A $6,000,000 contract with Estée Lauder solidified Paulina Porizkova’s dominance in the fashion industry. It was the highest sum paid to a model at the time, but having appeared on numerous photo spreads and strutting on every major designer catwalk, those zeros were well deserved. From the covers or Harper’s BAZAAR to campaigns for Chanel, Christian Dior, and Revlon, Porizkova’s prevalence in the ’80s was hard to avoid. Surprisingly, she describes the start of her career as an accident. At 13 years old, while living in Sweden (Porizkova is originally from Czechoslovakia), she let her friend, a burgeoning makeup artist, paint her for her portfolio. Soon enough, talent scouts got ahold of the images, and, as she said in an Instagram post, the rest “is history.”