Saria Elf Rose White is a cutie pie from Bondi, who now lives in Rozelle with her boyfriend. If you were new to town, she’d pack up the car and take you to one of the many splendid hot spots dotted along Sydney’s coastline, depending on the conditions that day. If it was calm and sunny, you’d be treated to some hangs at Bondi’s Flat Rock or Mackenzies, Icebergs infamous sauna and swim combination would be the ticket for a rainy day. Other equally-as-lush-sounding options include: spear fishing in South Coogee or La Perouse, surfing in Maroubra, or taking a drive up to the Blue Mountains.
Given her activity suggestions, it makes sense that Saria grew up in nature. She believes her upbringing gave her a lot of freedom to see the world with extremely pure eyes, leading her to create her own understanding of everything. She spent a lot of her childhood outdoors, and thinks that has attributed to her comprehending the world in a raw and legitimate way.
Saria definitely considers herself a spiritual person—she believes in almost everything and anything, and has a spiritual understanding ingrained deeply inside of her. The best piece of advice she’s ever received is to be her own leader, and she thinks if she had to give up social media for a week, she would have a much clearer mind although a much less meme-filled life. The first thing she does of a morning differs delay, but once she’s up and at ‘em, she generally sips on some h20 and then stretches her bod-ay. To unwind, she has a sauna or a swim, and oscillates between being a night owl (“because everything cray cray happens at night”) and an early riser. If she could only eat one meal for the rest of her life, it’d be either miso soup or protein shakes.
She got into modelling after being scouted by an agent from Viviens when she was 14, then decided to shake things up by switching to Priscilla’s when she was 17. “I searched up top agencies in Sydney, studied them and tried to see where I could see myself, and Priscilla’s really spoke to me,” she recalls. “I went straight over last minute in my brothers Ute on a Friday at about 5 pm. I walked in and said something like, ‘Hey everyone, I’m Saria and I’m wondering how I can join your agency?’. It was the only way I thought to do it, [laughs]. I showed Doll some of my previous photos and she said to come back in on Monday. Priscilla’s has been like a second family to me now for about a year-and-a-half and I’ve grown so much since I first walked through that door.
The most rewarding part of modelling has been developing her sense of self-awareness, comfortability and expression. “Being in front of a camera is confronting and really makes you look at yourself in a way you’ve never been able to before,” she says. “It’s an expression of art, and how that is conveyed really forces you to look inside and outside of yourself—finding a balance between what you believe and what you see. It’s raw and real, and modelling has allowed me to find a home within my heart that I didn’t have before.”
While she’s got a lot of songs on rotation, her favourites at the moment are ‘Dunno’ by Mac Miller and ‘Lilac Wine’ by Jeff Buckley. There’s no doubt that Eminem is her favourite artists ever, though. She’s about to finish reading The Murders in the Rue Morgue and is looking for another book recommendation at the moment (holler if you’ve got one!), and her favourite movies are Mid90s and Shawshank Redemption. The coolest thing she’s learned recently is that the Egyptian Pyramid top points line up perfectly with the stars of Orion constellation. “There’s a crease in each side of the great pyramid that creates a shadow on the pyramids only viewable from satellite view during a certain time of the day,” she explains. “The bottom points of the Pyramids are perfectly in-line with true north. Also, it’s always perfectly room temperature inside the pyramids. Weird as.”
In the next ten years, she hopes that Western culture becomes a bit more humbled, and that guns become illegal in America because “it’s giving people way too much power.” She also hopes that drugs are way less normalised, spirituality and religion aren’t targeted as a means of conflict, and that governments can start making serious changes for the future instead of running resources into the ground. A-men. Friendships are important to her, because friends “become your family, your support network, your mirror, your encouragers and motivators, and the people who you can have the most fun with, create ideas together, the list goes on.”
To her, ‘cool’ means cruisey floozy peachy keen.
Feature: Madeleine Woon Photos: Luca Kiripun Fashion: Chloe Hill & Luca Kiripun
Saria is represented by Priscillas AUSTRALIA
Shot on location in La Perouse, Sydney
