Model Missy Rayder on living through lockdown in NYC: ‘I didn’t feel it was right to run off’

In an airy studio in Brooklyn, on a rain-lashed Friday morning, Missy Rayder and I are sitting opposite one another with both of our faces half-covered. It says a lot about the ongoing oddness of 2020 that conducting an interview in masks doesn’t even seem all that strange; certainly, we agree, it beats Zoom by approximately 1,000 per cent.

Rayder, 42, has been modelling for 25 years, regularly gracing the cover of Vogue Italia, among other fashion titles, and fronting campaigns for the likes of Prada, Burberry and Vera Wang. This year, however, she’s had ‘a couple of shoots, but very few and far between’ since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. Immediately before lockdown she was on a modelling job in Milan. 

‘Then, as soon as I got back to New York, everything erupted.’ New York schools closed in early March, leaving her homeschooling her eight-year-old son, Luka. A single parent — she broke up with Luka’s father, her artist ex-husband Marko Velk, three years ago — it was, she says, ‘just us’, in their West Village apartment, the top floor of a brownstone building, where she has lived since 2001.

‘I’m an introvert by nature, so we just hibernated and listened to a lot of music. I’d like to say that I became a good cook, but that didn’t happen,’ she says. 

‘And the New York streets were empty because everyone left, so it felt like our city… Everyone around us disappeared upstate or to The Hamptons. But I felt this strange loyalty to New York and felt I had to stay put. Maybe that’s a form of masochism,’ she laughs. ‘But I’ve been through a lot here — during September 11, I lived downtown — and I just didn’t feel it was right to run off.’  

The long tail of Covid-19, she says, is only just beginning to be felt in New York, with the city seeing a huge rise in poverty and homelessness. 

‘There’s a church near my apartment, where homeless people have always hung out. But now, the line for the food bank there is like nothing I have ever seen. And there’s a lot more crime, a lot more random violence — it’s gnarly,’ she says. ‘I’m not afraid of the dark moments of life, but this has been pretty intense.’