Stella Tennant on the Nineties and how it feels to be a British fashion icon

In a rare interview, Stella Tennant tells Laura Craik how it feels to be a fashion icon — and why she wouldn’t want her daughters to go into modelling
Laura Craik18 March 2016

Cara, Kendall and Gigi may be the current superstars of social media, but for a certain generation of women there is only one model to idolise and that’s Stella Tennant. The brooding, languorous favourite of Karl Lagerfeld, Nicolas Ghesquière and, most recently, Miuccia Prada (whose catwalk she recently graced in Milan) is self-effacing in the Phoebe Philo mould, a low-key, woolly jumper-clad fashion icon whose stellar career happened despite, you suspect, her best attempts to put the brakes on. You won’t find Instagram pictures of Tennant’s avo on toast: she doesn’t do social media. Wanton self-exposure? She couldn’t think of anything worse.

When we meet in a photographic studio in North London, her pose is frozen majestically, but any impression that Tennant is an ice queen is quickly dissipated by the friendly wave she gives upon seeing me loom into view. She has that model’s instinct for the perfect frame, a talent honed over a two decade-long career that began with Steven Meisel shooting her for British Vogue in 1993 (she was 22) and only ever ascended from there.

Comme des Garçons Play T-shirt, £57, at shop.doverstreetmarket.com; MashaMa leather trousers, £460, at ritualprojects.com ; Dior slingbacks, £850 (020 7172 0172) Jewellery throughout, model’s own Lena C. Emery
Lena C. Emery

'That was my first proper job,’ she reminisces, once we have settled down to talk. Fresh from studying sculpture at Winchester School of Art, she was ‘roped into doing it’, unaware that Meisel was a very big deal indeed, having just shot Madonna’s Sex book. ‘After the Vogue shoot, he asked me to go to Paris and shoot a Versace campaign,’ she smiles wryly. ‘Suddenly, it was a proper modelling job. And I didn’t really know if I wanted to open the door and see what was inside. You have an idea of what fashion is about, but I’d been at art school. I didn’t know if I wanted to be objectified. I thought it was a big, shallow world and I wasn’t really sure if I liked the look of it.’

Stella Tennant

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It turned out she liked it rather a lot; the early 1990s, she says, were ‘a great time to start modelling — lots of the brilliant designers and photographers were my contemporaries, more or less’. On the decade’s return to fashion now, she says: ‘I don’t think the 1990s really went out of fashion, in a way. Well, my clothes haven’t really changed.’ She is wearing oversized jeans (‘I’m not sure if these are mine or my husband’s’), a long-sleeved green T-shirt by 45rpm, Turnbull & Asser socks, Comme des Garçons trainers and a Louis Vuitton handbag monogrammed with her initials. ‘And a vest,’ she chuckles. ‘Always a vest.’

You would expect such thermal pragmatism from a person who has lived in the Scottish Borders for the past 13 years, in a sprawling manor house shared with her fashion photographer turned osteopath husband David Lasnet (they married in 1999; the bride wore Helmut Lang) and four children Marcel, 17, Cecily, 15, Jasmine, 13, and Iris, 11. The family moved from New York so the children could enjoy the same outdoorsy upbringing as Tennant, who grew up near Hawick, Roxburghshire. ‘The first summer we had in Scotland, the older two just played at the back door with some gravel and a hosepipe, and were really happy, because it was more than they had had in New York,’ she laughs. ‘The younger two are much wilder and free.’ She likes picking and cooking her own vegetables. ‘We’ve got a vegetable garden at home. There’s nothing better than doing your own homegrown stuff.’

Dior top, £850, and slingbacks, £850 (020 7172 0172), Thomas Tait trousers, £756, at matchesfashion.com Lena C. Emery

That Tennant talks and moves with a peculiarly aristocratic grace is thanks to the sort of lineage that is catnip to the fashion world. Her maternal grandmother, Deborah, Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, was the last surviving Mitford sister until her death in 2014. Her father, Tobias William Tennant, is the son of the 2nd Baron Glenconner: his late half-brother Colin bought the island of Mustique in 1958, which became a favourite destination among the celebrity jet set, most notably Princess Margaret and David Bowie. While Tennant could, undoubtedly, dip into the same fast and glamorous lifestyle as her former cohorts Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell still enjoy, it’s not for her. She is, quite genuinely, a country girl.

Her work most often takes her to Paris, but, she says, ‘I don’t normally go away for more than a couple of days at a stretch. And weekends are pretty sacred.’ She admits she has been fortunate that her career has allowed her to maintain a healthy work/life balance. ‘It’s very visible, but it’s not a full-time job. Occasionally, if I’ve been working in the holidays, the kids come with me on trips, so they’ve seen a bit of what my working life is really like. But the house is not full of magazines. They’ve seen the reality of what the work is: it’s fun, but there can be a lot of hanging around backstage or in a location van. They’ve got a clear picture of the reality and the fantasy.’

Do any of them fancy modelling as a career? ‘No. I’m very much discouraging them from pursuing ideas of modelling. They’ve got to get on with school. Education is really important. Never more so than now. Modelling is the most fickle thing ever — it’s not something that I would ever recommend someone to try too hard to do, because it either happens or it doesn’t. It’s out of your control — that’s the problem with it. You might be offered stuff and that’s great. If you’re not offered it? Forget it.’

How has the industry changed since she started out? ‘It’s always difficult to tell what’s changed, because my perspective has changed. I’m in my mid-forties, I’ve got kids, I live in the countryside… I’m really on the periphery. I can dip into it, go back home and it’s another life. But it’s so different being a young model now. You have all the pressures of social media. You’re expected to be involved with all kinds of projects and exposing so much of yourself constantly. I would hate that side of it.’

Jumper, £425, and trousers, £1,875, Loewe (loewe.com) Lena C. Emery
Lena C. Emery

The work has changed, too. ‘The teams of people on photo shoots are so much bigger than they used to be. When you do shows, you have one outfit and you’re diluted in among 60 models. So the whole thing is diluted — your time with the designer, who is split between this huge cabine [studio] of models, whereas when I was working all the time and doing the Helmut Lang show, for example, you’d have a bunch of outfits. Your fittings would take an hour and a half. You’d build up a relationship with all these people. And that’s the part that I’ve really enjoyed.’

Tennant rarely gives interviews. ‘Modelling is like being in the silent movies — it’s not about your personal life, so I’ve never particularly indulged in doing interviews,’ she says. Yet despite — or perhaps because of — this wilful lack of self-promotion, she is as in demand as ever, not least because there has — praise the skies! — been a renewed interest in older models. ‘I don’t know why that’s taken so long,’ she says. ‘It’s really nice that you don’t have to be a specific age. I mean, of course, they do so much with post-production,’ she adds self-deprecatingly. ‘You’ve got the hair and make-up, the lighting... so they can make you look pretty much ageless.’

Gucci shirt, £745, and skirt, £990, at Dover Street Market (020 7518 0680) Lena C. Emery
Lena C. Emery

Is it disconcerting, seeing the results? ‘No, it’s lovely,’ she laughs. ‘You can live in some fantasy that that’s what you actually look like!’

She is sanguine about ageing. ‘I feel better about my body than I did in my twenties, because I feel extremely grateful to my body for being able to take four babies through pregnancy, and breastfeed. That made me really appreciate it and not obsess about one small patch of cellulite on my upper thigh,’ she laughs. ‘Not that I ever obsessed much, because I’ve never had to work at my weight. I’m just annoyingly, naturally skinny. Ageing kind of sucks, but I’m not going to fight it. I’ve stopped dyeing my hair black because my husband said, “Please, please get rid of it.” So I got rid of the black and my hair is actually much greyer than I’d realised. So I had a week of going, “Oh my God, I’m really grey at the back and what am I going to do about it?” And I’ve decided I’m just going to go grey.’

Besides, she says: ‘I’m not really pursuing my modelling in the same way. If it wants to pursue me, that’s a different thing, but me as I am. I’m not going to dye my hair and I feel really glad that I can just… I don’t want to pretend to be something that I’m not. I’ve got to an age where I have to feel comfortable with myself. It’s about time — I’m 45! I’m incredibly glad to be where I am. I’ve got my children, my husband, work that I enjoy… I mean, what else is there really?’

What else indeed.

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