Male models: from subway to runway

It's a familiar sight at New York Fashion Week: The women who rule the runways arrive in chauffeured cars with darkened windows. They stop on 40th Street beside the Bryant Park tents and emerge like the clone girls in a Robert Palmer music video, Aphrodites floating in on scallop shells, Starbucks skinny half-caf in one hand, Balenciaga bag in the other. Light bends around them. People know them by name.

You never see their male counterparts -- or more accurately you never think you see them. They arrive almost unnoticed on foot from the Bryant Park Metro station, Eastpak backpacks slung over their shoulders. It's only when they're underground, congregated in twos and threes and riding the trains in New York or Paris or Milan that they stand out: 6-foot-2 packs of cheekbones and confidence, giraffes among the wildebeests.

Matvey Lykov is one of the men who makes his living as a human clothes hanger. The 21-year-old Russian-born model has dark brown eyes, a whippet-thin body and his tribe's distinctive chiseled face. He speaks three languages, has a college degree in education and is quick to tell you he's living his dream -- anybody's dream -- right now. Traveling the world, appearing in magazines, making some money.

He first caught my eye on the Paris Metro nearly a year ago, as he and another model ran onto my train car, dashing from a Raf Simons show to a Lanvin fitting. Then, on the subways of Milan the next season, there he was again, amid the boys with the alabaster skin and radiant smiles, all of them perfectly tall and slender like genetically modified sunflowers.

They're the ones everyone's seen, but nobody knows.

Last month, the day after New York Fashion Week wrapped, Lykov plopped down at a SoHo delicatessen, shook off a hangover and shared his story -- one that took him from scrubbing the toilets of Manhattan on a student visa a year and a half ago to ranking in the top 25 male models on the international circuit.

Even after a night of drinking and dancing, he looks runway-ready -- if a few shades paler than usual and a bit unsteady as he slumps into a window seat. His brown hair is gelled into a casual tuft at the forehead, almost as an afterthought, and he's wearing a gray cashmere sweater over a turtleneck. He speaks nearly perfect English with a Russian accent that turns the word "models" into "muddles" and a cadence that makes many sentences sound like rhetorical questions. He constantly checks his ringing, buzzing and beeping BlackBerry, which has a Keith Haring wallpaper background.