Sports Illustrated beauty Marissa Miller, didn’t know what pretty was until later in life.
She was born in the family of hippies and didn’t understand what having a “good body” was, she was raised as a tomboy.
‘My sophomore year in high school, I played volleyball, and they made you wear those ridiculous uniforms that look like a bikini brief. It was super-embarrassing,’ she recalls. There was this rumour going around that I had a ‘good body’, and I didn’t even know what that meant! My parents were just like, ‘Oh, it just means you’re really healthy and you’re strong!”
Marissa was looking super girly in the photoshoot for Ocean Drive magazine.
‘My parents definitely were hippies. They lived out of their truck the first six months they were married, and all they did was surf. So I definitely had those tendencies, because that was how I was raised.’
When I began working for Victoria’s Secret, they were shooting a lot in Miami. I was there every week, and finally I just decided to stay because I didn’t want to fly back and forth from California every week…There are waves there – not huge, but the water’s warm,’ she says. ‘[Miami] was a really fun place to be, especially at that time in my life. I was living it up. I had my skateboard, and I used to ride it over to Mynt Lounge, on Collins, and the DJ would put my skateboard behind the booth.’