Marlon Teixeira was working amateur shoots in Brazil from seventeen when his grandmother introduced him to Anderson Baumgartner at Way Model Management in São Paulo. Cristiano Marchese signed him in 2008, and his first season ended with a Dior Homme exclusive in Paris.

The Armani Jeans campaign with Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott landed the same year, putting a Brazilian face with dark curls and a half-Portuguese, quarter-Indigenous, quarter-Japanese inheritance on global billboards before he had turned eighteen.

Karl Lagerfeld shot him for the Dior Homme spring-summer 2009 campaign, and the run after that ran through Salvatore Ferragamo, Roberto Cavalli, Giorgio Armani, Dolce & Gabbana, Hermès, Louis Vuitton, Dsquared2, Jean Paul Gaultier, and Emporio Armani.

Marlon became one of the defining male images of the 2010s by working in the part of fashion where the body sells the picture. The Diesel Fuel for Life fragrance campaign in 2011 put him on a global billboard rotation in nothing much at all, and the Armani Jeans, Dsquared2, and Versace Jeans bookings that followed kept him in that lane while L’Uomo Vogue, Vogue Hommes, VMAN, V, W, and GQ gave him the editorial balance. The curls became part of the signature, the thing that softened the abs in the picture and gave casting directors a face to look at as well as a body.

Almost twenty years into the career, he is still in front of the camera. He now splits his time between Brazil and Bali, surfing between jobs and raising a daughter. The Brazilian wave that brought Teixeira, Lachowski, and the rest into European luxury in the late 2000s has thinned at the top, and the face that has stayed there longest is the one houses kept reaching for when the brief was heat.