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Daisy Lowe: not just another It girl

2009 – with its whirlwind of TV shows and fashion campaigns – has been model Daisy Lowe’s year. But there’s more to her than mere party girl. After a childhood spent playing Saffy to her drug-addicted mother and the shock discovery of her real father at 14, Lowe has become wise beyond her years. In a frank interview, she talks life, love and why she holds no grudges



Daisy Lowe has got her knockers. Those people, for example, who suggest she’s only successful because of her parents. “Fair enough,” she says. “To people who say that, I say, ‘Sure. Go for it.’ Because if my parents weren’t famous I probably wouldn’t be doing this, to be honest.” She considers this. “But it’s also how I’ve managed to have a platform to be able to model with boobs and arse and some thighs, you know?”

Any discussion of Daisy’s appeal ends up at her breasts sooner or later. Vivienne Westwood calls her “a bombshell; a style icon for her generation, she looks super-sexy all the time”. Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman singled her out as a crusader against size zero, reversing fashion’s unhappy fixation with “jutting bones and no breasts or hips”, the current contentious topic as evidenced by last month’s hoo-ha over size 14 models at London Fashion Week. i-D editor Ben Reardon has had Daisy on his cover twice, the first time shot in profile, topless, by Terry Richardson with the barcode covering her nipple. “She’s not the thinnest, tallest or most beautiful model,” he says. “But she is stunning, sexy and inspiring in her confidence; a curvy sex-bomb. She’s the hot, cool girl at school who cut class and smoked ciggies behind upper school and pashed with the older boys. Plus,” he adds, “I love the fact she’ll get naked at the drop of a hat.” And if striking a blow for feminism by flaunting your boobs sounds suspiciously like something Katie Price would come out with… well, it’s all a matter of context. “Daisy gets her tits out, but she does so successfully,” reckons her friend, TV presenter Alexa Chung, “because she’s cool.”

“All I’ve ever done is try to make girls feel better about themselves, because women are curvy,” Daisy says. “They’re designed for a child to come out here.” Well, quite. It’s the sort of thing she says. The same lack of self-editing that used to drive her ex-boyfriend, the music producer Mark Ronson, to distraction (“The amount of times he was like, ‘Daisy, stop opening your mouth! You cannot tell a journalist to piss off’”). That resulted in her revealing a cervical cancer scare to MTV (“They wouldn’t edit it out and I was, like, ‘Come on, I only told you because you asked me why I was looking so stressed’”). And, if her answers to my nosy questions about her private life are anything to go by, presumably she gives her publicist kittens on a weekly basis (ten minutes into our meeting, the gory details of a fiddly kidney/bladder operation are offered as the reason she’s returning to London after two years in New York. I’d have accepted “homesick”).

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SOURCE: women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/fashion/article6852348.ece