Barbara Varvart ((better)) Jun 2026

"People expected a monologue," she says. "I gave them a conversation."

At 28, Varvart has already outlasted three hype cycles. She emerged in the mid-2010s, a pale wisp of a girl from Tbilisi, Georgia, with cheekbones that looked like they'd been carved by a minimalist architect. But unlike many Eastern European discoveries, she refused to be a blank slate. "I was never 'mysterious' on purpose," she tells me over black coffee in a near-empty Brooklyn café. "I just didn't have anything to prove." barbara varvart

In an industry that thrives on noise—constant content, red-carpet posturing, strategic feuds—Barbara Varvart has built a career on the opposite: stillness. Not the empty stillness of a model waiting for direction, but the charged, tectonic quiet of someone who thinks before she moves. "People expected a monologue," she says

Born in post-Soviet Tbilisi in 1996, Varvart grew up during the aftermath. Her mother was a chemist; her father, a jazz pianist who left when she was seven. "Chaos was the wallpaper," she says. "But chaos makes you watchful." But unlike many Eastern European discoveries, she refused