Karen Elson may be the coolest model of all. In a business that is supposedly taboo-breaking yet often deeply traditional (beauty, to paraphrase Keats, is all you need to know), the Mancunian has defied all the orthodoxies.
First, she doesn’t look like anyone else in the profession, and never has. Secondly, she works with fewer photographers than any other model at her level. Thirdly, give or take last year’s marriage to Jack White, of the White Stripes (maybe the coolest band of all), she is relentlessly low-key, rarely gives interviews, etc. You won’t see her in Heat, or with a tan and sporting the latest Fendi bag (she’s a vintage queen).
And fourthly, after ten years she is still at the top of her particular tree — not bad for a model who was so oddball that even her agency didn’t know what to make of her.
And fifthly, not withstanding the black wig she wears in pictures shot for Pop magazine, she doesn’t really undertake that chameleon act on which models pride themselves. Elson is a dyed-in-the-basin whey-faced Titian — the kind of beauty that plays better in Italian Vogue than in a Next catalogue; the kind that could have gone either way but must have been hard to pinpoint when she was growing up.
When we speak she is in New York, where she has lived for nine years, having her hair dunked in the strongest red formula yet, a defiant statement that is somehow at odds with her transatlantic twang (I’d expected something more grittily northern English).
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She’s six, or seven, or maybe eight months pregnant (she ascribes this vagueness to the vagaries of American obstetrics, a theory that is about as convincing as Elvis’s last sighting on Mars. It’s more likely a by-product of her quest to remain private).
“When I started out I sometimes spoke out about things that, in retrospect, I shouldn’t have done. They still come back to haunt me. Sure, modelling can make you insecure — but so does being young. As a 27-year-old woman I feel I’m so far from it now. I’m all happy and pregnant.”
Given how easily models become defined and trapped by a single image, it is interesting watching Elson’s attempts to draw the line between her public face — the arresting campaigns over the years for everyone from Dolce & Gabbana and Chanel to Versace and Gaultier — and the low-key home life.
She has been a favourite, and not just of the avant-garde, for years against the odds. She doesn’t slot neatly into the normal US Vogue parameters of American beauty and even held her own in a Pirelli calendar, where her unabashed creaminess shone out next to Moss and Bündchen.
She has survived and transcended every trend (Brazilian überbabes included) without compromising her individuality — an achievement that is due partly to her good fortune in being adopted and mentored by Steven Meisel (“my agent sent me to see him and we just clicked. I didn’t even know who he was. It’s a hilarious misconception that he’s this big scary photographer”) early in her career, but also to her good judgment.
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“Judgment?” she laughs. “It’s down to my agent, Louis. He makes sure I don’t do too much work. It’s so hard to stop yourself doing too much when it’s there, especially when you feel that you might not be offered anything again, and there have been moments when I really thought that.”
“There are only a handful of photographers that Karen feels comfortable with,” says Katy Grand, editor-in-chief of Pop magazine. “When beautiful women say how ugly they were when they were younger, you roll your eyes. But Karen really was gangly and a lot of people didn’t understand her look to begin with.
“Some photographers still don’t know how to capture her properly, and her attitude is that it’s better to be really selective than to take every big-money job going. That’s probably one of the keys to her longevity — and the fact that she’s a dream to work with.”
The black wig was Grand’s idea — a Patsy Cline tribute. “We were listening to a lot of Johnny Cash and Loretta Lynn on the shoot,” says Grand. Compared with other collaborations they have worked on, it was a gentle concept. “She was pregnant, after all,” Grand adds, “although she still fitted all the samples.”
The first time they worked together was in an East London car park. “Karen had just had her hair bobbed for a Paolo Roversi shoot in Italian Vogue and she looked so otherworldly. We got her to do impressions of snails and rabbits.” More recently, on a shoot with the photographic duo Mert and Marcus, Grand set fire to the road. “Not that Karen so much as flinched. She may sound like a New Yorker but she still has the Mancunian in her.”
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Elson chuckles again when I ask about this shoot. If she is fiercely protective of her current beatific state, it is maybe because she senses how fragile it is. “I’m not really fazed by wild stuff on shoots,” she says. “It’s much less tough than the catwalk. I’ve never heard the audience making comments about me when I walk down, thank God, but girls do. That would just make me cry.”
She is not, however, about to denigrate the business that transformed her life. “I find it very insulting when people say that modelling is not creative or that it’s passive,” she sighs. “Some people will always dismiss models because of what we do. As you get older, hopefully you learn to objectify it more and build up a fuller life outside work.”
Elson’s fuller life now includes the Citizens Band, a 25-strong troupe of like-minded friends who get together regularly to perform cabaret, dance and sing — anything from Noël Coward to Kurt Weill and their own pastiche compositions.
“Our manifesto is the years between 1850 and 1930, which I just love because while the music was so great — there was also so much dark stuff going on. It’s very inspiring.”
Citizens Band performed recently in Miami but play mainly in New York. “It has almost taken precedence over modelling,” says Elson, before checking herself. “But will I carry on modelling after the baby? I’ll have my picture taken as long as anyone wants to take it.”
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“And yes,” says Grand, “if she thought that it would help the picture, she’d still do impersonations of a snail.”
FIVE BRITISH MODELS WHO AREN’T KATE MOSS
Stella Tennant, now 35 and a mother of three. The face of Burberry.
Felicity Gilbert, 20, snapped up by Storm, Moss’s agency. Picked for Vogue’s class of 2006.
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Lily Cole, 17, discoved at a burger bar, still doing her A levels. Earned £2 million last year.
Erin O’Connor, 27, helped to turn around M&S’s image. Worth £9 million according to The Sunday Times Rich List.