Chad White signed with Major Model Management in New York in 2005, and a year later Steven Klein photographed him for L’Uomo Vogue, producing a cover and a forty-page editorial that put him inside fashion’s orbit overnight. Klein kept casting him, shooting the racy Dolce & Gabbana campaigns that followed and returning to him across editorial work for years, the type of photographer-and-model relationship that shapes a career.

Ralph Lauren, Giorgio Armani, DSquared2, Diesel, and Hugo Boss came next, a run that made him one of the defining American faces of the late 2000s. Vogue later called him the unofficial face of the early 2000s, naming the physicality the era was casting for, a sculpted Portland athlete who had given up baseball after a hand injury and walked into modeling almost by accident.

Twenty years on, White is still working. The campaigns have continued across Loewe, Michael Bastian, Tommy Bahama, and J. Crew, alongside a steady editorial presence at Arena Homme+, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, and the Financial Times HTSI. Michael Kors cast him for the brand’s 2025 Father’s Day campaign alongside his son Levi, a portrait that doubled as a record of a face fashion has been choosing for twenty years.