When Vittoria Ceretti walked into Milan’s San Siro stadium on 6 February 2026 holding the Italian flag at the Winter Olympics opening ceremony, in a custom white Armani Privé gown, she called it “the greatest honour of my life.” It was a fitting image for a woman who had spent more than a decade becoming the most globally recognised Italian face in fashion — and who, fourteen years earlier, had been an unknown teenager from Brescia stepping into a model-search contest.
From Brescia to the elite catwalk
Vittoria Ceretti was born on 7 June 1998 in Brescia, in Italy’s Lombardy region; her father runs a flooring company, her mother was a homemaker. At fourteen, in 2012, she entered the Elite Model Look competition in Italy and reached the finals — the discovery that launched her and led to representation by Elite Model Management. She made her professional runway debut shortly afterward, in Milan, for the designer Kristina Ti, and from there began a climb that would prove unusually fast even by the standards of a fast industry.
The work: one of the most in-demand models of her era
By 2014 and 2015 Ceretti was a face for Dolce & Gabbana and Giorgio Armani, and she landed the Fendi Spring/Summer 2017 campaign. Her breakout editorial moment came in July 2016, when Steven Meisel photographed her for the cover of Vogue Italia. Then came the season that defined her as a runway force: for Spring/Summer 2017 she walked a reported forty-one shows, Dior, Valentino and Chanel among them, and by the end of that year she had walked well over a hundred shows in a single season, vaulting into the top tier of the industry’s rankings. The late Karl Lagerfeld became a key champion, prizing her versatility and casting her repeatedly for both Fendi and Chanel — the start of one of the most durable house relationships of her career. Along the way she shot campaigns for Prada, Tiffany & Co., Alexander McQueen, Versace and Louis Vuitton, and by 2018 she had covered all of the “Big Four” Vogue editions — Italian, American, French and British.
What followed the breakout was not a flash but a reign. Year after year Ceretti has remained among the handful of models the biggest houses build their shows around, equally castable for severe high-fashion editorial and polished luxury advertising, and trusted to open or close the season’s most important runways. By her mid-twenties she had amassed a cover and campaign record most models would take a full career to assemble, and she did it without ever being pigeonholed into a single look — the reason designers from Lagerfeld onward have treated her as a kind of all-purpose muse, a face that can be remade to fit whatever a collection happens to need that season.
A national symbol
Ceretti is routinely described as one of the most successful and in-demand models of the late 2010s and 2020s, and her selection as the flag-bearing face of the Milano Cortina 2026 opening ceremony — leading a procession of models dressed in the red, white and green of the Italian tricolore — cemented her as something more than a working model. It made her a national fashion symbol, a role the press explicitly compared to Carla Bruni’s a generation earlier. For a country that had not had a model of quite her global stature in years, she had become, in effect, Italy’s face abroad.
Part of her distinction is that she carries an unmistakably Italian glamour into an industry that had, for a stretch, looked elsewhere for its stars. Where the 2000s and 2010s were dominated first by Eastern European and then by American and Australian faces, Ceretti arrived as a throwback and an update at once — a Brescia girl with a classic, knowing beauty who could also read as thoroughly contemporary. It is no accident that, when Italy wanted a single face to represent it on the largest possible stage, it reached for her rather than for an actress or an athlete; she had become the country’s most exportable image.
The Private Side
Ceretti’s personal life has drawn outsized attention. In January 2020 she married the Italian record producer and DJ Matteo Milleri — one half of the electronic duo Tale of Us — in a small seaside ceremony in Ibiza; the couple announced their separation in June 2023. That same year she became one of the most discussed names in entertainment when she was romantically linked to the actor Leonardo DiCaprio, a relationship that has proved unusually durable by his standards and continued into 2026. Ceretti herself has been pointedly guarded about it, declining to be defined by a more famous partner and keeping the details firmly to herself — a discretion that, if anything, has only deepened the public’s interest.
Earnings and net worth
Ceretti is consistently described as one of the highest-paid models of her generation, but hard figures are unreliable and vary wildly: estimates from celebrity-finance sites range from a few million dollars to well into the tens of millions, with no two sources agreeing. The spread reflects guesswork rather than disclosed earnings, and any single number should be treated as speculation rather than fact. What is documented is the calibre of her contracts — Chanel, Prada, Louis Vuitton, Tiffany — which signal top-tier earning power without putting a verifiable figure on it.
Where she is now
Ceretti remains at the very peak of the industry. In 2025 she covered Vogue Italia in an Eighties-glamour editorial, landed on best-dressed lists, and continued her Chanel and luxury campaign work, before capping the period with the Milano Cortina 2026 flag-bearer honour in February 2026. More than a decade after a model-search contest in Brescia, the teenager who once needed an introduction has become the rare Italian model the whole industry knows on sight — and, increasingly, a figure the wider world recognises too.