Astrid Holm sat down with Laurent's editorial director in Paris in January, between fittings for a campaign she has been working on for three weeks. She was composed in the way that people who have been composing themselves professionally since the age of eighteen are composed — not performance, not effort. Just the permanent result of years of practice.

She has been in fashion since 2017. She has worked with two agencies, shot for four continents, and walked runways in every major city. She has also, by her own count, declined more work than she has accepted. We wanted to know how she thinks about that.

On the first years

"You say yes to almost everything in the beginning, and that's correct. You don't have enough information to say no well. You don't know what a good booking feels like versus a bad one. You don't know what production environments reveal about how a brand values the people it works with. You learn all of that by showing up and paying attention."

She pauses. "The problem is when you keep saying yes past the point where you've learned enough to stop. That's when you start to damage the thing you've been building."

On the decision to say no

"There is a specific feeling I learned to recognize, which is the feeling of a booking that is correct on paper and wrong in practice. The rate is right. The brand is credible. The photographer is someone I respect. And something is still off. I used to override that feeling. I stopped overriding it when I was about twenty-three, and every time since that I've overridden it anyway I've regretted it."

She is clear that this is not about prestige. She has declined campaigns for globally recognized houses and accepted bookings for smaller brands with strong creative. The criterion is not name recognition. It is, as she describes it, "whether the image will be something I'm still proud of in five years."

On working with Laurent

"What I value most is that they read a brief the way I would read it myself — not just for the rate and the logistics, but for what it actually means for where I'm going. Most agencies don't have the patience for that conversation. They have a slot to fill. Laurent has a career to manage. The difference is completely visible in the long run."

On what younger models should understand

"The industry will always find someone new. That is not a threat — it is just how it works. Your job is not to compete with the new person. Your job is to be the person they cannot replace, which is a different project entirely. It takes longer. It produces less urgency. And it is the only approach that actually works past the age of twenty-five."

She finishes her espresso, checks the time, and stands with the ease of someone with somewhere to be.

"The best thing I ever did was stop being afraid of silence between bookings. The silence is where you decide what you actually want. The bookings just follow."