People often move to New York City to reinvent themselves. But some folks make it big, only to have their careers, and public identities, go away.
It’s all too common in the youth-obsessed industry of fashion, where most models (with the rare exceptions of, say, Naomi Campbell or Cindy Crawford) have an expiration date. So what happens when you find yourself retired in your 20s, 30s — or, in the case of one Elite face — 18?
Meet the former catwalkers who have found new life as a dentist, real-estate broker and even a hula-hoop instructor.
Male model turned dentist
These days, Dr. Stanton Young is more likely to be saying “open wide” than “cheese.”
“It was really fun and I got to travel all over Europe,” said the 59-year-old dentist, who starred in campaigns for Giorgio Armani and Versace and appeared in the pages of GQ, Esquire and Vogue Homme. “I got quite the cultural education.”
Young was scouted in the mid ’80s while he was a 24-year-old undergraduate at San Jose State University and planning to go to dental school.
What started as a summer gig in Milan would up being a five-year commitment. “I had the ‘British’ look which was very in at the time,” he said.
But, after visiting Oxford, England, where his grandfather had studied as a Rhodes Scholar, Young realized he missed academic life. He promptly reverted to Plan A and enrolled in dental school at USC in Los Angeles.
“I was still appearing in catalogs and some of my fellow students spotted my pictures,” he recalled. “I’m sure some of them thought it was weird.”
Young used his fashionable earnings to support himself through school and, later, to buy homes in New York and in California.
It was during his residency at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan that he met his wife, Christy (who now home-schools their children) and settled in New York for good.
“After the arrival of our first daughter, I obviously didn’t do much traveling, and I missed it a little,” said the Brooklyn resident, who has five daughters, ages 15 months to 16 years old. “But life changes when you become a parent.”
He sees similarities between modeling and his second career, in which he treats many models and actors at the NoHo Dental Group.
“They’re both very creative and interpersonal,” he said. “And I perform a lot of cosmetic dentistry.”
Vogue model to real-estate broker
When Trish Goff meets new people in her job, she is often told she reminds them of someone.
Chances are they saw her in a top fashion magazine during her heyday as the face of Versace, Chanel, Dior or Louis Vuitton.
Now, after two decades of posing for the cameras, the 42-year-old Vogue cover girl — who now goes by Trisha — is a real-estate agent in New York City.
“I look back with fondness on my time as a model,” Goff, an associate broker at Compass, told The Post. “But I’m living a different chapter of life and I’m really comfortable with it.”
Florida-raised Goff first stepped on the property ladder in 1997 when she was 20, shortly before the birth of her only child, son Nyima, and four years after becoming a professional model.
Using savings from her lucrative career — which saw her flitting between Paris, Milan and Tokyo — she bought a 3,500-square-foot loft on the Lower East Side.
“After all that time in model apartments and hotels, I wanted a space of my own,” she said.
She renovated the loft — “my friends and I sanded and stained the floors ourselves,” she said — and soon sold it for nearly three times the $500,000 she’d paid. Next up was a Chelsea town house, then a home in Prospect Lefferts Gardens.
But around 2008, as Goff’s enthusiasm for the peripatetic world of modeling waned and she yearned for something less transient, she thought, “What’s next?”
Her conclusion: “People will always need homes.”
Goff’s property-flipping made her a natural fit for real estate. She earned her license in 2012 and made use of her connections in fashion (though she is far too discreet to name her famous clients) to buy and sell high-end residences in NYC.
Goff, who lives with her fiancé, DNA Model Management co-founder David Bonnouvrier, in NoHo, drew on the people skills she learned from working with the intimidating likes of master photographers like Richard Avedon.
“At the end of the day, I get the biggest kick out of finding the right place for someone,” she said. “I never forget that I’m dealing with their life and happiness.”
From catwalk to hula-hoop classes
Cori Magnotta, 35, credits her teenage modeling career for giving her the guts to stand in front of 40 people and hula-hoop.
The Ridgewood, NJ, native won the nationwide Elite Model Look competition at the age of 14 in 1998. For four years, she strutted runways wearing brands such as Guess, Liz Claiborne and Elite’s own line of clothing.
“I used to love walking to the sound of loud, throbbing music,” Magnotta recalled. “The runway would vibrate and I felt so alive and confident.”
At the time, “heroin chic was all the rage,” and the 5-foot-10 model was instructed to not go above a waifish 110 pounds.
“As a teen, after school, I would have to go on the treadmill for an hour,” Magnotta recalled. “I grew to resent it.”
So she quit, instead enrolling in college in Rochester, NY, and becoming a social worker for five years. Married at 19, she later moved to Portland, Conn., with her husband Andrew, who works in computer programming.
She also refused to exercise for more than 12 years. But in 2015 after the birth of her son, Luigi, Magnotta hit 260 pounds.
Although suffering from postpartum depression, she forced herself to try hula-hooping because it looked fun and, best of all, could be done in the privacy of her home. She ended up losing 100 pounds.
Now she runs her own business teaching the activity at gyms, fitness studios, YMCAs and even private-company offices in central Connecticut.
“People have been showing up to my classes three times a week for two or three years. And I’ve helped one woman lose more than 50 pounds,” Magnotta said. “I can keep up with my son and have turned my hobby into a business I love. I’m far happier doing this than modeling.”
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