Anne Vyalitsyna — known to the industry simply as Anne V — was born in 1986 in Gorky, the closed Soviet city that has since returned to its old name, Nizhny Novgorod. Her discovery story is pure turn-of-the-millennium: at fifteen she entered a model search that IMG was running in Saint Petersburg for MTV's "Fashionably Loud Europe," won it, and got on a plane to New York.
Chanel, and a Decade of Swimsuits
The start was unusually fast even by 2000s standards. Within roughly six months she had shot campaigns for Anna Molinari, Chloé and Sportmax, and signed a widely publicized four-year contract as the first face of Chanel Chance — a plum assignment for a teenager nobody had heard of a year earlier. The runway followed: Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Prada, Fendi, Dolce & Gabbana, Givenchy and Roberto Cavalli all booked her in the years that followed.
Her defining run, though, happened in print. Vyalitsyna appeared in ten consecutive Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issues, every year from 2005 through 2014 — one of the longest unbroken streaks in the franchise's history, and the achievement her name still trades on. She also walked the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show three times, in 2008, 2010 and 2011, though contrary to a common mix-up she was never a contracted Angel — the Sports Illustrated decade was hers, the wings were not.
Comeback
Vyalitsyna became a United States citizen on November 16, 2013. After years away from the catwalk she returned in 2023 at Valentino Haute Couture, and the Spring/Summer 2024 season turned into a full second act: she opened Prabal Gurung, closed Chiara Boni La Petite Robe, and walked Carolina Herrera, Richard Quinn and Givenchy — the latter alongside Natasha Poly, another Russian-born veteran of her generation.
Off the Runway
The biography behind the swimsuit record is more grounded than the SI parties suggest. Vyalitsyna grew up in a household of doctors — her father worked as a sports physician for a football club, her mother as a pediatrician — and medicine, not modeling, was the expected track before MTV's cameras intervened. The editorial career that followed went far beyond the swimsuit issue: covers and editorials for Vogue, Vanity Fair, GQ, Elle, Harper's Bazaar and i-D, campaigns for Prada, Chanel and Ralph Lauren, and a stint as one of Joanne Gair's living canvases in the 2005 Sports Illustrated body-painting pages.
Her personal life kept crossing into pop culture. From 2010 to 2012 she dated Maroon 5 frontman Adam Levine — the two appeared together on the November 2011 cover of Vogue Russia, and his band's "Misery" video co-starred her. In 2015 she and her partner, tech executive Adam Cahan, welcomed a daughter and named her Alaska — chosen, Vyalitsyna explained, because Alaska is where the U.S. and Russia meet, the same geography her own career had been bridging since she was fifteen.