Khrystyana Kazakova Bio
Khrystyana Kazakova is a Russian glamour and fashion model, body-positive activist, and television personality. She was born on May 21, 1985, in Magadan, Russia. Playboy named her its November 2020 Playmate at 35. Her appearance came during Playboy's contemporary era of international and digital publishing.
Kazakova has natural breasts, brown eyes and blond hair. Her measurements are 37-27-40.
Khrystyana Kazakova’s work in modeling became inseparable from questions about who fashion permits onto its runways. Growing up in Ukraine, she struggled with beauty standards that treated anything above a very small dress size as overweight. She tried to change her body accordingly, but a near-fatal incident involving her mother and extreme dieting forced a reassessment. Kazakova later described that experience as fundamentally changing how she thought about beauty and the standards she had been trying to satisfy.
Curve modeling eventually gave those ideas a professional outlet. Kazakova worked with brands and publications including Target, Aerie, Adidas, Macy’s, Good American, JCPenney, TomboyX, Gwynnie Bee and Elle, with agency representation in New York, Los Angeles and Miami. Television considerably widened her audience when she competed on Cycle 24 of America’s Next Top Model, reaching the final three while making body acceptance and representation a visible part of her story on the show.
Her most distinctive project, however, began away from conventional fashion infrastructure. In 2017, Kazakova created The Real Catwalk, a guerrilla-style runway conceived around a simple proposition: participation should not be restricted by gender, body shape, size, disability, sexuality or ethnicity. Beginning in New York, the project later appeared in locations including Times Square, London and the Brooklyn Bridge. In 2018, she also collaborated with photographer Peter DeVito on More Than Just a Trend, exploring stereotypes surrounding gender, sexuality, diversity and identity.
Playboy selected Kazakova as Miss November 2020 after that work was already well established. She regarded becoming a Playmate as particularly important within her modeling career, but also as another platform from which she could discuss self-acceptance. Her Playboy interview made no attempt to pretend that years of questioning beauty standards had produced a permanently resolved relationship with herself; she described self-acceptance as something continuing rather than something one simply achieves and completes.
That distinction suits Khrystyana Kazakova’s wider career. America’s Next Top Model brought television visibility, commercial assignments established her within curve fashion, and The Real Catwalk turned her ideas about inclusion into an actual runway where other people could participate. Playboy became part of that sequence in November 2020. For a model who once tried to make herself smaller to satisfy the standards around her, organizing a catwalk designed to make room for virtually everybody is perhaps the most revealing career fact of all.
