9 minute read
SPOTLIGHT BAHAMIAN
from Zaqwsaqw
SPOTLIGHT
hase Carter, the 22-year-old model with pool-blue eyes, golden hair, and a baby face, muses, “I think it was all the wake surfing I did,” by way of explaining the hoarse voice she came home with from a trip to Sardinia for a UNICEF gala. We’re speaking by phone on a late summer afternoon. “And not showering after I got out of the ocean and keeping my swimsuit on all day — the stuff that your parents tell you to stay away from when you’re a kid and you don’t listen to them.”
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Such are the common workplace hazards for the Bahamian beauty, who is now based in New York City but spends much of her year on white-sand beaches the world over. “It’s so funny. I don’t recall going to the beach until I moved to New York,” Carter says, realising the irony in light of having grown up in the Bahamas. “I don’t think I was ever a beach girl, but I’ve turned into one.”
She has modelled for an impressive array of clients, including Victoria’s Secret Pink, Maybelline New York, Urban Outfitters, and Good American, Khloé Kardashian and Emma Grede’s sizeinclusive denim and activewear brand. Still, her sunny beauty and athletic physique have proven particularly well suited for swimsuit editorials and campaigns.
Carter occasionally sniffles throughout our phone call, but signs of her lingering cold dissipate whenever she discusses the greatest ambition she has beyond modelling: becoming a television host. “I just love talking, and I love the nonscripted part of TV,” she says in her usual ebullient manner. “My family business back home is actually radio and TV broadcasting, but now I’ve finally decided, Yep — that is what I want to do.” At the 2018 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue launch party, Carter cohosted the red carpet alongside television personality Jeremy Parsons, even when she could have been celebrating. She also hosted a segment for E! at the Oscars. It has been an exciting foray into the field, although her dream is to have her own sportsthemed or other talk show.
“As soon as I get up, no pun intended, I watch [ESPN’s] Get Up! , and I watch Stephen A. Smith, because his opinions are so outrageous and unfiltered,” she says. “I watch every game I can. My main interests are basketball and football, and I’m getting more interested in baseball now.” Rumours of a romance with New York Yankees outfielder Giancarlo Stanton have been swirling in the tabloids, but when asked, she responds with a coy “I’m not commenting.”
She is an open book about all other matters, however. Here, rising model Chase Carter tells MAXIM about her childhood in the Bahamas, her early love of sports, her whirlwind modelling career and what’s next for the ambitious beauty.
What was it like to grow up in the Bahamas?
It’s really close-knit, and I thought that was how the whole world worked. Everyone’s your cousin, or everyone is a relative of some sort. You go to the grocery store and you bump into all of your friends’ parents. It’s also very slow-paced, which was interesting for me because I’m a pretty high-strung individual. When I got to be around eight or 10, my mum said I was ready to get out of the house.
Were you always active in sports?
I played every single sport for my high school, but that is such a Bahamian thing, because there are not enough kids. They start bribing you and saying, “You don’t have to show up to practice or do that assignment today if you play the game.” I was on every national sports team, too, because of the lack of children. I was the number one javelin thrower in the Bahamas — because I was the only one.
SPOTLIGHT
SPOTLIGHT
This Page: Bolero, DIESEL; Panty, COSABELLA;
E arrings, necklace, and bracelet, BONHEUR J EWELRY; Boots, VIVETTA
How did modelling enter the picture?
We were in Sydney, Australia, in the airport, and I FaceTimed my friend from the Bahamas because I had missed three days of orientation for high school. I guess I was talking a lot about the B ahamas in the conversation, and this agent-looking woman came up to me and said, “I have a model shooting in the Bahamas. Are you on the same shoot?” I said, “What? Excuse me? No; I don’t model. I’m really into sports. I’m gonna go to college; I’m gonna get a scholarship.” She and my mum started talking for a couple of hours, and she said, “This is fantastic. I’ll set up five meetings with agencies in New York. When is your break from school?” So we got back to the Bahamas, and my dad said, “This is a scam. You can’t just see someone in an airport and then fly to New York.” And my mum said, “We’re doing it.”
When did you trade sports for modelling?
I started making money the summer when I was 16 years old. I remember going to Chicago for Seventeen magazine, and Miami for Ralph Lauren. I got to travel by myself, and I got to be independent and out of the house like I always wanted. I always said to myself, “I’ll go back to school,” because I missed the routine and playing sports. I would keep up with my team and asked if I could still play games even though I was doing online school. Two years after I graduated, I saw that all my friends were doing was drinking and partying, and I said, “I’m fine here. I can live in New York and do whatever I want and not have to depend on my parents for financial support and be my own person.”
How did being an athlete prepare you for modelling?
The competitiveness. I’ve never looked at other girls and gotten competitive. I get competitive with myself. I say, “Chase, why do you think you didn’t get that?” or “What can I do differently?” W hen I have my mind set on something, it’s really hard to get it off that thing.
What would be your dream TV hosting job?
LeBron James has this show on [his website] Uninterrupted , and he interviews athletes about the grind and how they became these superstar athletes — the before rather than the during. Hosting my own TV show like that would be fantastic, just like LeBron James, my favourite athlete in the world, is doing.
Who else do you admire?
This is going to sound funny, but Kevin Hart. He’s a yes-man. He does anything he can get himself into. The guy doesn’t sleep, and I really look up to him for that. If he can have all that energy, then so can I. I look up to Tyra Banks and Heidi Klum because they transitioned into what I want to transition into. They are their own confident, beautiful women, and they’ve made careers out of their voices.
SPOTLIGHT
Opposite page: Jeans and belt, CHROME HEARTS; Earrings, JENNIFER FISHER
This page: Bra, AGENT PROVOCATEUR;
Jeans and belt, CHROME HEARTS; Sunglasses, RETROSUPERFUTURE; Earrings, JENNIFER FISHER
AUTO FOCUS
CATCH HER IF YOU CAN How Aussie SUPERCAR BLONDIE leveraged social media into stardom...
Text b y KEITH GORDON
It’s possible you don’t know who Alex Hirschi is, but in today’s social media-dominated world, there’s almost no doubt that you’ve heard of her professional handle, Supercar Blondie. The Australian-born, Dubai-living former radio personality has built her fanbase of around 14 million combined followers on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube, on her passion for speed and the enthusiasm she brings to her videos and posts. It would be easy for a cynic to assume it’s the “Blondie” side of the persona that has attracted her legions of followers, but the truth is Hirschi stands apart from the horde of influencers and enthusiasts because of her genuine passion for sharing supercars with the world.
She initially used her journalism degree to land a job in Dubai as a radio host. Soon, she discovered a perk of the job was the opportunity to test and review exciting vehicles, of which she took full advantage. Soon automakers like Bentley, McLaren and others were seeking her out to share their creations with the wider world. Her reviews became more detailed, and her videos more polished, until she decided to commit to covering supercars full-time.
“Just like anyone would, if you were given a McLaren, you would start uploading photos of your experience, and some videos and stuff,”
to your personal Instagram account, Hirschi tells us. “I didn’t have any intention of making this a thing on social media.” But soon, the videos she created with her husband led to a growing following that couldn’t be ignored. “I think probably a year after we started uploading on Instagram and working every weekend [and] every night after coming home from the radio job, it became a second full time job really,” she recalls.
“I got to 60,000 followers and that’s when I just decided, hey, if we’re going to make this into something, we may as well just take the leap, quit the job and just go for it. And that’s what happened in April 2017.” That was the start of her meteoric rise, and soon Supercar Blondie was attracting more fans across various platforms and she hasn’t looked back since. “Since I quit my job, I’ve gone from 60,000 followers to about 14 million, so in two and a half years, I suppose it did go crazy and it seemed to make that massive jump.”
While she clearly knows what she’s talking about when reviewing a new model from Ferrari, Lamborghini or Bugatti, Hirschi believes that her content is successful because it’s not only for the automotive obsessed. “What I have made clear was that I’m not actually a car expert, and that is actually one of the reasons why my content, I think, relates to a lot of people. Because I don’t go in talking about all of the really complicated
