“I’m used to the press and cameras... to being a public figure”: Prince Nikolai on being the model prince

Prince Nikolai of Denmark will be arriving on the Eurostar from Paris to London at exactly 17.21. It is 17.15 and I am pacing about arrivals with a sign bearing his name. I have never met a prince before, let alone picked one up at a train station. Minutes tick by and the sign above flickers from “on time” to “arrived”. Passengers begin streaming through the double doors. A tall, lean figure approaches and removes his face mask to reveal a megawatt, movie-star smile. He extends his hand in greeting.

“I’m Nikolai,” he says, as if I hadn’t been meticulously arranging this meeting for the better part of three months. He wears a salmon-hued hoodie and skinny black jeans, a backpack for his overnight visit slung over his shoulders. As we walk towards our car, we chat easily about his train ride – “It was good, a little dark. I couldn’t see anything outside.” He tells me that the wifi wasn’t great, which was a bummer because he couldn’t watch the Formula 1 Grand Prix, so instead he passed the time listening to the downloaded tracks on his iPhone (John Mayer and other “nice, chill” music).

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I immediately feel a little bit silly for being nervous, for the hours spent mulling over what I could or could not say to Denmark’s young prince. He is simply a pleasant 22-year-old, in London to do a modelling job. To say that Prince Nikolai of Denmark – who also holds the uniquely Danish title Count of Monpezat – is “normal” would be a little absurd. Few people are born a prince, few are invited to model for Dior and exactly one person, Prince Nikolai, is a prince who has modelled for Dior.

As the eldest son of Prince Joachim and his first wife, Alexandra, Countess of Frederiksborg, Prince Nikolai is seventh in line for the Danish throne. His uncle, Crown Prince Frederik, is set to become the King of Denmark. Prince Nikolai agrees that his experience is more than a little unusual. Still, he carries no air of pretension. No undue formality. Perhaps a more appropriate word to describe him, right down to his cream-coloured Yeezy sneakers, would be “casual”.

The prince and I are to meet at the upscale Mediterranean bistro at our hotel for dinner at 19.30. It is 19.34 when he strolls through the lobby. He apologises, profusely, for his tardiness – there had been a miscommunication and he thought we were meeting upstairs, by the elevators. I tell him it’s totally fine, and he apologises again. He has changed into a camel turtleneck. His hair looks fantastic – a devil-may-care mop of dark brown tendrils he tucks behind his ears. Once we settle in at our table, I ask him if he has any hair secrets.

“I just shower, basically,” he says, with a shrug. Prince Nikolai made his modelling debut at Burberry’s autumn-winter 2018 show wearing a shirt bearing an updated take on the brand’s iconic plaid and a wool overcoat. “I was super nervous,” he admits, though royal life had prepared him somewhat for the runway. “I’m used to the press and the cameras... to being a public figure all my life.”

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Instantly the internet was abuzz about “the model prince” and in spring 2019, there came an indelible fashion moment. “The Prince of Denmark opened my first Dior Men’s show,” Kim Jones, the brand’s artistic director, tells me over email. “It was such a dream to have him by my side.” For Jones, whose late mother was Danish, the casting was a loving tribute. For Prince Nikolai, it was a career-changer, cementing him among the noteworthy male models of the moment, royal or not. “That was really what launched my career,” he says. “I was so privileged that I got to both open and close the show. I really got a lot of attention after that.” A Dior campaign starring Prince Nikolai soon followed.

The start of Prince Nikolai’s modelling career was quite coincidental. The director of the Danish agency Scoop Models, Bente – a former model herself who once posed for Helmut Newton – just so happened to run in the same social circles as Prince Nikolai’s mother, Countess Alexandra. Bente reached out to Countess Alexandra about signing the young prince and, when Prince Nikolai turned 18, he accepted. “I was super intrigued. It sounded amazing at the time... It still is,” he says.

“How can a royal person be a model? No one has ever seen that before,” says Bente when I call her up a few days later. She first had the notion to sign the young prince when she bumped into Countess Alexandra on an air plane, travelling with her two sons, Prince Nikolai and his younger brother, Prince Felix. “I looked at the two boys and I said, ‘Those boys are so beautiful. When they grow up, call me if they want to model.’” Shortly after Prince Nikolai’s 18th birthday, she got the call. “He looks great,” Bente says. “If he was not a prince, I would take him anyway.”

How can a royal person be a model? I ask Prince Nikolai if he received pushback from anyone in his family regarding his new career path. “No one was against it,” he says. “Of course, I had to explain myself – I’d have to do that with whatever I do. If I had a new job in any industry or when I started at university, I had to explain that to my family as well. Not in a bad way, or anything.” In addition to modelling, he studies at the Copenhagen Business School. He’s currently on a semester abroad, in Paris.

Though Prince Nikolai seems to adore Parisian life, it was not his first choice. “I wanted to go to Hong Kong,” he says. “Because of my mom’s heritage.” Born in Hong Kong to a Chinese-English father and an Austrian-Czech mother, Countess Alexandra met Prince Joachim, the youngest son of Queen Margrethe II, at a private dinner in the 1990s. She was beloved by the Danes. Poised and kind with exceptional style, she was quickly dubbed “Diana of the North.” She and Prince Joachim divorced in 2005. “They’re my biggest fans,” Prince Nikolai says, of his parents.

The Danish monarchy, though rooted deeply in history and tradition (dating back to before the 10th century, it is the oldest constitutional monarchy in the world), is changing. In 2016, the royal spokeswoman announced that seven of Queen Margrethe’s eight grandchildren will no longer be granted a salary from the state (the Crown Prince’s son, Prince Christian, is the exception). The news came shortly before Prince Nikolai’s 18th birthday. How could anyone deny him a career in modelling? He had to earn a salary somehow.

Prince Nikolai has other thoughts on why his life has differed so greatly from the lives of his predecessors. “I think it’s mainly because of digitalisation. I had such a different upbringing from my parents,” he says. “I have my own phone – who had that 50 years ago?” He has a point. In the grand scheme of his family’s history, a prince modelling for Dior is hardly any stranger than a prince having Instagram (which he does, by the way; the account is private). “Everything has to transition and follow the times and modernise, right?” he concludes. It is a practical answer from a practical guy.

This steadfast practicality manifests in a variety of ways. The first thing Prince Nikolai checks on his phone every morning is the weather app – he is nothing if not prepared for the elements. “I think it’s just part of the Danish culture,” he says. “For foreigners, when you talk about the weather it’s to postpone the conversation. In Denmark, the weather changes so much – we talk about the weather actively.” I ask him what’s on his camera roll and if he’s skilled in the art of the selfie. “I never take photos,” he says. "I’d love to have this beautiful album on my phone. Mostly it’s just practical screenshots. Like my train tickets.”

He removes his turtleneck to reveal a crisp white Comme des Garçons Play T-shirt and leans back casually on the banquette. We’ve come to the part where I must, professionally, as someone in the field of fashion, point out how impossibly, objectively beautiful Prince Nikolai of Denmark is. Bente is right – he would be a successful model regardless of his heritage. That he is a prince in possession of this otherworldly beauty? It is truly the stuff of Disney movies.

I ask him who in his life makes him laugh the most. He pauses. “Well... my girlfriend,” he says. It is public knowledge that Prince Nikolai has been with his girlfriend for several years – the information was just a Google search away. Virtually every detail of his life is available online. The internet fanfare surrounding the prince and everything he does is a bit of a wormhole, from the countless imposter Instagram accounts to the viral TikTok of him simply walking. He tells me he doesn’t pay much attention to it, unless it presents itself in an unmissable manner.

“Sometimes when I do my grocery shopping I stumble upon a paper with me or my family in it, and I just read the front page,” he says. But there are no such papers in Paris. There, it seems, the prince lives unbothered as a student and a model. Eating at brasseries and cafes, trying to learn a bit of French. “I am not fluent in any way, but I try to speak French when I’m in a restaurant or shop. It’s difficult, right?” he says.

In Paris, Prince Nikolai’s classmates “don’t know and don’t care” about his title. “It’s relaxing and soothing in a way. I can be even more myself,” he says. It all sounds very, well, normal. Before we get the cheque I ask him once more how he gets his hair so good. At least tell me who cuts it, I implore. “Usually my mom cuts my hair,” he says.