Vanderpump Rules’ newest blonde bombshell, Vail Bloom is Princeton girl, in case you haven't heard. Yes, she's just that cool. She’s a Daytime Emmy Award-nominated actress, a model, and a graduate of Princeton University, so the question begs to be asked: If she’s stirring up boy emotions on Vanderpump (eat your heart out, Jax), what was Vail like at Princeton? So far, it sounds like she was as much a heartbreaker then as she is now.
Bloom (if that is her real name, because, come on, it’s a picture-perfect stage moniker) matriculated at the Ivy League school sometime around Y2K, graduating in 2004 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in — wait for it — architecture. In 2003, Bloom was entered as a contestant in Maxim ’s annual Hometown Hotties contest, and weirdly enough, Bloom noted at the time that she didn’t even submit her own photos:
Somehow some pictures got stolen from my modeling portfolio and put on the web. I was really angry at first. I was going into my eating club and seeing my picture on a screensaver, and I was getting really uncomfortable.
Sounds fishy. First of all, eating club? That’s called “my whole life.” Second of all, why would a random person submit pictures of another random person for a national magazine contest? But we'll have to take her at her word. Not cool, mystery person. Not cool.
In 2002, Nassau Weekly, a rival student paper to Princeton’s Princetonian, published a list —“The Girls of Princeton: Our Ten Most Beautiful Girls” — taken from a survey of about a hundred Princeton male coeds. Ew, much?
Bloom, of course, was named one of them, photographed pouting near a grove of cherry blossoms on the Princeton campus. The questions posed to the girls were typical Playboy-inspired fare, with Bloom being asked by her interviewer, “What makes a person beautiful?” Her response? “Passion. I would say that’s the key quality. And uniqueness.” I really can’t fault her for this: In college, I would have said something equally typical that I thought sounded really deep and inspiring at the time. However, the feature was controversial and the “Top Ten” list in Nassau Weekly led to many staffers quitting.
Still, it's important to make it clear that it wasn’t all modeling shoots and interviews for Bloom during her time at Princeton. She was also a member of the diSiac Dance Company, a dance troupe that, according to their website, “explores the frontiers of modern dance through unique interpretations.”
So what is Bloom, with her modeling and acting and Ivy League-education, doing on a show like Vanderpump Rules? That remains a good question. But hey, a girl’s gotta have a little fun.
