Iowa’s Next Governor Joins the Very Short List of Politicians Who Used to Be Models

Before he entered politics, Rob Sand posed for Italian Vogue and walked the runway for Prada. “What do you really know about Rob Sand?” a political advertisement asked the people of Iowa in the run-up to Election Day. Rob Sand won the governor’s race in Iowa last week. The Democratic candidate for governor was leading in the polls, and his Republican opponent hoped that a detail from his past would turn off voters: The small-town boy from northeast Iowa used to be a high-fashion model. In a Wall Street Journal interview ahead of the election, Sand downplayed the brief chapter of his résumé that saw him walking Prada’s runway and appearing in fashion shoots while he was a college student at Brown. “It’s a job I had,” he said. “It wasn’t that different from the rest of the jobs I had, other than, you know, it was part-time instead of full-time.”Sand walked in the Prada Menswear spring 2003 ready-to-wear runway show in Milan, Italy. Now that he’s won, Sand’s supporters are embracing his high-fashion turn. Photos of the governor-elect from that time have gone viral on social media, and his campaign website is now selling $32 T-shirts that read “My Model Governor” with a collage of images from his modeling past. As of Monday afternoon, about 1,500 shirts had been sold, his campaign said.“I’m disappointed to learn images of me modeling for Prada are circulating. Because this shot from Italian Vogue is much better,” Sand wrote on Instagram on Friday, posting an image of his lanky younger self opposite another model. He declined to be interviewed about his modeling forays after the election.‘It’s a job I had,’ Sand said about his time modeling. ‘It wasn’t that different from the rest of the jobs I had, other than, you know, it was part-time instead of full-time.’Fashion is often equated with frivolity, and Republicans hoped Sand’s past would be a point against him in parts of conservative, rural Iowa. The attack ad featured runway footage from the Prada show and an image of a young Sand posing with another model in what the ad described as a nude shoot. A campaign aide told The Journal that both Sand and the other model were partially clothed. Zach Lahn, Sand’s Republican opponent, spent $1.9 million on the ad, placing it in the top 10 for dollars spent on an individual commercial by that campaign, according to AdImpact data. It ran for almost two weeks at the end of the campaign. An image of a young Sand posing with another model was included in an attack ad, which Sand’s Republican opponent Zach Lahn spent <img src=An image of a young Sand posing with another model was included in an attack ad, which Sand’s Republican opponent Zach Lahn spent $1.9 million on. Politics is filled with former actors and pageant queens, charismatic people who turned their penchant for performance into the basis of successful campaigns. The pipeline from fashion model to politician is less common. One exception is former President Gerald Ford, who appeared in the pages of Look magazine in 1940 with his then-girlfriend, a model named Phyllis Brown. Her agent, Harry Conover, said that Ford was also the model for an illustrated cover of Cosmopolitan in 1942. (An archivist at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library said no other evidence corroborates that it was Ford in the image.)While Sand downplays his years in Vogue, he appears to have had some success. In the 2000s, Prada was one of the most coveted runway gigs in the business because it was so exclusive in its casting. A spot on the Prada runway was one of the most coveted modeling gigs in the early 2000s.“They cast young men from untraditional places,” said culture editor Laia Garcia-Furtado, author of the new book “Prada in the Nineties.” The goal, she said, is to find models who have “a specific look that everyone else tries to adopt.”“Historically, it has been a launching pad for new faces, often turning unknown talent into some of the most sought-after names in the industry,” Jaga Acquarulo, the men’s board director at the Society, a modeling agency in New York City, said in an email. Sand’s androgynous face and long, slicked-down hair fit the fashion zeitgeist at the time. He posed for influential photographers including Steven Meisel and Terry Richardson, alongside top models such as Caroline Trentini and Jessica Stam. In a 2002 magazine editorial photographed by Richardson, Sand is floppy-haired and freckled, looking less like the slick Prada guy than the scrappy skateboarder he was as a teenager. In recent days, Sand has mostly been seen in casual attire. During the first televised general election debate in October and for his first news conference as governor-elect Monday, he didn’t even bother wearing a tie. Write to Chantal Fernandez at chantal.fernandez@wsj.com and John McCormick at mccormick.john@wsj.comGet the latest World News, breaking headlines and global updates from the US, UK, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Russia and other countries along with latest US midterm elections update. Follow major international events on Hindustan Times.