Lizzy Jagger falls into that bracket of young celebrities: the Sons and Daughters Of . . . (Sados, for short). The first child of Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall, she is, like Peaches Geldof and her own sister Jade, famous first for her surname. You’re never quite sure what Sados do. Their faces circulate endlessly in the celebrity rags. They go to nightclubs, sun themselves on yachts, party. Confusingly, they all look like each other.
Jagger, 22, is currently a model. She has been signed up as one of the new faces of Marks & Spencer’s latest clothes campaign. The first one featured a set of vaguely famous women of various ages (Twiggy, Erin O’Connor, Laura Bailey) playing girly dress-up games in artfully shabby stately homes. Is the idea that the rock-chicky Jagger might provide a spikier edge?
She made her first appearance as a model in 1998 for Thierry Mugler alongside her mother, having left school at 16. “I was good at religious studies. Part of the GCSE coursework was meditation. We spent an hour a week with our eyes closed. It was great,” she says. Asked about what seems, in retrospect, like a crazy upbringing, she says it felt normal; it was her reality.
A few years ago Jagger dated another Sado, Sean Lennon, then announced to a newspaper in 2004 her intention to cool things. In the same year it was reported that Lancôme, for whom she modelled, had told her to put on weight. “That was completely made up. I haven’t gained or lost weight since I was 17,” she said. “My dad and brother James both exercise like crazy. I can’t be bothered, I’d rather watch TV.”
Last year, Jagger was caught on CCTV getting hot and heavy with Calum Best (another prime Sado) at Kabaret’s Prophecy, a London nightclub, though Best denied that they had had sex in the club. Jagger also swung to Kate Moss’s defence after allegations that her fellow model had taken cocaine. “It’s not just Kate. Everybody in England is doing [cocaine]. There’s so much of it about. You have to deal with the bigger problem, not just blame her.”
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Those who have interviewed Jagger say that she is bright and charismatic. She appeared in the indie movie Igby Goes Down and turned down a small role in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette because she felt she didn’t have the acting credentials. Modelling is good, she says, “if you want to do something else”. She likes “painting and writing short stories — not songs”. She’ll have to sharpen her ambitions if we’re ever to think of her as anything more than a leggy beauty with a distinctive surname.