In my last post I briefly mentioned Toni Garrn, a model who has now aged out of the industry. When I looked more into her life, it quickly became obvious that she is another example of a woman making highly questionable life decisions. For starters, in the late 2000s and early 20102, Toni Garrn was one of the top names in the modelling business. Her first gig was modelling for Calvin Klein, when she was not even 16 years old. According to Wikipedia, she did over 60 shows in 2009, when she was seventeen. I do not want to risk any kind of copyright violation issues, so I am not going to post pictures of her from 2009. However, I came across an advertisement from 2012 that features her prominently:

By any measure, she was spectacularly good-looking at that time. While there were probably some random guys who tried her luck, surely she was moving in social circles where she met a lot of wealthy and powerful men. It would have been very easy for her to bag a a guy worth at least eight figures. There are hundreds of billionaires in the United States, where she used to work and live, and her hometown, Hamburg, Germany, has the highest number of millionaires in Germany. There are even over 800 people in Hamburg who earn (!) more than one million per year, surely mostly men, and given how socially segregated the rich are, she would easily have been able to meet a fair number of them.

Yet, what does young Miss Garrn do? Instead of cashing in her stellar looks, she prefers getting railed by DiCaprio for two years, and it goes rapidly downhill from there. This is from Wikipedia:

Garrn was in a relationship with actor Leonardo DiCaprio from 2013 to 2014. Garrn was engaged to English actor Alex Pettyfer on 24 December 2019. They married in Hamburg, Germany on 2 October 2020. The couple has a daughter who was born in July 2021. On 22 April 2023, Garrn announced that she and Pettyfer were divorcing on her Instagram account.

In case you have not heard of Alex Pettyfer, do not be surprised. This does not mean that you are completely out of the loop. He is a Z-list actor. More comically, Toni Garrn met him during the shoot of the box-office bomb Warning (2021), which brought in only $180k at the box office.

Toni Garrn is past 30 and her looks clearly are not what they used to be. Below is a recent advertisement she did for an unknown brand. From what I gather, the target audience are people who buy clothes in supermarkets or from non-specialized retailers, considering that the parent company is OTTO Group, which fully focuses on the mass market and affordability.

Obviously, this woman is in a pretty good shape for her age. She is still slim, albeit her skin is no longer as good as it used to be. Not even video manipulation can fix this anymore. What is worse, her face looks worn out, and her hair is of a much worse quality. There is a reason why she is no longer featured in ads by luxury brands like L’Oreal. If you think that she does not even look that bad in that video, then maybe watch the L’Oreal clip above again. I came across another video with her, from last year, in which she looks even worse. If she went to a singles event and people did not know who she is, plenty of guys would ignore her.

Toni Garrn was handed a big stack of golden tickets in her youth. I would not be surprised if there have been hundreds of highly eligible bachelors lusting after her when she was young. Even in the worst case scenario, she would have been better off than she is now. Had she married some billionaire at 22 and divorced, with a kid one year later, she would have no financial worries at all and would still be young enough to perhaps have another go at marriage, or do whatever else she wanted. Instead, she got married to a guy who is not even a has-been but instead never-was, and also got divorced.

There is even the risk that Toni Garrn will end up in dire financial straits in the future. Even though her net-worth is, obviously, not publicly known, a German magazine that is devoted to the lives of the rich and famous estimates her net worth at around three million euros. This may sound like a lot, but is it really? In her case, we are looking at someone who no longer has the opportunities she used to enjoy. She is not going to get booked sixty times in a single season. Instead, she does bottom-tier modelling work for brands nobody has heard off, perhaps just to pay the bills. The ad she did for “LASCANA” is the kind of work you do if you desperately need to as it leads to reputational damage. This is similar to Nicolas Cage taking roles in 29 direct-to-video movies in order to get out a financial hole due to “debt”. (It is strange that an article on this does not mention his costly divorces.)

If you are 30, have no regular source of income, yet are also accustomed to an extravagant lifestyle, money can disappear quickly. Let’s make a best-case assumption, ignoring the value of her apartment, and assume she has three million euros sitting around in cash and stocks. If she spends 20k a month, she will be in for a rough awakening and see her money run out within less than two decades. I used the following figures: 3m starting balance, 20k monthly withdrawals, 4% annual withdrawal increase, optimistic 7% capital gains, 22% taxes. Of course, this is simplified. On the one hand, I assume that she is not making any money but on the other, I also exclude the financial loss due to harebrained business schemes. If you think that 20k a month are a lot then maybe look up how much it costs to “travel in style” if you are a former international supermodel. She likes to travel to exotic places and surely she is used to a certain standard when it comes to her accommodation. Based on her current trajectory, I would not be surprised if she ended up in a pretty bad spot in her 50s, if not sooner. Toni Garrn could have had it all. Compared to the life she easily could have lived, her current situation is deplorable.