Kristina Romanova spent a decade being paid to represent other people's brands. In March 2022 she ended up owning half of one. That month Aman Essentials was spun out of the Aman hotel group as a separate company, and Romanova — a Russian model who walked her first runway at 16 — became its chief executive and creative director with a 50 per cent stake; the other half is held by Aman owner Vladislav Doronin. The move from fee to equity is the rarest transition in modelling, and the one thing an agency cannot book for you.
Volgograd, a local agency, and a BCBG runway at 16
Romanova was born on 11 June 1994 in Volgograd, was recruited at 16, moved to New York and made her runway debut in 2010 with BCBG. Her first agency was V.G. Model Management in her home city — the ordinary Russian route, where a regional agency finds the girl and a larger one takes her abroad. Women Management in New York, Milan and Paris followed, along with Elite in London, Traffic in Barcelona, Modelwerk in Hamburg and METRO in Zurich.
At 180 cm she sat squarely inside high-fashion runway range, and her debut season reflected it — Ralph Lauren, Marc Jacobs, Jil Sander, Dolce & Gabbana, Alexander McQueen, Jean Paul Gaultier and Yohji Yamamoto, with Moschino, Alberta Ferretti and Dries Van Noten later. How that board gets assembled from a standing start is set out in our guide to getting into a modelling agency.
Ten years as someone else's face
What followed was a top-tier commercial career: faces for Anna Sui, Ralph Lauren, Vera Wang, Marc Jacobs and Coach. The Vera Wang relationship is the striking one — by most accounts she fronted the Princess fragrance from 2013 to 2023, a long run at a time when fragrance faces are typically rotated every two or three seasons. In 2013 she also appeared in the video for Avicii's "Wake Me Up", which had approached two billion views by 2020.
That is a successful decade, and it also shows the ceiling built into the job. Each of those bookings pays a fee for a defined use over a defined period. The brand keeps what compounds — the customer list, the repeat revenue, the equity value the campaign helped build — while the face is renewed at the brand's discretion and can be replaced without explanation. That is why campaign fees, however large, behave differently from ownership; our breakdown of what models actually earn by market sets out the numbers.
2018: the organisation she built before the business
Her first move outside modelling was not commercial. In 2018, as the #MeToo reckoning reached fashion, Romanova co-founded the Humans of Fashion Foundation with the singer-songwriter and lawyer Antoniette Costa. Its HOFF app launched in New York in early February 2018, ahead of fashion week, offering anonymous real-time reporting of harassment and abuse plus access to pro bono and subsidised lawyers and counsellors — for everyone on a set, from models to stylists and make-up artists.
"Every human deserves to have his or her voice heard. Every human deserves to have his or her rights protected," Romanova said at the launch. The project also drew scepticism over how anonymous reports could be verified or enforced, which belongs in the record alongside it. What matters for her trajectory is the change of role: it was the first time she assembled an organisation rather than appearing inside one. The practical version of the same problem is our checklist of red flags when signing with an agency.
Inside Aman: retail first, then a 50 per cent stake
Aman Essentials began in 2018 as a skincare line built with the group's spas so guests could continue treatments at home. Romanova describes the origin as a customer question rather than a strategy document: guests "love to collect luggage tags", she told Forbes, and "they always ask 'what body oils you use for the massage'". She joined Aman in 2019 and took over retail in 2020, and the categories multiplied — fragrance, wellness and ready-to-wear in 2020, leather in August 2021. In March 2022 the brand was separated into its own company, split 50/50 between Romanova and Doronin, her partner since 2015 and the father of her two children.
The output since is the argument. On 26 October 2022 Aman Essentials opened its first retail space outside Aman properties, a concession at Harrods in London. On 11 January 2023 came Aman Essential Skin, developed with the Japanese beauty group Kosé and released across 20 countries — five products built on purple rice bran and indigo extract, more than two years in development. Beauty distribution opened through Luisa Via Roma and Neiman Marcus, while ready-to-wear and leather stayed exclusive to Aman: "Our clients love the fact that they can't find it anywhere else."
"I am very hands-on with my role and get involved into every detail," she told Forbes, adding, "I don't want to produce anything that I will not use myself." On positioning she is blunter, and the line is remarkable from someone whose previous career was built on being recognisable: "It's about craftsmanship rather than connecting to trends and celebrities."
What transfers from modelling — and what does not
Several things genuinely carry over. A decade on set is a decade spent on the client side of brand-building, watching how houses decide what a product should look like and how it is sold. Taste and visual judgement are the working tools of a creative director, as are the network and the discipline of a job run on call times and deadlines.
Plenty does not. A profit and loss account, supply chain, cosmetics regulation across 20 markets, hiring and distribution deals are learned trades. A five-product range takes two years and a partner with formulation science — Kosé has a century of it — because that work is chemistry and manufacturing, not styling. It is also fair to be direct about the route: Romanova's stake came through a spin-out of a group owned by her partner, and no reader should plan a career on that arriving.
The transferable lesson is smaller and more useful. The assets a model accumulates over ten years — an audience, a trained eye, a client network, a close view of how brands are really sold — are worth more attached to something she owns than rented out one campaign at a time. They accumulate on volume of real work, which is the practical use of a live casting board, and her career runs in order on her catalogue profile.
