See her video at SavvyTV!

Larysa Poznyak always knew that she was going to be big, Whitney Houston circa The Bodyguard kind of big. However, she never suspected that she’d be where she is today – the LA face of Fashion TV, the face of several luxury brands, and have many a ‘Miss’ title under her ever-so-stylish belt. If anything, her current career has proved more of a happy accident.

“I always wanted to be famous,” says Poznyak in her clipped Russian accent. “I always thought I would be a big singer, a really big singer. I always dreamed -- no, I was sure -- being a seven-year-old girl in the Ukraine taking piano lessons and singing lessons, that one day I was going to be a big singer in America. I was sure that I was going to be like Whitney Houston. I was always dreaming about the glamour of this life.”

She admits to being guilty of pelting out I Will Always Love You on a regular basis, and even confesses that this is a habit that she is yet to break – in the shower, on the road, even mid-interview to fill a rare silence. When asked why that tune topped her repertoire, her reply is quick.

“It is very romantic.”


Romance Is Not Dead

A romantic at heart, Poznyak has a lot of stories to tell in that department.
 
It was not the super-sized, star spangled style that pulled Poznyak from her home country Ukraine two years ago. Instead, it was romance. Her Ukrainian mother met an American man online on “one of those marriage websites.” She met him on a Caribbean Island and married him shortly afterwards. For most, this would be a cringe-worthy story; for Poznyak, it is the stuff that dreams are made of – and the reason she came to America.

“Nothing happens without love,” she assures Savvy Style. “Yes, they are still married. Happily married.”
 
“America has been very good to me; it has given me a lot of opportunities to me. I am not complaining. I was very successful back in the Ukraine, but it was a small country, a very small country.” Poznyak talks of the inequity of the cumbersome Russian economy and says that “it is sad”.  “That’s why I took a chance to move to America.” 

That is a chance that most certainly paid off. Poznyak now calls Hollywood Hills, LA her home. As the LA face of Fashion TV, she broadcasts to 300 million households in 202 countries across five continents on the only 24-hour fashion, beauty, and style television station with worldwide reach. And she is engaged to one of the top attorneys in Los Angeles, Brian D. Witzer.

When asked if she considered the American Way a culture shock, she laughs.

“It’s less fashion! It’s not like in Europe.”


Little Miss…

Poznyak first fell hard for fashion as a wide-eyed young thing. Her mother, “a very talented and creative woman”, was a seamstress of the old guard.

“I was like her Barbie doll,” says Poznyak.  The little girl who would go on to become Miss South Ukraine (among other titles) and to play Miss America on television was addicted to beauty pageants.

“I loved to watch beauty pageants: Miss America, Miss World, Miss Ukraine,” Poznyak continues, rattling one ‘Miss’ off after the other. She committed each dress to memory and would demand her mother trawl through the archives and make her the dresses that she so adored. “I knew it all by heart and my mum recreated those outfits for me, so that was at the very beginning. It was the beginning of me loving everything feminine, everything fashionable, everything beautiful.”

She laughs at the irony that she went so quickly from playing dress up to being dressed up. Not only a Ukraine celebrity, she worked in Russia as a top model and was named Miss South Ukraine 2002, Miss Face of Ukraine 2002, and Miss Moscow Beauty 2003. Since moving stateside, she has been the face of Elite Champagne, Nicola Berti, Fashion TV, NBC, HBO, FOX, and TLC. She has also graced the screen in the recent flick Wild Hogs and has appeared on CSI: Miami, Las Vegas, Days of Our Lives, and Entourage.


She’s In Fashion

Perhaps not surprisingly, among Poznyak’s favourite designers she lists Donatella Versace, because of her Russian feel. “Something about her clothes has a Russian appeal,” says Poznyak. “The way she connects metals with her textures; her leopard prints, and her fur.”
 
“Fashion-ey stuff,” Larysa says when asked to describe her own personal style. “I like to wear what men can’t. High heels, mini skirts, an open dress where you can see the cleavage. Sexy clothes. Not high fashion, not the crazy big dress from magazine ads – I have grown tired of that.”

While this may seem a foreign concept to most, Savvy Style reasons that if you ate chicken every day at work, it would be the last thing you’d want to eat on your own time. Poznyak was Robert Cavalli’s model (not that Savvy Style is comparing Cavalli to chicken).  Of the high fashion that she wears on both the catwalk and to events, she is ever a realist: 

“It’s not practical in real life, especially in real life where you drive a sports car.”

When asked how many shoes she has, she mishears the question, thinking it is in reference to her fiancé.

“He has about 500 pairs,” she says, before correcting herself:  “I have about the same.” That is a serious wardrobe.

 “It is very, very big.” This too may be an understatement, but a justifiable one at that. “It is my professional need to have it so. It is my work. Appearances, you can’t wear the same stuff two times or the paparazzi will see it. I will Google myself and be embarrassed. No. I am a fashion face, the face of fashion, so I can’t afford to wear the same dress twice, nor the same shoes, nor the same accessory – they are going to notice everything. For regular life, I still dress a little more upscale than most people do because people see me, and I have to look good. I enjoy it. I don’t complain.”


She Works Hard For The Money

Savvy Style wonders if Poznyak ever tires of the style industry; of the endless showings, the back-to-back launches and parties, and the constant spotlight.

“I want to tell everyone that it is work,” she says firmly. “It is work. People tell me, ‘Oh, you’ve got this glamorous lifestyle, you’re so lucky’. No.”

She quotes President Vladimir Putin, Time Magazine’s Person of The Year. When inferred by an American correspondent that Putin’s success was based on luck, “… he looked at the correspondent and he said: ‘fools get lucky. I work day and night; 24 hours a day, seven days a week’.”

“I can say the same. I am not comparing myself to a president, but models, they work. Me? I host, I do modelling, acting, and production – I really work. It’s a 24-7 job. Do I get tired? Yes, of course I get tired. I drink a lot of energy drinks in order to keep my drive.”

Poznyak denies partaking in the booze and pills lifestyle that so many other celebrities opt for, the odd glass of champagne at events aside.

“I like to drive my car in good conscience,” she says, “I enjoy it more.”


Life in the Fast Lane

She certainly knows about life in the fast lane and has spent more than a little time behind the wheel of a race car. Yes, a race car.

Her love of fast things first started in the Ukraine, “where we don’t have such strict police as in America.” Here she witnessed a guy pull a 360-degree turn in his sports Mercedes convertible from a stationary position. That is, dead still.

“It was crazy,” says Poznyak as she recalls the sheer terror of his female passenger, “She was screaming, he was driving. You have to have both legs on brake and gas, you have to be really focused. When I saw that, I said, ‘oh my God, I want to do that’, and then I thought ‘why not? Of course I can do that.’”

She took classes, and now counts ‘extreme race car driving’ amongst her many talents.  She denies, though, pulling her stunts on the suburban LA streets. “But I do do a lot of fast driving.”

(Indeed, her talents are indeed many and varied - Poznyak is also trained in hand-to-hand combat and lists the following weapons in her repertoire: fire arms Kalashnikov’s assault rifles AK-47, Makarov’s handgun, and Viatkin’s rifle.)

All this at 22 years of age. It is little wonder that the glossies describe her as a ‘driven young woman’.

“I am a goal seeking person,” says Poznyak.  I want to achieve what I want to be. I believe that you must always move forward, you should never stop, not even if something puts you down. You need to move forward.”

Poznyak is, to use the tired cliché, not just another pretty face. She is a former major in business management in the Ukraine, she speaks five languages, and has major production responsibilities with Fashion TV, which even she describes as a “tough to get” kind of job.

With her work, Poznyak daily witnesses the goings on behind-the-scenes of the style industry, and she looks forward to one day starting her own boutique production company. Whether she will stay in front of the camera, or move entirely behind it is a question for which she is yet to have a firm answer.

“I really love to be on the camera, the camera loves me, and everything is good,” she laughs. “I’d like to learn the back-side of it, because it’s intellectually stimulating. I like to direct and produce, because that can be a business in the long run for me. As a model, you retire. You retire very soon.” This does not mean that she is not happy to ride her looks at the moment though.

“My body is perfect not only in pictures, but in real life,” says Poznyak. Savvy Style considers this an interesting statement from someone supposing to come from a production standpoint, on which the whole premise is to pick out and correct flaws. Poznyak, though, is not unaware of the irony.

“Believe it or not, most models, women who are called by men’s magazines the most beautiful, and the most sexy women on earth, these women with all these titles, I meet them in person all the time for interviews, or I bump into them on the red carpet and let me tell you, they look nothing like that. They look nothing like their pictures because of good retouching people, because of good editors. It’s not real. I don’t want to get everyone mad, but it’s true.”

The difference between Poznyak in her raw images and the retouched ones is almost indefinable, for which the Savvy Style art desk was eternally grateful.

Indeed, with a wardrobe that most would kill for, licence to drive incredibly fast, and a style that sets her apart from the rest, Poznyak no longer has to dream of the “glamour of this life” – instead, she lives it. 

On The Web: www.myspace.com/LarysaTV


Credit where credit's due...

Art Director: Candace Rae
Photographer: Brie Childers
Photographer’s Assistant: Welch
Stylist: Tina Cote-Dolan
Hair & Make-Up: Dehx
Videographer: Stefan Glidden