When Coco Rocha began modeling at age 14, the willowy young Canadian’s career didn’t take off right away. At least, not in New York.

Rocha’s agency decided to bring her to Asia, where she worked for two months in Taipei, and another two months in Singapore.

In Taipei, the teen did a lot of catalog work, some 25 to 75 images a day. At castings, the client would ask two models to do a kind of pose-off—“Vogue-ing,” as Rocha calls it.

“Today, it may be ‘sexy pose.’ Or ‘confident pose,’ whatever that means,” she said in an interview in Hong Kong last week, where she was the celebrity judge at the image-model search of American direct-selling company, Mary Kay, called “Mary Kay Dream Beautiful.”

Three Filipinas competed in the finals. (Story in a future issue of Inquirer Lifestyle.)

“So you just kept going,” the 26-year-old added. “If they liked you, you got the job. When I went back to New York, I thought that’s how you did it. So when I went to my first few shoots, they were kinda laughing at me. They thought it was interesting, they thought it was weird. But I kept doing it. Over the years, it just became ‘Coco’s thing.’”

Next week, on Oct. 28, the supermodel dubbed the “Queen of Posing” will release via Amazon “Study of Pose,” a thick tome containing 1,000 unique poses celebrating her signature modeling style, her schtick, if you will. Advance signed copies of the book, photographed by Steven Sebring, were given out to Asian media attending the Mary Kay event.

It’s published by Harper Design.

Jean Paul Gaultier, the designer who made Rocha perform the Irish jig—another of her signature moves—on the runway for his Celtic-themed collection in 2007, wrote the foreword.

Rocha, a trained dancer, was in fact scouted at an Irish dance competition. When she walked, er, danced for Gaultier’s runway, she had only been doing runway shows for a year and a half. It was such an astounding performance that on YouTube videos of that show, you could hear the audience cheering their approval. Only a few months after, Vogue put her on its cover.

Gaultier calls Rocha “the premier model when it comes to pose and movement.” Rocha said she and collaborator-photographer Sebring envisioned the book for aspiring models “to show that there isn’t just three ways of posing.” They referenced art history, film and pop culture, the supermodel added.

“It works for models, artists, sculptors, and people who just love the point of view of models as muses,” Rocha said.

It’s a heavy tome, 2,032 pages thick, with black-and-white photographs numbered 1 to 1,000, showing the nuances of the human form and facial expressions. A digital app will also be released, where the poses are shown 360 degrees. It took them a mere three days to shoot, but a full two years to edit and put together into a book.

“Even the smallest gestures are important,” Gaultier writes. “To convey those kinds of feelings effortlessly is the primary job of a model, which makes it a vital and, at the same time, difficult job.”

“Sometimes I try real hard to not do [the many poses,] and they say, ‘Do your thing!’” Rocha said with a laugh. “It became a schtick. Then people just learned to love how I do it. I decided to perfect it, and it became the thing I do.

“Also, that’s the thing that I bring to the job. That’s what I tell models: bring something. I don’t know what you’re good at. Maybe you’re very flexible, show them. Maybe you can make funny faces, show them. Don’t be scared to be different. A lot of models, they come to a competition or a casting, and they think, ‘Look beautiful, look glamorous, sit up straight,’ and then everything’s good. That’s not it.

“Do something that makes them say, ‘She’s not the prettiest, she’s not the cutest, but she is amazing,’ whatever that is. For me, it’s posing.”

PHOTOS BY CHECHE V. MORAL