#danielle evans

Danielle “Dani” Evans, winner of Cycle 6 of America’s Next Top Model in 2006, is reflecting on how the title impacted her career.

In interview on the recent Netflix Series exploring ANTM, Evans shared that winning the show was not always seen as an advantage in the high-fashion world. At the time, some agencies reportedly viewed ANTM winners as reality TV personalities rather than serious models, making it harder for her to transition into traditional agency work.

While today’s industry embraces visibility and personality, Evans’ experience highlights how different the modeling landscape was in the mid-2000s.

Without bothering to put clothes on, she’d proceeded to explain to me, not for the first time, that really, all pleasure was perverse, that it was perverse to ever enjoy anything in such an awful world, that any moment of happiness was selfish when infinite horror was always happening somewhere else.

“Tell me,” she’d said. “Tell me, Terrence, how you can ever be happy about something as stupid as sex, in a world where children are beheaded for no reason. Doesn’t that make you really fucking sick?”

“You make me really fucking sick sometimes, Gabi,” I said.

She silently walked into the kitchen, still naked, opened the cabinet, and proceeded to line up my cherry-red drinking glasses and one by one throw them at the living room wall, waiting for the last to shatter before reaching for the next. When she finished she looked up.

“If you’re going to call me crazy, I’m damn well going to act it,” she said.

Technically, I hadn’t called her crazy. I did not, in fact, think she looked so much like a crazy person as a quite rational and calculating person behaving the way she thought a crazy person might—a prospect I found significantly more frightening and not entirely unattractive. I said nothing, went for a long drive, and returned to find the glass swept up and a new set of glasses lined up on the kitchen counter. I thought it was a peace offering and not a good-bye.

I never paid for the newspapers after she left and most of them stopped coming, but the German paper still came weekly. It was a week behind the present and in a language I didn’t speak, but I read it religiously, reveled in its deliberate and drawn-out words. I thought that so long as you didn’t understand a thing, it was a goddamn lovely world.

Danielle Evans for Bode Magazine

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