Heidi Klum: How One German Supermodel Became the World’s Quietest Empire
HEIDI KLUM, OR HOW GERMANY CONQUERED THE WORLD IN STILETTOS
By Our Correspondent, still recovering from Fashion Week jet-lag and the existential dread of duty-free
Frankfurt—There are only two German exports the planet greets with unbridled enthusiasm: BMWs and Heidi Klum. One is a precision-engineered machine designed to make you feel superior at 250 km/h; the other is a BMW-commercial soundtrack on human legs. Both guzzle resources, both look better under studio lighting, and both have remarkably similar resale values if you keep the mileage down.
From the Ruhr to the Rio Grande, Klum has spent three decades proving that globalization isn’t really about container ships and semiconductor treaties—it’s about one woman packaging Teutonic cheekbones for every time zone. She began in 1992, when “German supermodel” sounded about as likely as “friendly border control,” and methodically colonized the imagination of a planet that still thought Bratwurst was exotic. Today you can’t swing a counterfeit Louis Vuitton in Lagos, Lima or Lahore without smacking her face on a billboard reminding you that beauty is democratically available—provided you purchase the correct serum.
The trick, of course, is volume. While other nations export tanks or dubious development loans, Germany exports Klum: 1.75 metres of genetically improbable symmetry, replicated on every screen from Seoul subway cars to Saudi mall kiosks. The message is soothingly uniform: aspire, exfoliate, and maybe—just maybe—your refugee camp / favela / open-plan cubicle will smell faintly of her latest bergamot-infused body mist. Call it soft power with a hard cheekbone.
Governments notice. When Klum annually descends upon Cannes, the local police clear the Promenade de la Croisette with the same urgency normally reserved for presidents or plutonium. The EU has never issued a joint statement on her activities, but Brussels bureaucrats quietly appreciate any distraction that keeps voters from asking why their olive oil prices now fluctuate with the whims of Vladimir Putin. A Klum-hosted Halloween party, after all, is cheaper than a NATO exercise and only marginally less explosive.
Meanwhile, the United Nations keeps inviting her to “awareness” galas, apparently convinced that nothing deters warlords like a former Victoria’s Secret angel in recycled polyester. Diplomats pretend it’s about sustainability; everyone else knows it’s about the photo. Still, if a 47-second clip of Heidi pretending to care about ocean plastic convinces one oligarch’s third wife to ditch single-use straws, who are we to mock? Multilateralism is dead; multitasking lingerie activism lives.
The numbers, like the cheekbones, refuse to sag. “Germany’s Next Topmodel” airs in 147 territories, a figure the Foreign Office can’t match with Goethe Institutes. Each season delivers a fresh crop of internationally interchangeable teenagers who learn, in prime time, that self-worth is directly proportional to Instagram engagement. Critics call it neoliberal cruelty; economists call it a flawless supply chain of hope, Botox and sponsored content. Either way, the show earns more soft currency than a Bundesbank printer on espresso.
Yet the true geopolitical miracle is Klum’s staying power in an industry that discards women faster than a TikTok trend. She has survived the rise of Russian oligarch models, the K-pop invasion, and an entire Internet epoch that discovered it could photoshop its own cheekbones for free. While other nations’ icons retire into vineyard obscurity or war-crime tribunals, Klum simply adds another revenue stream: children’s books, a QVC clothing line, a ghost-produced disco single that charted higher than the eurozone inflation rate. If capitalism had a Mount Rushmore, she’d be the only face without a scandal-induced nose job.
And so the world spins, Brexit unbrexits, supply chains crumble, but somewhere a container ship slides into Hamburg loaded with 40,000 units of Heidi Klum Intimate apparel bound for Shanghai. The captain doesn’t know her name; he only signs the manifest. Yet in that moment, Germany has once again slipped lace-covered tendrils into the global id, reminding every port authority that influence isn’t always about steel—sometimes it’s about underwire strong enough to lift a medium-size economy.
Call it empire by lingerie. Call it the most entertaining surrender in modern history. Just don’t call it harmless; even the Luftwaffe never achieved that kind of market penetration.
