Christie Brinkley's Daughter Is Basically Her Twin

Supermodel, actress, and possibly ageless creature from another planet Christie Brinkley, has two daughters. Her oldest, Alexa Ray Joel, with second husband, singer/songwriter Billy Joel, takes after her father in the looks and music department. Brinkley's youngest daughter, however, is not only the spitting image of her mother but also following in her mama's footsteps with a modeling career and public campaign to promote body acceptance. Here are a few things you may not know about Sailor Lee Brinkley-Cook.

Sailor's father was Brinkley's fourth husband, architect Peter Cook. Brinkley and Cook married in 1996, but the union unraveled by 2006, when Sailor was about 8 years old. It was an ugly uncoupling. Brinkley reportedly discovered Cook had been carrying on an affair with an 18-year-old staffer at his architecture firm. The ensuing divorce and custody battle played out in the press for years, and Cook's lawyers alleged Brinkley was to blame by fighting to prevent closing the trial to the public. In other words, Brinkley may have wanted the world to know the lurid details of her husband's affair. Though she won the custody battle, the exes continued their high-profile character assassination for years, which was something Sailor probably noticed.

Although Sailor told Town & Country her childhood was "normal," she did acknowledge that "watching my parents' contentious divorce play out on the pages of the New York Post is certainly not part of everyone's childhood experience." Divorce is never easy on a kid, and we imagine it's exponentially worse when the kid's dad is in the newspaper for having a $3,000/month porn habit and for supposedly forking over $300,000 in hush money to keep his teenage mistress quiet.

Body image and self-esteem are issues Brinkley has spoken out about for years. They are also extremely common challenges for teenage girls, especially ones who happen to be the daughters of famous supermodels. According to Brinkley, those factors led to Sailor grappling with her own weight issues. During an appearance on The Meredith Vieira Show (via E! News), Brinkley revealed that Sailor had become worried she would lose modeling opportunities to girls who were "so much thinner," and "did start to lose a little too much weight."

Brinkley said Sailor recognized the problem, then chose to investigate the pressures women experience that make them feel inadequate for her senior project. Sailor made a video called The Weight of Being a Woman. The montage features women relating their own experiences with body image issues, concluding with some sobering statistics about self-esteem and eating disorders and an empowering message to be educated and to embrace oneself. It's a heavy topic, and not one generally approached with such open-mindedness by the typical teen, so perhaps having a powerful and outspoken icon of a mom has its advantages.

In 2013, at just 15 years old, Sailor signed with IMG Models, one of the world's most elite modeling agencies. It's clients include supermodels Alessandra Ambrosio, Gisele Bundchen, Kate Moss, and more. In a 2013 interview with Hamptons magazine, Sailor acknowledged the leg-up having a supermodel mom gave her. "It got my foot in the modeling world, but otherwise it's pretty normal. As much as people say we're twins, I don't think I look like my mom that much, so I think I can make my own identity in the modeling industry."

That grounded perspective on what can be a cut-throat and superficial pursuit has served Sailor well in her fledgling career. Just three years later, she told Downtown that she aims to emulate her mother's professionalism. "I've been told by photographers [and make-up and hair artists] that they like how I make conversation with them and treat them like people. And that's what my mom did that got her big in the industry. She treated everyone as a human and as an equal and just made working fun. And that's what I aspire to do."

Apparently her strategy—combined with her gifted genetics, of course—is working. Sailor's portfolio already includes campaigns for Town & Country, Seventeen, and Teen Vogue.

You may be thinking, with some skepticism, "Three campaigns in three years is great success?" Keep in mind, we're talking about someone who was balancing a professional modeling career with high school. Also, instead of just continuing full-time with modeling, Sailor was smart enough to line up a back-up plan. In the fall of 2016, she  enrolled at the prestigious Parsons School of Design in New York City to study photography. For a kid who already has a foot in the door in the fashion industry, Parsons is a great fit. The institution's famous alumni include Donna Karan, Marc Jacobs, Tom Ford, Zac Posen, and many more. It's basically a factory that produces talented and creative people, so even if Sailor can't make it on her modeling career, at least she'll have a respectable education to fall back on.

Being both the child of a celebrity and an active participant in social media, Sailor's online presence is open to attacks from unscrupulous tabloids as well as the haters and trolls who lurk in comment sections. In 2013, when she was 15 years old, the Daily Mail ran a story about how she had shed her "puppy fat," and was looking more like her mom. It was framed as some kind of triumph, but in reality, the article was thinly veiled fat-shaming of a young girl.

And that's not all of the negative attention Sailor has received. In the comments sections of her social media accounts, she's been insulted for her weight, looks, decision to attend Parsons, and she's been negatively compared to her mom. The dialogue grew so vile that Sailor penned an open letter on her Instagram with a screen capture of a sampling of the insults that people left in her comments, including the unnecessarily cruel, "Sorry, but she looks nothing like her mother. She's average looking at best." Sailor fired back at her detractors, questioning what motives they could possibly have for putting down a young girl who is just pursuing her dreams. Sailor went high when the haters went low, proving again that her looks aren't the only thing she inherited from her mom.

In her 2013 Hamptons interview, Brinkley revealed that as a teenager she was so revolted by a description she read about the Chicago stockyards that she swore off eating meat for the rest of her life. She also told Shape that she successfully turned her mom, dad, and brother into vegetarians, and has continued her meatless lifestyle, so it's no surprise her mini-me, Sailor, followed in her footsteps.

After accompanying Brinkley on a philanthropic trip to Africa in support of an anti-poaching agency, Sailor took her anti-meat stance a step further, declaring on Twitter, "Officially full vegan. Waiting for my congratulations from @peta." In October 2016, Sailor retweeted a celebration of World Vegan Day, and also tweeted, "Yes i wait in a 20 minute line to get a sweetgreens salad WE ALL HAVE OUR VICES." Anyone who claims with a straight face that a salad is a vice has to be a vegan, right?

Sailor's position on being constantly compared to her mom has changed over the years. As of this writing, her most recent thoughts on the subject come to us courtesy of an open letter penned to her haters on Instagram. She wrote, "stop. comparing. me. to. my. mother. Believe it or not I am my own person with my own beliefs and own thoughts and my own face!"

But when she was just getting into the modeling game, Sailor didn't seem to mind the comparisons. She did a mother-daughter shoot for Bella NYC that was a total "look how similar they look!" kind of thing, and she also admitted in an interview with Good Morning America that she knew she was going to be "introduced to the world" as Brinkley's daughter, and that she loved that, although having her own identity was also important to her.

By 2015, Sailor already seemed to be growing weary of the comparison. In a profile for Town & Country, she said, "It can be hard to be up-and-coming and constantly compared to an icon." Sailor even pivoted away from talking about modeling, saying, "Right now I'm focusing on working hard in school and getting into college," which brings us right back to her now infamous Instagram rant where she also wrote, "Yes i am so fortunate that my mother is my mother.. And she will always be an inspiration to me... But being constantly compared to her 50+ years of success at only 18 years old? And being told I could never amount to what she was and what she looks like? Doesn't feel great."

So, yeah, this is sort of awkward for us, considering the whole subject of this article, but we do get it. Sailor is ready to be out of her mom's shadow and doing her own thing, and nobody can fault her for that.