Sunflower Yoga Virginia

(Photo: Patrick McMullan)

Observed in her natural habitat, model Miranda Kerr, 28, is less a person than a production. At Victoria’s Secret’s midtown offices, she is getting fitted for the underwear empire’s fashion show in a diamond- and pearl-encrusted brassiere and “wings” shaped like a giant silvery clamshell growing from the base of her spine. “I feel very special and shiny and sparkly! It’s very Marilyn!”

Staring in at Kerr through the aquarium wall of her personality are two film crews shooting a Victoria’s Secret CBS special (airing November 29); a line of photographers; a layer of reporters; publicists; personal assistants; agency representatives; Victoria’s Secret spokespeople; costume makers bearing feathers, sequins, and tulle; makeup artists with brushes at the ready; and a lone bodyguard who never takes his eyes off Kerr’s $2.5 million Fantasy Treasure Bra.

“This old thing?” she says, batting her eyelids and cooing to no one and everyone in her native Australian lilt. Someone tells Kerr that she’s wearing 142 carats of diamonds. “A hundred and forty-two carats of diamonds?” she says, flashing the cameras a dimpled smile. “Wow. Rich.” A hyperactive stylist piles on 142 carats more, in bracelets and earrings, then pauses to reconsider Kerr’s panties. The ones she’s wearing are wrong—all wrong. An emergency team is dispatched to scour for alternates. “I want to go to sleep in my clamshell and then wake up!” Kerr says as she waits.

Panties crisis solved, Team Kerr continues working in the dressing room for another 30 minutes. She emerges not like Venus but like an overaccessorized burlesque performer. “There’s no business like show business!” sings her stylist, and Kerr breaks into “Big Spender, ” waggling a miraculous derrière that seems held aloft as if by invisible string. The stylist steps back, admiringly: “Look at that cleavage!” Kerr gives her and the cameras a wink: “Well, it’s milking time.”

Ten months ago, Kerr’s now perfectly flat, stretch-mark-free stomach contained her first child, Flynn Christopher Blanchard Copeland Bloom. Even if her workout routine, diet, and husband, Orlando Bloom, weren’t the only things reporters ever asked about, Kerr shows a strong reluctance to utter any sentences not purely banal. She insists she owes her return to bra-modeling shape to yoga, smoothies with “noni juice and vitamineral greens, ” and her organic-skin-care line, Kora Organics—the very mention of which turns on her infomercial voice. She and Bloom are practicing Nichiren Buddhists, but she doesn’t want to talk about that. He’s good at changing diapers since “he’s a Capricorn” and “they’re really hands on.” (Kerr is an Aries: “Not shy and kind of out there.”) They have homes in L.A. and the English countryside, as well as a New York apartment that is “too small, ” so they just stay at hotels. “I really feel like the world is our home, ” she says.

Kerr grew up in the country with “horses and motorbikes, ” and first saw a Victoria’s Secret store as a 16-year-old exchange student in Virginia. “I was like, ‘Wow! This is like a wonderland for women in here! We don’t have anything like that in Australia.’ ” She was blown away when she became the first Australian to get a contract with them. “I just remember, like, the first time I met