Model Behavior

From Milan's runways to New York's NXL team, Swedish born Alex Lundqvist has left a very distinct mark on this world.

By Marcel Zenari / Photography by ROM123 and archives

Prologue
- "Grolsch beer? It's Swedish." The waiter insists.
- "Check on the label, 'cause I don't think that it's Swedish. I know all the Swedish beers, and I'm pretty sure this one isn't." Alex replied.
In fact, it was Dutch.

Sweden
Alex was born and raised in Stockholm, Sweden. His father is a dentist and his mom assists him in the cabinet. They met when she was 16 and he was 20. The whole Lundqvist family is highly successful. Alex has a younger brother, Maximus, a chiropractor and professional paintballer living in New York. He is very close to his brother, they live in the same building, play on the same paintball team, and have put together Bunker King as a family venture in the competitive paintball clothing market. Alex is especially proud of his younger sister. She went to San Diego and LA for a year to study fashion at a design institute. She has recently started working with a Stockholm-based company called Temple. She started with a few drawings for their women's line. They liked it so much that they had her draw up the whole men's line, she was now going to Russia to present her work to the factories. "They're one of the hottest brands in Stockholm. We found out yesterday, we're really proud of her, she finished top of her class of her school." Alex smiles. There's two smiles, one because he is extremely proud of his sister, and the second because there's been an incessant draw to the world of fashion in the Lundqvist family. His mother sowed a lot. That might even have been Alex’s explanation for it. "When I was a little baby, she used to sow all these outfits, and she had friends who worked in magazines who took pictures of it all.” When Alex was a little bit older, she sowed a whole jeans outfit for him, jacket, pants, and everything else. “They had to tie me to the pole to get me to stand up and take the picture. I always thought it was fun and had really good grades in sowing classes and wood chopping classes." As I was still bewildered that all Swedish kids learned how to sow and cut wood, Alex was already telling me about his accomplishments. He loved sports, did competition skiing until the age of 16, when school took more of his time, and before he joined the military, something else that is mandatory in Sweden. Like anywhere else, you could decide to say "I can't hold a gun..." and get away, but it was quite important for Alex, who progressed rapidly to the rank of tank commander. “They're cutting back a lot with NATO and what not… But back then, there were Russian submarines roaming around in the Swedish archipelago.” The military service in Sweden is only one year, and his path was all drawn up for him, as he had applied to one of the best graphic design schools in the country. But that summer, he had nothing to do, and a friend of his was going down to Milan.

The Road to Milan
If you google ‘Alex Lundqvist,’ you will find countless fan websites about his huge modeling career, which started at the age of 18. Alex was 'scouted' by a girl in his class who told him that he could make money modeling and that he should contact this friend of hers. He began modeling for small local ads. "My very first job...", he adds, hesitantly. "My very first job was for a brand called Young Trend... I might actually still have that picture. It was a bar picture, I'm standing at the bar, and there's this girl smiling. That was my first job ever". He laughs, probably thinking how only a couple of years later, he would be handpicked by Bruce Weber to place his foot on Helena Christiansen’s crotch for a Versace campaign. But he made over a hundred dollars for this ad, it was great money for him at the time. And that was not where his career really started. A friend of his was going down to Milan... That's the part of the story we were at. But he had problems getting further. "I never really traveled..." he added. His parents, who he still insists on calling "mom and dad", had this great summer house. Lots of his teammates and other paintball players traveled there, they all called it "fantasyland". At end of June to July, the population there triples, as it is in one of Sweden's hot spot summer destinations.

Yes, he was bound to eventually tell me about this friend of his that was going to..."So I went down to Milan". In an afterthought, the fact that it took three stories to finally tell me in a roundabout way that he did eventually go to Milan is no laughable matter. This was a decision that changed his life, like all the choices that we make, never realizing at the time how important they would be. In Milan, he started catching a couple of 'jobs' (that's modeling lingo for catalogue, advertising, runway or magazine shoots) and traveled around Italy. He went down to Sicily, Naples, Capri and made a lot of friends. "I fell in love with traveling." The 'jobs' were going well, and that's the least he could have said, considering that Bruce Weber, an internationally renowned fashion photographer, handpicked him for the Versace campaign. That was "a huge job", as he repeated overly (now, 'huge job' in modeling lingo, is when this involves world renowned models and photographers for a high end fashion brand, on an international advertising campaign). Strangely enough, he was in a modeling agency called Joy, at the time. This was a huge opportunity, and to throw all this away would have been foolish. Maybe they convinced him to stay in the industry, maybe he had always wanted to be a part of it. The match was made, and heaven was Alex's destination for the next couple of years.

The Fast Life
"It was great money", he insists. Before this, his only jobs involved delivering mail on Sunday mornings at six o'clock, or waiting tables in a couple of restaurants. "I pretty much did everything, catalogs, runways, advertisements, magazines..." and he has the pictures to prove it. He went back to Sweden to break the news to his parents who are very supportive of everything their children have done. His father wanted him to study economics, but this ended up teaching Alex what he didn't want to do. He had already decided to go to graphics school because he loved to draw. But all the plans had changed because a friend of him had gone to... "All hell broke out", or 'loose', it's amazing how well Swedes speak English, and if it hadn't been for this little quirk and misquote, I could have easily forgotten that he wasn't born and raised in New York city.

New York
There are no top model men. There are Top model women, who might even make ten times as more as their male counterparts, but whose careers are shorter, or harder to sustain without eventually giving in to white goods. It was 1993, Alex was one of the very few male models who had a name that reached beyond the industry, like Mark Vanderloo or Jason Lewis. The first they had him booked for was a Calvin Klein show. They picked him up in a limousine at the airport, "I had never driven in a limousine before, and I got the driver to take pictures of me in it." He adds, almost childishly. The hotel was right on the ‘Square.’ "I had seen all those movies saying that New York was so dangerous, I just had to check it out, I thought that I might get mugged in an alley.” Instead, he fell in love with the city. He moved there a year later. He has been a New Yorker for eight years. He got the GUESS? campaign and for the next five years, he started doing all the shows, Versace, Armani, Valentino, Gabanna, Prada, etc. There was a lot of runway work, and some models have learned to despise it. "I didn't love it, but it was interesting... It was kind of stressful, you had very long days..." He starts to dream away, remembering a life that might seem far away now. "You know what? I have a tendency to forget about things that I don't like, more or less. It's true, you learn from your mistakes, but most of the time, any memories I have, even the bad ones, I remember as good." I asked him to give me an example, almost in disbelief. “Being completely drunk so that I fall down the stairs and get eleven stitches. That's not a really happy memory, and I'm going to think before drinking too much again, but I think about is a kind of a laugh, you know. The thing that pissed me off the most about this, is that I was supposed to go play paintball the next morning and I couldn't go."

Gotcha
That was the link. It wasn't evident at first, and frankly, it came as quite a surprise. The Jeff Kanew film came out in 1985. Gotcha had somewhat of a cult following in the paintball world and had reached Alex, who had just finished his school. "I think that it was in Paris, with this American kid. It starts out with this great scene where he's in college or something. They have a card of someone they need to shoot, and then they have this paintball gun. It's awesome. Then they get the person and shoot him with a paintball gun. He goes on vacation in Paris, and gets involved in this whole espionage thing, with a girl who works for the CIA. Then in the end he shoots the guys with a paintball gun but loaded with tranquilizer balls." That was the first time he had ever seen something to do with paintball. That was the paintball connection. So we’re back in the early 90s, Alex and Max bought a paintball magazine and tried to order a paintball gun, which they weren't allowed in Sweden until a couple of years down the road. They finally managed to buy PGPs and played in the woods. True Colors, Joy Division, all the Swedish teams were already there, and Alex and Max started practicing with experienced players. They won their first indoor tournament with pump guns. Paintball wasn't really legal at the time, but the country is quite lax on certain things. "I shouldn't say this but it's not like America, where you have to wait until 21 to drink, you can't swear, and stuff like that, and the suing factor is not the same. It would be unheard of to be able to sue McDonalds over a hot cup of coffee." They played against Warlords, the biggest team around at the time. They were having an exhibition game and they pretty much beat everybody except for the Lundqvist team. After that tournament, Joy Division asked them to be a part of the team. They accepted, but it was then that Alex decided to leave the fields for the runways.

The London Trip
Five years back, Joy Division got sponsorships from WDP. Max, still living in Sweden told Alex that he could get prices on their markers. Alex took up the offer and accepted the bran new Angel. The same year, Max came to visit him in New York as Joy had just finished playing Skyball in Toronto, where they had met a team from New York called Armored Saints. He told his brother that if he ever wanted to play in the New York vicinity, he should call these guys up. "I called them up and went to play with them." And the first time he slid to his bunker, he couldn't believe that he had left the sport for five years. The adrenaline was flowing through his blood stream again. Half a year late, Alex received another phone call from his brother. This time, he told them that European team NBK needed an extra player for the Mayhem Masters. "The Joy guys would be there and they were such great friends, I really wanted to see them." So Alex was supposed to go to London, and Max was supposed to get him a spot on NBK. "He flew in, rented a car, the tournament was that day. He finally managed to find the field, find the team, that was already at the chrony. “I hadn't played tournament ball in such a long time, I asked them where I should play, they told me wherever I wanted, and it ended up being me against one opponent. I shot him and hung the flag.” Alex is so happy as he tells me this story. More enthusiastic than I have ever seen him speak about anything else. He's right there on that field five years ago. Making it back into the paintball tourney world in one swift move.

Ground Breaker
He followed once more his brother to the Orlando World Cup. The first team they were playing against was Ground Zero. At this time, he had never really met them. He had met Rosy at the New York field once, that was it. In that decisive game, Alex was again alone on the field, shot them all and hung the flag. He found out that Will Arroyo lived a block away from his apartment in New York. They invited him to practice and the rest was history. "I would say that the friends that I made in modeling wasn't the same thing that I found with the Ground Zero guys. I was kind of lonely in New York. I missed home a lot, I missed my Joy guys... For me, I had friends that I had all my life, it's a different kind of people. For people in the modeling industry. I shouldn't say this but they're not very genuine, they are often looking out for themselves before anything else. That's one of the big reasons why I fell in love with paintball again, because the people are really themselves, they're not afraid to be who they are. They're all really cool guys." Alex made it to GZ gold, silver, and the GZ team that traveled to Europe. They won the world title in 2001, the year the team decided to change their name.

New York Xtreme
"We're only allowed to play one Millennium tournament." He answered. The question was whether or not he was going to play a couple of tournaments with his Joy Division teammates. "It was my brother, not me." And this time, the question was whether or not he was suspended for a year for playing two Millenniums, one with Joy, the other with Ground Zero. He doesn't want to talk about that. That's where I start to see his point about only remembering the good stuff. He wasn't going to tell me that there was something wrong with a one year suspension. "I don't thing they made it up yet." Now that was an interesting construction. I thought he meant that they hadn't made up their mind yet, but the following sentence he uttered made me think again. "Supposedly there's no rule in the rulebook on this, I don't think they really know themselves. They know they want to tell the players that they can't f#@k around, 'cause a bunch of Bob Long's Oakland Assassins played the first Super 7 event here in the States..." But Alex is a fervent supporter of Xball, one of the most enthusiastic I have ever met. "I think Xball is the greatest format ever for paintball, and I see everybody that plays it, in Divisions as well say the same thing. It's the best format for TV, because in order to get on TV, and in order to actually make money on TV, you need the commercials. I spoke to someone who told me that in basketball, they actually wait for the commercial. American football is the biggest sport in America, and a big part of that is because it is such a good format for commercial breaks. I don't think 7-man could ever be as exiting for television."

Bunker King
The company that was inspired by Will Arroyo three years ago with his little beanies has grown faster than any of them had hoped for. Alex and Max now handle some of the most well-designed T-shirts around. Alex especially likes referring to the ‘X ray of the skull with paintballs inside.’ They sold them at World Cup three years ago and they did pretty good. Alex had so much other things going on that he didn't have time to push the company a lot. But times change. Generation E told them last year that they could distribute some of their products, but they would have to pull through with production. Alex always took all the money they made and reinvested it in the company. He could have invested heavily into it with the money he had accumulated modeling, but he had always felt that the company should grow on its own. They got a larger and larger inventory but Generation E didn't sell enough for them, so Alex and Max decided to take over the distribution, put booths together for their events, and create newer and more innovative products. "This stuff is made where all the fashion designers buy their materials...". The response at World Cup has been incredible, and a couple of stores in Manhattan are now selling the products.

Rules of Engagment
About four years ago, Alex walked into a restaurant, and saw the most gorgeous girl he had ever seen in his entire life." He had always liked the blond Swedish looking girls, but Keytt was so unique looking that she swept him off his feet. "I'm a pretty shy guy", but he still gathered the courage to walk up to her table and tell her that he just had to talk to her. She was there with her sisters, he was there with his brother. She had a clothing company and Alex and Max had just started working on Bunker King. A year before, he had told his parents that he would never find the right girl. The next Christmas, he told them that he had found the right one, the following Christmas, he told them that they would be grandparents. "And now they are."
"Family and friends and people are the most important things in the world. We come here with nothing and we're not going to leave with anything. It's the experience we have and the people we leave behind." He’s thinking of little Alex junior. "It's been the thing I'm the most proud of in my life..."

Epilogue
Before leaving, Alex left me with an afterthought. It was in the form of a joke. It was about two old men sitting on a park bench. One says to the other:
-"Remember when we were in Paris when the war ended?
-Yes.
-Remember those two Swedish dancers?
-Yes.
-Remember when they asked us to go down to the French Riviera with them?
-Yes.
-... Well we should have gone."
Alex went. He went down to Milan. "Life is so short, you can't hold back, you can't be afraid. I see so many people who don't like their life, this is what is so amazing with paintball. You wouldn't do it because society tells you it's a good thing to do. It makes you feel so alive. They want to live as loud as they can." And like that, he was gone.

This interview is extracted from FaceFull.com

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