Debra Lin: Lady of the Legs

The body that was once a source of embarrassment has earned Debra Lin a place in the world's top modeling agency.

She shows up for the photo session looking like a student in an Asian junior high school, freshly scrubbed and without makeup—the condition known in the trade as clean-clean. To inexperienced eyes she looks like just another gangly, pie-faced teen with a pasty complexion and an incipient slouch. Her reedy frame is likely to incite in the average adult male a touch of concern, laced with pity, for the state of her health. Somehow she creates the impression, as she strides to the makeup room, that her knees and elbows precede her by a couple of feet.

The transformation takes almost exactly one hour. The creature that emerges makes the wait worthwhile. Here, now, is Debra Lin, the ace Asian for Elite, the world’s top model agency—languorously slender, impossibly chic, shockingly beautiful. She now wears, at the business end of her swan neck, the kind of face that inspires strong men to found empires and ordinary men to daydream about heroic deeds. Yes, at 5-9, 120 pounds and age 25, Debra Lin is at the top of her form. She has begun getting the kind of modeling jobs once reserved for supermodel Angela Harry. In fact, Debra Lin is likely to become, during the next year or so, the next Angela Harry. Of all Asian models now working, Lin has the best chance to smash the barrier that once separated Asian models from the Paulinas, the Claudias, the Cindys. For sheer physical proportions and style, Linis equal in every respect to the white models regularly gracing the covers of Vogue and Harper’s. If anything, Lin’s legs and neck seem longer, her buttocks shapelier. Her eyes are every bit as romantic and her skin, certainly, is creamier, more ethereal.

Her well-received debut on a cover of Face presaged an explosion of impressive new assignments, proving that the casting directors of the world’s top brands are no longer blind to the pulling power of Asian beauty. On the eve of our interview Lin was picked to show off her legs for the next batch of L’eggs commercials. She has already shot commercials to appear this fall for London Fog and Vidal Sassoon’s Asian campaign. Her nude, tattooed body forms the centerpiece of a recent Janet Jackson video. When Hollywood movies like Rising Sun and Clean Slate need the hottest Asian babes to spice up party scenes, Debra Lin is on the A list.

The momentum that has been building in her modeling career may be expected to turn Lin’s head a bit. One can’t help picking up a jaded note in her friendly-smokey-bored prom-queen voice. After a few minutes, however, one realizes that this is simply a natural defense mechanism that has built up in the course of her career; it drops off as the conversation progresses. She turns out to be surprisingly polite, respectful, even obliging. Some say this niceness is merely the trademark of top Elite models. Lin, on the other hand, claims that’s how she has always been, since long before she won the 1988 Miss Asian World title that launched her as a professional beauty.

Q: Are you living with another model?
A: No. My roommate works in interior design.

Q: How did you come to room with her?
A: We met in college here.

Q: Where did you go to college?
A: I went in Hawaii for two years and came out here for two years.

Q: Where did you go to college in Hawaii?
A: Kapiolani Community College.

Q: How did you like college there?
A: I loved it. It was a little laid back though. Everyone wore slippers and shorts and tee-shirts to school and we went to the beach after class.

Q: Ala Moana Beach?
A: Mm hmm, or go shopping at Ala Moana Shopping Center.

Q: Were you born and raised in the islands?
A: Yeah. I go back like twice a year.