I was expecting Lara Stone to be demented. Not tra-la-la, traipsy round the dingly dell demented like, say, Björk. But slightly scary mad, à la Grace Jones smashing someone round the head with a tea tray.
I feel terrible saying this now, because I realise my assumptions were all based on ‘A Look’. She’s possibly one of the most low-maintenance people I’ve ever interviewed. On time. Thoughtful. Unfazed at the prospect of decamping from the freezing lobby of the studio where the Telegraph’s shoot has just wrapped, to a kebab shop – the only place that’s reasonably warm and open at 5pm on a Friday on the rattier edges of London’s Stoke Newington.
But in the end, we find a pub with shockingly bad music and grubby cups. I’m not sure she even notices. She is teetotal, but remains undiva-y. Far from smashing things, this is a woman whose passion, it transpires, is assembling Ikea furniture, and who spent a recent holiday walking on the beach with her six-year-old son Alfred, picking up litter. Successfully building Alfred’s bunk bed is one of her highlights to date.
But you never know, do you, especially when you’re off to see a model who’s starred in some of the more searingly dystopian fashion shoots of the past two decades, including, memorably, the one where she was clamped to Agyness Deyn in a psychiatric hospital bed, looking distressed but fabulously beautiful, obviously. This was a 2007 shoot for Italian Vogue by Steven Meisel that highlighted the trend for young female celebrities – Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears – to check into rehab. Then there was the shoot with her fondling wolves, and the shoot of her sporting a variety of bondage corsets and nipple-tasselly things, as you do, while balancing oiled bodybuilders aloft on her shoulders. If Kate Moss’s Resting Model Face is a toss-up between a pout and a gummy grin, and Cara Delevingne’s is a goofy big-sister grimace, Stone’s is a glower. It’s those eyebrows, which seem perpetually to hover in frown mode.
No tassels today, though. Instead, an old black Alexander McQueen military-style coat, a stripy Breton from Majestic Filatures and old black Helmut Lang trousers. It’s (elevated) Yummy Mummy style. ‘I think sometimes people are disappointed because I don’t have this Instagram lifestyle,’ she notes. Maybe not. It might be but a humble stripy tee, but the whole package looks sensational and somehow original, thanks to that pale lemon-coloured ponytail and biscuit-coloured eyebrows. In pictures, too, she can make the classic look interesting.
She’s used to the dissonance between her image and the reality. ‘People often think I’m really grumpy when I’m not,’ she says in her sing-songy Dutch-inflected English. ‘It’s because when I’m not smiling I look quite stern.’
Reading previous interviews, there often seemed to be a whiff of cordite in the air, although now we’ve met, I think that apparent unpredictability is just her honesty. She didn’t have to tell the world that she checked into a South African clinic for alcohol addiction when she was just 26. But the way she sees it, why lie? ‘I was travelling all the time. There was always an excuse to have a drink. With the way my life was, always at the airport, a work event… The best thing, I thought, was to break that cycle and go away for a month. No one had said anything. I just didn’t like the spiral. I thought, “It’s not going to get better.” I had to stop it.’
That’s very mature, I say. ‘Yes, I thought so too,’ she says, so deadpan I still don’t know whether she was joking. ‘I mean, in retrospect, I could have just gone on holiday for a month. But it was fine and I learned a lot.’
A year after rehab, in 2010, she married David Walliams, whom she met the year before, at Claridge’s in the presence of a surreally eclectic guest list that included Walliams’ Little Britain co-star Matt Lucas, Denise Van Outen, Richard and Judy, Sir Elton John, Stephen Fry and Tom Ford. How our mouths plopped open: Vogue’s enigmatic sphinx partnering with one of the titans of populist British telly.
‘Because,’ says Stone simply, ‘sometimes really different people work together – but maybe not for ever.’ At the time, she said he made her laugh and could be mean ‘in a good way’. At any rate, once she was outed as ‘the famously camp’ (as the tabloids liked to describe him) Walliams’ love interest, the level of her fame – which until then had been respectful fashion-fame – went off the charts. She remembers the moment, early in their relationship, when she realised how shrill its register had become. ‘I’d been at his house and was walking back to the Tube and this car was driving next to me and they were taking pictures the whole time. It was just so bewildering and terrifying.’
So much to parse in this: Stone was still taking the Tube; Walliams didn’t escort her home; her vocabulary is excellent; fame sucks.
Equally well publicised was their decree nisi in 2015, which cited Stone’s ‘unreasonable behaviour’, although friends later claimed that she agreed to those terms in order to expedite proceedings. Walliams, it was said, was devastated at the end of their marriage. Suffice to say, it was horrible. ‘It’s awful getting divorced. The first time I left Alfred with David, he was really clingy. It’s now five years and luckily our son was really young. He didn’t really notice anything. It’s only now that he realises that we used to be married. He’s the happiest kid – really happy to be home with me and really happy to be home with his dad, so what more could you ask for?’
Do they have a good divorce? ‘It’s been OK. We always both had Alfred’s best interests at heart. It’s quite complicated custody because it’s almost 50/50.’
She has made the best of the shared custody –she lives in Camden, in a cosy, comfortable house not far from Walliams. She clearly adores motherhood, proudly telling me her son now reads her bedtime stories. Do these include Walliams’ phenomenally successful series of children’s books? ‘I’ve tried, but we haven’t actually finished one. Alfie gets distracted. To be fair, I think they’re aimed at a slightly older reader.’
Much as she misses her son when he’s with his father, it means she can pursue her career relatively unconstrained by what she calls ‘mum guilt’. She never expected to be still in demand as much as she is, aged 35, and it clearly delights her. Well, not clearly, because as we’ve established – those eyebrows. ‘I’ve been very lucky and very successful and I still love my job. I only work with nice people. I finish the day and it’s still light. It’s pretty easy.’
This may be the least anguished account of modelling I’ve ever heard, but then compared with working in McDonald’s – her previous gainful employment – modelling is probably a doddle. She isn’t knocking McDonald’s. ‘I was on the Big Mac station, operating those guns with the sauces in and in charge of the pickles. Always two pickles. I was really good,’ she says.
Stone was born in Holland and brought up in the small town of Mierlo by a Dutch mother and English father. At school, her parents were called in weekly to discuss her behaviour ‘and there were constant threats of expulsion’. She doesn’t know why she was like that. Her childhood, with one younger brother, was pretty idyllic. ‘I grew up on the edge of the forest. You could walk everywhere by yourself. But grumpy teenager, I suppose. I thought I knew everything.’
She was scouted at the age of 13, which must have been weird. But maybe I’m overthinking it. She didn’t – she’d never even heard of Vogue. The first time a casting agent asked whether she knew how to walk (fashion speak for mastering a signature catwalk gait) she thought they’d taken leave of their senses. ‘How did they think I got to the casting? Of course I could walk.’
She was shocked, she says, by recent #metoo revelations of abuse in the fashion industry. Nothing like that ever happened to her. Not because the agency looked after her particularly when she was young, she says, but because she knew how to look after herself. Still, it sounds emotionally tough. She had years of rejections. Sometimes she’d go on 15 castings a day and all of them would be a no – hence the job in McDonald’s.
At 16, she moved on her own to Paris, where she was placed in a ‘model flat’, sharing with as many as nine other girls. And still the rejections stacked up. By 19 she began to run up debts, which panicked her. She started doing catalogue work (industry jargon for less prestigious but lucrative shoots for high-street brands, which could kill your chances of working for a high-status magazine or designer). It was only when she finally changed agents that things clicked. There was no dramatic shearing of the hair, nor peroxiding of the eyebrows. ‘It was just a question of them seeing me with a different eye and marketing me.’
Her big break was going to a casting for Riccardo Tisci, now creative director at Burberry, but back then reinventing fusty old Givenchy as a mecca for off-kilter style and socially progressive gestures (he was the first designer to cast an openly transgender model). From there on in it was one Vogue shoot after another – interspersed with campaigns for the brands of the moment.
But even when you’re at the top, the mind games don’t stop. Sometimes, at the height of her modelling career, there was talk of her being ‘big’ (and they didn’t mean successful). Seeing her on the catwalk at the time, it was so obvious that she was, by any standards, slender, albeit with notable curves, but she says the taunting was persistent, and goes on to describe what sounds like systematic bullying. Did she feel she was having a fat day every day?
‘Kind of. It depends who I was working with. Some stylists would call in really small samples they knew wouldn’t fit, and hand me a pair of waist 24 trousers . I’d say, “They’re not going to fit,” and they’d say, “No, put them on. Put them on, I just want to see.” They’d come up to my knees. This was still happening when I was 30 – loads and loads of times. I mean by no stretch of the imagination was I ever fat. Size 8 or 10 at the most.’
It took even the sensible, Dutch, down-to-earth Stone the best part of 15 years to realise she didn’t need that kind of torment. ‘You start being a bit more selective about who you spend the day with at work. I have no desire to spend all day with people who actively make me feel bad.’
I don’t think there is anything contrived about Stone’s powerful, off-beat beauty, which, even away from the lush lighting, makes her look like a modern-dress Vermeer painting. The translucent pallor, broad cheekbones, dark watchful eyes and arrestingly wide gap between her front teeth, are part and parcel of what she is: an English-Dutch woman, who can’t tan, even if she could be bothered to, who resisted pressure early on to get her teeth ‘fixed’ and would often rather sit on the sidelines observing. ‘No, I’m definitely not extrovert,’ she says dryly.
Later, when I ask her what gets her worked up (expecting something Attenborough-ish), she responds immediately with ‘people’. Anything in particular? ‘They’re so annoying. I feel really annoyed at their driving, obviously. I’m like the worst road-rager. Their slow walking.’ And their obsession with filming everything. ‘I went to this party yesterday and I’m the only person not on my phone.’ Just don’t cross Stone when she and Alfie are on the school run in her Mini and you’re on your mobile. But, God, I know where she’s coming from.
Her boyfriend, a handsome property developer called David Grievson whom she first met more than a year ago on Tinder (why was a woman with her extravagant assets on Tinder? For the same reason she likes Ikea, presumably), tells her the Dutch are too honest to be polite. ‘And the English are too polite to be honest,’ she adds. ‘I feel very Dutch.’ The coded ways of her adopted country exhaust her sometimes. Although she loves London and its freedoms, the longer she lives here, the more perplexed she is by the class system. ‘It just doesn’t exist in Holland.’
I’m surprised this is an issue for her. But actually she says she doesn’t really see her friends from the old days – models Raquel Zimmermann, Lily Donaldson and Freja Beha – except loosely, via Instagram. They live all over the place. Maybe it comes from Alfie’s school, where Stone is a class rep (duties include organising the summer fair and the teachers’ presents. So yes, potentially a minefield of class-ridden detonations).
She’s an interesting study of someone who had to grow up fast, and then spent years filling in the gaps. I think that explains, as much as her Dutchness, the stripped-away approach to her life. After years of frenetic schedules, she doesn’t follow complicated diets or fancy exercise regimes, apart from walking Bert, her border terrier. She used to do Pilates but thanks to her Ikea habit, she says, she has a frozen shoulder. Her best method for combatting stress is an afternoon nap. She’s not a hermit – she went to the Fashion Awards in London last December with Tisci – but when I ask whether she likes entertaining at home, she looks horrified. ‘Home is private.’ She’s navigated tabloid fame and emerged the other side, finding a level of recognition that suits her. People rarely approach her in the street. Not even in Holland, where she is surely one of their most famous models?
‘Are you kidding? Doutzen [Kroes] is much more famous.’
Lara Stone on the catwalk
Givenchy in 2006
Victoria's Secret in 2008
Calvin Klein in 2011
Chanel in 2015
Alexander McQueen in 2018
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbHLnp6rmaCde6S7ja6iaJ6RqLWqu81op56noKGycLjAq5hmq6Sku6Z50qiknqyZorK0edGemKWkqWKxqrLFnqmepqRivaa7z6WcZq%2Bfp7huwM6gnK2glad8