly appears at the bottom of the screen. Skriver’s one-year-old clambers onto her lap where she happily babbles away before being gently lifted out of sight by the tattooed arms of her long-term partner, American musician Alexander DeLeon, whom she married in 2022. Later – as shared on Skriver’s Instagram account – her baby Aurora would shout “Mama!” as she recognised her mother striding across the television screen’s livestream in a skimpy silver bra set, leaving a trail of long sparkling tendrils in her wake. The look was completed with towering wraparound stilettos, soft blonde waves and her megawatt smile.

Related: Josephine Skriver reclaims her wings for the Victoria’s Secret 2024 fashion show

Skriver’s reappearance on the Victoria’s Secret runway is one thing, but being back in New York is meaningful in itself, marking a full-circle return to the turf on which she was originally discovered as a teenager. “Something happened when I was 14,” she says. “My height or something. Even when I would walk around in Copenhagen, I would be stopped all the time. I was like, ‘Is this legit? Or are people just making fun of me?’” But this time, it was her soccer coach who was stopped as he was escorting Skriver, and the rest of her fellow Danish team players, for a one-day trip to the Big Apple.

She was signed right away, but things didn’t really take off until she was 18, affording Skriver the time to become more comfortable in her skin and acclimatise to the modelling world. “They were super patient,” she says of her first Danish mother agency. “Looking back, I would have been way too green if they had just dropped me overseas from day one when I was so young.”

It also bestowed Skriver, a tomboy through and through, the opportunity to properly learn how to walk. “I could not walk in heels at all in the early days. I had a cleaning job on the side and I would walk around vacuuming in heels to get comfortable,” she laughs. “I was too embarrassed to let my friends see, so I also made my mum go for night walks with me in heels after dark, so I wouldn’t meet anyone I know.”

The 2010s were a diabolical time to be coming up in the modelling ranks, with body image standards at their worst and the industry, for the most part, being lawlessly managed. “It definitely was a different time… a time where there were no rules for how old you had to be, no rules to ensure you were sleeping and you were healthy,” Skriver reflects, acknowledging how she was blessed to be with her protective and patient mother agency.

She took her debut steps as a teenage model on home ground, walking at Copenhagen Fashion Week several times and securing one of her first gigs with local brand Munthe, shooting at the summerhouse of creative director Naja Munthe with her mother in tow. (Poignantly, Skriver brought her mum on set at the same location for a Vogue Scandinavia photo shoot earlier this year in celebration of Munthe’s 30th anniversary).

Despite her huge subsequent international success, propelled by the Victoria’s Secret spotlight, Skriver maintains her close ties to home – returning to Denmark often and making sure Danish forms part of her daughter’s quickly burgeoning language skills. In fact, Skriver is homeward bound mere hours after her big Angel moment in New York to shoot this Vogue Scandinavia digital cover story in the heart of Copenhagen, where she maintains the high-octane glamour with sultry backless gowns, fluid suiting, statement accessories, and legs for days. The crème de la crème, however, is the svelte, velvet boned bodysuit she wears – a Nina Ricci creation that debuted on the spring/summer ‘25 runway – with a plisse panel of organza fanning out across her decolletage to dramatic effect. Skriver is potent and powerful, a vision reminiscent of the OG supermodels.

Empowered and at ease in front of the camera, Skriver is now bringing her expertise to the flipside of the modelling game as she casts girls for Joja, her own activewear brand which she started up with fellow Angel Jasmine Tooke out of LA in 2016. The pair had bonded during workouts and their shared pursuit of feeling strong and healthy – both were fond of heavy duty weight lifting, often a taboo for models. “Back in the early 2010s, when it came to exercising, people would say ’You should just think about being skinny’ and I was like, ‘Well, I want to feel strong’,” Skriver says. Looking for the right models to don its streamlined, performance-focused pieces, Skriver now has the opportunity to apply her wisdom from the other side of the fence, reinforcing her well-adjusted attitude to the industry. “It’s really just a clinical process,” she says. “You’re really just thinking about the details, someone’s look or their vibe – not that person and their value. But obviously that’s a lot easier to understand when you’re 31 instead of 17.”

It’s an attitude that was deeply instilled in her by her family, whose unconventional LGBTQ+ structure Skriver has always talked about with open pride. In the ‘90s, when queer couples could not legally get fertility help in Denmark, Skriver’s lesbian mother placed an ad in the newspaper looking for someone to father a baby, with a gay respondent becoming her dad. Surrounded by love and support growing up, her queer parents and caregivers reiterated that modelling wasn’t about her personal attributes. “They would say, ‘Hey, your look is your product, it’s not you’,” Skriver recounts.

Her family has now warmly welcomed the arrival of Aurora, a joyful embodiment of the adage that ‘it takes a village to raise a child'. “I love that Aurora has a diverse family. I thought my family was complicated but when I met my husband, I saw how it’s common that people have complicated families through situations like divorce. So now we have four sets of grandparents for her, four homes to go home to, and just multiple people who love her,” Skriver smiles, adding, “And she can grow up to be whoever she wants to be.”

Skriver’s strength is more than just physical fitness. It’s something she’s always fostered within herself throughout her career, and which takes new forms as she moves further into motherhood. (Though the physical side is very real, as Skriver points out the bicep muscles she’s developed from carrying her child as she lifts twittering baby Aurora back onto her lap.) “Technically, I’ve been so selfish in my life,” she says. “My work has been my North Star, my job has been my priority and I’ve been able to put myself first. But now, as a mother, I’ve almost grown to be two people. It’s made me more dimensional.”