Eva Herzigová

Eva Herzigová (born 1973) left communist Czechoslovakia as a teenager and became one of the defining supermodels of the 1990s — the face of Wonderbra’s traffic-stopping 1994 “Hello Boys” campaign, a Victoria’s Secret and Chanel regular, and a fixture of fashion’s front row for three decades.

The first supermodel digital twin

In the early 2020s Herzigová spent a year working with London’s Dimension Studios, talent agency Unsigned Group and Epic Games’ MetaHuman technology to build a photoreal digital twin of herself. Seventy cameras scanned her face and body — roughly 150GB of capture data — while motion-capture sessions encoded her signature walk and poses into animation data rendered in Unreal Engine.

The result is a bookable virtual Eva: brands can dress her in digitally created clothing, restyle her hair and makeup, and place her on virtual runways or in advertising campaigns “all in a click of a button,” as she told Tatler in 2023. She likened first seeing the avatar to “giving birth.” Dimension co-founder Simon Windsor stressed the twin was built to be “authentically Eva,” not to deceive — a consent-first counterpoint to the unauthorized AI models flooding fashion imagery.

Herzigová’s experiment reframes the AI threat to modeling as an opportunity: rather than being replaced by synthetic faces, an established model can license a controlled, hyperreal double that works without her — extending a career’s brand equity into games, mixed reality and virtual fashion.