She’s the sexiest girl of her generation. Daisy Lowe talks about her burgeoning movie career and why being sensible is the secret of her success
If you want proof that the waif look is out, then look no further than Daisy Lowe. Even swaddled in layers of knitwear, half-asleep and flaky-nosed thanks to a nasty cold, she exudes all the earthy sexiness of a 1970s Playboy pin-up.
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She has a smile that looks like perfect happiness. She has the kind of body (long of limb, soft of flesh) and attitude (utterly unafraid of whipping it all off) that guys go gaga over. Not to mention photographers, designers and stylists.
“She’s a bombshell; she looks super-sexy all the time,” says Vivienne Westwood. And according to her booker, Sarah Leon of Next Models, “Daisy sells clothes better than anyone of her generation”.
It’s taking her a while to wake up (“I was up until, like, 4am playing hide-and-seek with Will in my new house”), but the personality — as real and warm as her killer smile suggests — is in full flow. Chatty and candid, she tells me that, since she moved back from New York in November, she has mainly been busy finding somewhere to live (a house in Holland Park) and discovering the joys of buying furniture: “It’s my new favourite kind of shopping.”
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The timing of her return is spot-on. Refreshingly clean-living, paparazzi-shy and determined to be famous for “actually doing something good”, Lowe is every pneumatic inch a girl of the times. “Will” is Will Cameron, her on-off boyfriend of many years. So they still hang out together? “We’re still ‘together’,” she says, too accustomed to rumours (the latest being that she has hooked up with fellow Burberry model Tom Guinness) to get irritated by speculation about her private life.
She turns 21 at the end of this month, and her coming-of-age year looks set to be a big one. Next up, we’ll see more of her famous bod, when it models the Louis Vuitton beachwear collection alongside that of the “larger” super Lara Stone. What was she like to work with? She rolls her puppy-dog eyes. “Larger? I felt like an elephant next to her. It’s ridiculous. She’s being hailed as this bigger girl, but she’s tiny.”
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Lowe certainly isn’t afraid to tell it like it is. The theme for the party she’s throwing for her 21st is Magical House of Fairy Tales. “I'm going as a fairy princess,” she says. On the invites, she has written: “In this enchanted land there’s only one rule — thou shall not powder thy nose.” She explains: “No drugs allowed, basically. If you want to be at my party and you're one of my good friends, then we’re just playing Twister, thanks.”
It’s no surprise that Lowe is one of the leaders of the sober brigade (“Although I do like the odd shot of tequila”). She says that, in general, “all my friends are really clean. The older generation learnt what drugs can do to you, and we’ve learnt from them. We don’t need to experience it for ourselves, we don’t need to batter our bodies.”
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Lowe has seen it all for herself, of course. Her mother, Pearl, wrote with blistering candour about her own struggle with drugs in her autobiography, All That Glitters (soon to be made into a film). As a result, Lowe has said that there’s “a huge element of Saffy from Ab Fab in me — because I always tried to be my mother’s mother”.
The two are extraordinarily close, and Lowe seems gutted that she’s “not allowed” to play Pearl in the All That Glitters movie. She is up for a part in it, however, and can currently be seen in the film Geography of the Hapless Heart.
Opportunities come fast. She says that being asked to design a new jewellery range for Swarovski has been one of her proudest career moments — “You recognise that I actually have a brain? Thank you!” — and has insisted that 20% of the proceeds go to Climate Concern. “We have this one earth, and we have to protect it and love it.”
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Healing — be it the world or the people around her — is a big theme with Lowe. She’s interested in the Hoffman Process (both her mother and her acupuncturist have told her about it), whereby “you go to this place for a week of intensive meditation and counselling to get rid of every tiny bit of anger within you and release it”. And you get the sense that, in fact, for all her grounded togetherness, Lowe’s demons are never far from the surface.
She is remarkably open — it’s a trait that has served her mother well in turning around her fortunes, after all — but one topic remains off limits. In 2004, Pearl discovered that Daisy’s biological father was Gavin Rossdale, with whom she’d had the briefest of flings. Rossdale, who had, up to that point, been a “doting godfather”, then severed all ties. Quite a hit for a fragile 15-year-old ego to take, she says she is “constantly working at making that switch towards living in the light, away from the dark”.
In her autobiography, Pearl says that Rossdale’s name is “banned in my household”, and that “he’s missing an amazing girl”. But now that Daisy is increasingly in the public eye, avoiding his daughter will be more difficult.
Daisy makes up for this void by lavishing love on the family she has. She’d been Christmas shopping for them when we meet — splashing out on “the classic quilted Chanel bag, in bright red” for Pearl (“She’s the most special person in the world to me, so I have to get her a really good present”), and dresses and shoes from I Love Gorgeous, on Ledbury Road, west London, for her four-year-old baby sister, Betty.
She has made no secret of the fact that she wants children herself, in the past revealing that she wants to have “three or four and be a really good mother and make sure they have a brilliant life”, and has said that she fell for Cameron when he told her “he just wanted to be a really good dad”.
One thing is certain, she is thrilled to be back home. I ask if she’s proud to be British — to be a figurehead for British fashion — and her face breaks into that famous grin. “So-oh proud. So proud, there’s a huge British flag in my hallway. In case I ever forget I’m back in England. It’s like — I really am here!”