Tatiana Sorokko

Tatiana Sorokko gained renown as a fashion model on the runways of Milan, Paris and New York during the 1990’s. A native of Russia, she was frequently photographed for editorials and covers of European and American magazines such as Vogue, Elle, Harper’s Bazaar and Cosmopolitan. The 5’11” blue-eyed Sorokko has modeled for Yves Saint-Laurent, Christian Lacroix, Karl Lagerfeld, Gianfranco Ferre, Alexander McQueen, Giorgio Armani, Calvin Klein, Vivienne Westwood, Ralph Rucci, Marc Jacobs and Donna Karan among other leading designers.

Raised the daughter of a nuclear scientist, Sorokko grew up in Arzamas-16 (now Sarov), a top-secret nuclear research community in the Soviet Union, and was expected to pursue a career in science. At the age of eighteen, when Sorokko was studying to be a physicist at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, she was discovered by Parisian modeling agent Marilyn Gauthier.

Intrigued by a future she had never expected and encouraged by Gauthier, Sorokko headed to Paris where she quickly exploded into the international modeling world. Within two weeks she walked the runway for Dior and Yves Saint-Laurent and was photographed for Harper’s Bazaar by the legendary French photographer Guy Bourdin.

In 1991 Sorokko met and later married Serge Sorokko, a real estate developer and art collector turned art dealer, with galleries in San Francisco, New York and Beverly Hills. When she moved with her husband to California, Sorokko began to focus her energy on career opportunities in the U.S. Already well-known by major fashion designers and editors, her career took off in America as quickly as it did in Europe.

Despite her modeling engagements all over the globe, Sorokko continued her education at the Academy of Art University, in San Francisco, where she studied History of Fashion. Her Personal style and uncommon sense of fashion were soon noticed by the mainstream media, and Vogue, in a story about Sorokko, described her as an "eagle-eyed iconoclast" and a "fad-making model".

Sorokko appeared on the cover of Runway, a book of fashion photographs by Larry Fink, and was featured opposite Brad Pitt in a commercial for Honda. She is also a subject of a book, recently published in Moscow, Russian Models, by Ekaterina Vassilieva, which credited her as the first widely recognized Russian model to emerge after perestroika.

With the publication of the December 2001 issue of Russian Vogue, Sorokko embarked on a new career as its Foreign Correspondent and Contributing Editor. As author of "Style Fax", a popular monthly column of fashion and style commentary, Sorokko covered a wide range of hot topics and personalities.

In 2004, Sorokko was invited to perform with the Russian National Orchestra, on tour in the United States, and she was the narrator at the Wind Quintet's debut performance of Jean-Pascal Beintus' "Wolf Tracks", at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC.

In January 2005, Sorokko began work as Contributing Editor for American Harper’s Bazaar. Among many notable subjects, Sorokko interviewed Kateryna Yushchenko, American wife of the Ukrainian President, for the September 2005 issue, and, most recently, for the August 2008 issue, Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. She has styled shoots featuring Elizabeth Taylor, Joan Collins and Linda Evans, Donatella Versace and daughter Allegra, fashion designers Andrew Gn and Diego Della Valle, Republican Presidential Nominee, Senator John McCain and wife Cindy, Wolfgang and Gelila Puck, and Ralph Lauren in Moscow, to name a few.

Sorokko is an avid collector of Haute Couture and antique jewelry, and has frequently donated or loaned pieces from her collection to various museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Musueum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, in New York, the de Young Museum and the Legion of Honor Museum, in San Francisco, and the Phoenix Art Museum, among others.

Sorokko is often invited to speak on the subjects of fashion and style, and her recent engagements have been with the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, The Phoenix Art Museum and the San Francisco Academy of Art University.

Sorokko was named in 2000 to the "International Top 100 Best Dressed" list by American Vogue, and in 2007 to the “"Best Dressed Women of All Time"” list by Harper's Bazaar in its 40th Anniversary issue.