Three years ago, with no experience and, admittedly, no previous interest in acting, she took a part in James Mangold’s The Wolverine, opposite Hugh Jackman. Now, Okamoto is taking charge of a new creative space. Phillip Lim styled an entire show after Okamoto’s distinct new haircut-“I thought he was joking when he said I was going to be the theme of the show,” says Okamoto, “then on the day of the show I saw the wigs”-and she went on to book Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Yves Saint Laurent, and multiple American Vogue editorials, not to mention campaigns with Mario Testino for Dolce & Gabbana, Mario Sorrenti for Kenzo, and more. Next came a move to New York in 2009, which changed everything. I thought, ‘Why am I doing this?’ I realized it’s not very healthy, but somehow, rejection always gives me the energy and motivation to be better.” “I realized the reason why I wasn’t very happy-I was still trying to impress the Japanese people who rejected me at first. “I was doing shows and magazine work consistently, but nothing was really satisfying me,” she explains.
Okamoto says that she never really received a great response from the Japanese clients, so she left for Paris-still looking for some acceptance from home, still looking in from the outside-and broke through almost immediately. Okamoto was just fourteen at the time, and with a walk down Tokyo’s most famous scouting street and some encouragement from her parents, she dove into a career-sending photos to a strong Tokyo agency that signed her a few months later-that has since taken her from Tokyo to Paris at age twenty, to New York at twenty-three, into international fame, and, in the last three years, quite inadvertently, into another realm entirely. Shorts by Wanda Nylon, from Albright Fashion Library. Sweatshirt and sandals by Alexander Wang. “Till that point, I always thought I was an ugly creature because everybody really treated me like that.” “I was trying to find a way to appreciate myself, how I am and how I looked,” she recalls. One day, I was wondering if maybe I should be a model, models should be tall.”Īs hard as it may be to imagine, Okamoto says that she was self-conscious about her appearance while growing up. “I was going to the local public school till junior high school, and I was very different from other kids, because I was very tall for a Japanese girl. “I was born in the suburbs-it’s called Chiba,” explains the thirty-year-old Japanese beauty over the phone. Tao Okamoto, the face of so many high-profile campaigns-and now, in a big way, a burgeoning actress-decided to become a model. Some kids bleach their hair, rip their clothes, and otherwise celebrate and enunciate their self-declared freak status Raf Simons listened to Kraftwerk, Kurt Cobain took up guitar, and Patti Smith stole from a stranger and hopped on a bus to New York. There are a million ways to deal with growing up on the outside.
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