From underwear to software: meet Lyndsey Scott, the model with a geeky secret

By straddling hi-tech and high fashion, Lyndsey Scott stands out from her peers in both. The app creator and model tells us about being bullied at school, working for Calvin Klein, and the joys and prejudices of the computer-coding world

BY Stuart Brumfitt | 27 April 2014



Photo: Vincent Dilio

Elle Macpherson has her lingerie empire, Gisele Bündchen devotes free time to a skincare range, and we are well used to the moonlighting of Kate Moss. But New York-based Lyndsey Scott, who has won contracts with the likes of Calvin Klein and Victoria's Secret, must be the first supermodel with a sideline in computer-coded apps. Her fellow catwalk fixture Coco Rocha may be a contributing editor at PC Mag, but Scott has yet to meet another model with an interest in coding. Indeed, meeting anyone with that interest is rather rare. 'Computer science isn't the sort of thing you go up to people and talk about,' she says. 'For the most part people are pretty uninterested in the specifics that go into coding.'

Scott's Twitter page offers a window into her diverging interests. Between tweets promoting her latest advertising campaigns and editorial photo shoots, there are obscure binary in-jokes and self-confessedly nerdy debates on the best core-data-migration practice. She has made robots and is fluent in Objective-C, Java, TI-Basic, C++, Mips and Python. It is Objective-C that has become her programming language of choice. She uses it to create Apple-approved apps that have made her a fledgling tech tycoon: iPort, initially a portfolio app for models, is now used by architects and cake-bakers alike; Code Made Cool encourages young women to get into coding; Educate! is a project for the Ugandan charity of the same name, which helps to fund and develop young African entrepreneurs and scholars; and the Matchmaker is a social-networking app 'for love, friendship or business'.

Discussing her programming success, Scott, 29, is lively, confident, beaming. Far less so when she is talking about her personal life, especially her past. She was bullied mercilessly at her high school, a fancy preparatory school in New Jersey. 'One of the major problems I had was that I didn't understand the reason,' she says. 'I figured there must be something terribly wrong with me. I was really skinny - I know they made fun of me for that. They called me a monster. I was maybe 80lb and 5ft 8in. For the first three years I was the only black person. By the end I was terribly quiet. I could barely talk to people without tearing up.' She stutters and her gaze drops as she recounts this.



She kept the abuse to herself, never confiding in her family, despite a stable home life with both parents present and good relationships with her two younger brothers and sister. 'People pushed me around. There was one class where they kept knocking my books on to the floor. I was invited to a few parties just to be uninvited. I was pretty out of it, depressed, and didn't really care,' she says. 'But I wanted to go to college, so I put lots of effort in and got into Amherst [in Massachusetts], which was the number one liberal-arts school in the country at the time.'

She studied theatre, economics and physics, then enrolled on a computer-science course. 'I didn't understand what computer science meant,' she says. 'I took the course and right away I loved it. My last project was to make a Monopoly game, and I went crazy with it. We had to code 10 pages and I probably did five times that. I liked how capable computers are, and I wanted to take advantage of the code to make something real.'

She realised it was very similar to coding games on calculators with friends, as she used to do in her happier early schooldays, essentially creating DIY Game Boys and smartphones. 'I saw that my TI-89 calculator came with a huge document,' she says. 'I looked through it and realised that you can use the coding in the document to make games on the calculator. The kids would tether the devices together and pass games to one another.' She also discovered that she had a genetic propensity for this: her father, who now owns a home-healthcare company, had been a computer programmer for the National Security Agency, a fact that she was un-aware of throughout adolescence.

Once she had graduated from Amherst (with a dual degree in computer science and theatre), Scott ignored pressure from her parents to pursue programming and sought a modelling career. Buoyed by a subtle physical transformation (thanks largely to a cocktail of weight-gain supplements) and the encouragement of friends, she began touting herself around the New York agencies. She was rejected by every one, some twice. 'I thought it wasn't for me,' she says. 'But then I posted images online and my first agency found them and called me, so I signed with them.'

Thawing out after a few days spent handing out flyers on a street corner for a low-paid promotional job, Scott heard from Calvin Klein. 'I was called in to meet them at 11pm and they told me on the spot that they wanted me to be an exclusive,' she says. 'At the time any job would have been great, so this was a huge shock to the system. I pinched myself for months.' Scott became the first African American to win an exclusive contract for a Calvin Klein show. Soon after she was booked for an extravagant, A-list-soaked Victoria's Secret show. 'That was just like with Calvin Klein: I didn't sleep for several days before because I was so nervous,' she says. '[Fortunately] they had great make-up artists and they can work wonders, no matter what.'



Lyndsey Scott on the runway at the Calvin Klein womenswear autumn/winter 2009 show in New York; at a rehearsal for the 2009 Victoria's Secret fashion show, also in New York

Scott's negotiation of the fashion world has occasionally proved tricky. Her first model agency asked her to consider trimming five years from her true age. 'In the business they think you're past your prime when you're 24, but I was 24 when I started,' she says. 'I think part of the trend towards using younger models is that they like to keep the models disposable. They take 15-year-old girls in, then trade them in for more girls the next year, just to keep the prices low. These younger girls look so old and mature when they have their hair and make-up done, but some of them are 14.' After leaving one agency she tried to find another and was told, 'You're almost 30, your pores are going to change and get bigger, your body's going to change, so you should just try to move on.' She has now signed to the industry heavyweight Elite. 'They're really cool about it,' she says, referring to her impending landmark birthday.

But today Scott's modelling work is more a means of earning funds for her burgeoning app empire and profile raising to draw attention to her digital wares. She has also been busy building a reputation on Stack Overflow, which describes itself as 'a question and answer site for professional and enthusiast programmers'. Scott can boast 'over a 2,000 reputation' (very good, apparently).

She had become an active member of the site, answering questions to grow her reputation and gaining profile views, when, around the time of the community elections earlier this year, 'I was looking through comments and trying to choose who I wanted as the moderator, and I read a comment that seemed addressed towards me, like, "Make yourself a hot chick in your profile picture and you'll get more views." I think most of the people doing this are white men. I don't know how to say this, but there's some sexism and even some racism,' she says, almost apologising for their shortcomings.

One suspects there may also be an element of jealousy at play. Most faceless programmers can only dream of the interest Scott and her digital projects have received. But she is not letting the negativity affect her, instead focusing on giving inspirational talks (she spoke at Yale University in March on the challenges she has overcome in modelling and tech), charitable work and taking pleasure from 'modelling, coding and the free-dom to do the things that I enjoy'. After years masking her true passions, skills and even age, surely the most embittered bedroom-coder would not begrudge her that.

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