Natasha Esch’s parents wanted to buy her a business she would enjoy. So they snapped up Wilhelmina, one of the country’s top modeling agencies. Now, at 21, she’s the owner, but the question is . . . : Can She Run the Show?

Natasha Esch wears revealing clothes.

From the waist up, she’s pure preppy in a plaid Chesterfield jacket, brown hair tucked under a headband. From the waist down, she’s a lean, mean fashion queen, encased in a long skintight skirt, slit to show some leg, black stockings and high-heeled black ankle boots.

The clothes reveal a woman in transition. A few months ago, she was just another business student at an East Coast college. But now she spends 12-hour days at the Wilhelmina modeling agency--which she just happens to own.

One other thing: She’s 21 years old.

The plot might have been concocted by Judith Krantz: Young girl, an only child whose father is a wealthy businessman, grows up in Germany. Later, she attends a Swiss boarding school and dreams of becoming a tycoon. Her father serves time in prison for fraud. When he gets out, he moves his family to America and buys a modeling agency for his daughter.

The scuttlebutt is that Dieter Esch acquired the agency as a graduation present for Natasha Esch, who finished school in December.

“It’s not true,” she says firmly. “I’ve owned this company ever since we bought it in 1989. But I don’t think people like to get away from the (idea) that I’m a little rich girl whose daddy got her a gift.”

Of course, she is a little rich girl and daddy did buy her a great big agency.

But Esch denies all allegations of princessdom.

“Was I spoiled?” She considers the question for a moment. “I was not a child who said, ‘Mommy, buy me a little mink coat,’ and I’d get it. I was spoiled with love and with attention. When I was at college, I got an allowance and I had to (pay for) my own credit cards. So in that aspect I was never spoiled. But I was taken care of well, you know?”

Evidently, that’s still the case. Esch won’t reveal her income, but her father says: “I’m sure she has a salary that satisfies her needs for (whatever she wants).”

What might that be? She indulges in $35-a-pair pantyhose (“they’re the only kind I can wear and they last “) and nibbles on sugary-sweet candy stored in various desks around the agency. She goes nightclubbing when she has the energy and owns two dogs, a pug and a bulldog puppy. When she wants to get away, she escapes to her parents’ home in Connecticut and satisfies her cravings for her mother’s German comfort food, like mashed potatoes, eggs and creamed spinach.

Calories? What are those? Nothing seems to show up on her slim 21-year-old hips.

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Esch has been working full time at the agency since January, but she acknowledges it will be some time before she actually runs Wilhelmina. After all, modeling is a cutthroat, face-of-the-moment business; agents foam at the mouth when they hear rumors a top model might be in the mood to defect.

Her experience consists of summer internships at the agency. So for now, she is acting as a human sponge and soaking up as much information as she can from everyone, including her father, who is officially a consultant to the business.

“I don’t mean to say that I have anywhere near the expertise or knowledge that I should to run this company,” Esch says emphatically. “But I would like to make the point that while I do value experience, I don’t think it’s necessary to be half a century old to be leading a good company.”

Both father and daughter say there is no projected date for her to run the show. Right now she is concentrating on the learning the financial end of the business, rather than the more glamorous task of booking models.

The task of overseeing the daily operations is left in part to Fran Rothchild, executive vice president, who joined up with former model Wilhelmina when she started the agency in 1967. (Wilhelmina died of cancer in 1980.) Rothchild sold her shares in the company when the Esches bought it, but agreed to stay for the time being. She has no problem with a boss who’s just at the legal drinking age.

“I’m in this business 26 years,” Rothchild says, “and maybe it’s time to slow down, change reins and give it over to someone younger. I love being in the business, and I hope I will continue working here. But it’s a very youthful business.”

Esch discusses her past, present and future in an empty conference room in the Wilhelmina offices on Park Avenue South. Fashionably dressed bookers (agents) sit at oversized round tables making deals while pretty young things saunter in. Modern art hangs on putty-colored walls.

There’s no point in asking for an interview in Esch’s office--she doesn’t have one. She does have a little unadorned desk nook, but daddy thought it best for her not to be isolated in a room.

A photographer suggests that Esch pose at her modest setup, sitting back on her chair, feet up and arms behind her head in that classic top-o’-the-world-ma pose. But she demurs.

“I’m not that much of a hot shot,” she says.

Give her time.

Esch says she wants to be one of the most important female power brokers in the entertainment industry, wants Wilhelmina to be the No. 1 agency in the United States, wants to expand it to include entertainment talent. Oh, and she also wants to be on the cover of Fortune, Forbes and Business Week.

Right now Wilhelmina does not hold the top spot, although various observers put it at two, three or four. The agency has just signed top model Nadege and placed two models on the cover of Sassy magazine. One of its “new faces” recently appeared in the New York Times Sunday magazine, and another model is doing the Gio perfume ads.

Years ago Wilhelmina dominated the industry, but now it lacks a roster of female supermodels that rival agencies Elite and Ford boast--the Christys, the Lindas, the Claudias, the Cindys.

The Esch mega-hype bandwagon could change that. In the past few weeks the media--Joan Rivers, New York magazine, the Washington Post--have been clamoring for a piece of her.

“I am absolutely shocked at this,” Esch says, shaking her head. “You have to understand, I come out of college, and my dad says, ‘You’re going to get some media attention,’ . . . but it’s out of control! I mean, this is way beyond the scope of what I expected.”

But who’s knocking all that publicity? Not this mogul-in-training, that’s for sure.

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Esch’s motivation overdrive started early; she says she’s always been decisive and ambitious--her father adds “stubborn” to the list.

“I think it comes from the fact that my parents have given me a lot of ability to want things and to strive for things,” she says. “I’ve always been a person who’s known what she wanted.”

She elaborates on how she came to own the agency: “When my family came to the States (in 1988), they wanted to invest their money in something. And given that I was about ready to go to college, they felt that it would be important that it should be something I would enjoy doing later on. They looked at several industries, and they came upon modeling. . . . It looked very fun because it was young, creative, but it was a business.”

She attended Babson College in Wellesley, Mass., a small school (about 1,500 undergraduates) offering only business degrees.

Renee Hobbs, associate professor of communications who had Esch in three classes, calls Esch “a great student, really fun, really smart. She was very outspoken, and that created a lot of interesting conflicts and controversies in the classroom. She was certainly not afraid of what people would think of her. But she wasn’t the kind of person who says outrageous things to get attention.”

When word got out that Esch owned Wilhelmina, Hobbs recalls: “It made the students wildly anxious about her. She was not always appreciated by some students who perceived her as a rich kid. But she never let that get to her.”

When Esch interned at Wilhelmina during the summers, not everyone appreciated the new kid.

“It’s tough to say whether they took me seriously,” she says. “At that point they thought I was the daughter of the owner. I started in the men’s division, and the perception among the bookers was: What is she doing? She’s just here to have fun with the male models, and stuff like that.

“But I worked very hard and people were finally able to see that I wasn’t into it to have lunch or dinner with the models,” she continues. “Once they saw that, they respected me and were willing to teach me, and ever since then people have treated me a lot differently.

“I think I learned the hard way. I remember I came home every night for a week crying, saying, ‘Mom, they’re being so nasty to me, they won’t talk to me.’ But it was fine in the end.”

Leading a tour of the agency, Esch encourages interviews with the bookers. “They’ll tell you what it was like when I started as an intern. It’s OK,” she says flipping her hair back. “I can take it.”

“Everyone was real leery of her at first,” says Martha Lundgardh, director of the men’s division “When Natasha came in as an intern, (we knew her family owned the company). So you looked at her, like, what is she doing this for? Is she here to spy on us? And it takes a little while to relax with the idea that maybe she really does want to learn this. . . .”

And while some in the industry may have their doubts about a 21-year-old agency owner, not everyone is convinced her age is a detriment.

“This is a business of young people, and we very often have young people in top executive positions over here,” says John Casablancas, owner of the Elite agency. Besides, Casablancas was considered something of a hot shot when he started his own business at the tender age of 24.

“So if she is really capable and great, there’s nothing unusual about her having an important role.”

“I think (her father) is a very smart guy, and I’m pretty sure he’s going to surround her with all the advice--including his--that she’ll need. . . . I think the head of an agency is above all a good leader. If she’s a good people person and rallies her staff around her, he might be very successful.”

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On a weekend, Esch suggests lunch at the funky Lucky Strike in SoHo, where it’s noisy and everyone looks like they’ve just stepped out of a Gap ad.

At the restaurant she orders eggs Benedict, French fries dipped in mayonnaise and a Diet Coke. Marlboros are smoked down to the filter.

Finally she talks about her father’s prison term.

Dieter Esch spent his career building what became the world’s third-largest construction equipment firm, and was considered one of West Germany’s top entrepreneurs. But the company eventually fell apart, and its subsidiaries declared bankruptcy when its bank collapsed in 1983. Subsequently, Esch was found guilty of defrauding a Saudi Arabian shareholder. He spent about three years in prison, but held on to most of his assets.

Says Natasha Esch: “All I want to say about those times and this matter, is that I probably learned the most out of it that anybody can learn. It was a tough time, but in regards to people, to business, to the way the world works, I think it was probably the greatest lesson I could have learned. But it makes you appreciate things and I know my whole family feels this way, and you just have a different viewpoint on life. I think you’re a more intense person, and you also have more intense feelings about the way people treat you.

“We all have our little package to carry,” she says, stubbing out a cigarette. “I think I probably have to say that at this point in my life I have a very easy package to carry. . . . One thing hard times teach you is that you live for the moment because you never know what’s going to happen. It could be worse and it could be better, but live for the moment and enjoy what you’re doing for now and nobody can take that away from you.”