Polly Vernon meets Erin O'Connor




It doesn't matter how carefully you prepare yourself to get a face-to-face encounter with Erin O'Connor , you inevitably be a little gob-smacked once you're actually confronted with her. You'll be able to know, theoretically, that they stands 6ft 4in in heels, that she's a whip-thin streak of angular, linear hauteur. That her face is dominated by her unapologetically large nose, the feature she once loathed, once saw regularly air-brushed into place by unaccommodating art editors; the feature she now credits as her signature, because the making of her. But understanding the theory, and confronting the flesh reality, isn't same.Live, Erin O'Connor is formidable. Heart stopping, breathtaking, overwhelming. Anjelica Huston once informed her: 'You'll not be pretty, but you'll often be magnificent,' also it was fair comment.Erin O'Connor's magnificence is now the main focus of some celebration. She's been a phenomenally successful model for some years. She's a niche power, a title, a top-of-the-wish-list fixture for designers fantasy-planning their runway shows. She's been the face and Modigliani-referencing form of Chanel, Givenchy, Versace,Interiors: Off the beaten track, Dolce & Gabbana, Gucci, Armani, Gaultier. 'She isn't simply a model,' raves Jean Paul Gaultier, 'She is very art. She actually is like theatre. She actually is extraordinary inspiration.I ought to wish to be with her daily.'Her first published pictures - a Juergen Teller have a 1996 issue of i-D - launched an entire other way of being beautiful. They referred to it as 'freak chic'; they talked about her 'imperfect beauty', resulting in her 'mass of imperfections define a great whole'. The illustrator David Downtown made her his muse. 'She is among the greatest models working today,' claims Karl Lagerfeld. 'Her face is like a Roman vase - not just a standard beauty, but a contemporary anti-beauty.'But, recording, Erin O'Connor's profile was cranked up a notch, and her magnificence was recognised and embraced by a wholly new audience. In March 2003, she featured in a three-part Channel 4 documentary called This Model Life. The digital camera followed her as she worked out her business in The big apple and in Paris, and back again. Crucially, and against all the odds - as the signs were that This Model Life really should have been the best in stitch-up doc - Erin was exposed as the strangest of things. A laid-back, straightforward, warm, emotionally functional, stupendously successful model. A jet setter along with a pragmatist. An interesting, sweet, razor-smart 25-year-old who likes her lifestyle greatly, but isn't impressed by it and expect anybody else to get; who likes just how she looks and the money it can make on her behalf, but who may never have thought it was it is important on earth.Today, Erin is perched around the extreme fringe of an upholstered stool inside the bedroom of her preferred suite at Claridge's. She's wearing a whopping brocade strapless dress which flares out and finishes just above her knees, and swishes round her when she walks her million pound-generating power walk into the toilet, and then back out again. Her shoulder-length Cleopatra-styled hair lies poker straight against her head. Her legendary alabaster skin just isn't quite as alabaster.'Sorry, sorry, just wanting to do something about my spots,' she says. She actually is attacking her chin with concealer. She hasn't slept for 48 hours, she's got a chilly, she's flown from London to New York and back within the last day-and-a-half, she's taken some painkillers coupled with some champagne and it's all playing havoc together with her skin, she explains. In three hours, she has to get on stage for her first-ever presenting gig, compering a modelling competition at Topshop. She's only received her script. But she doesn't mind. 'I don't mind,' she says.Therefore, before you've recovered through the initial impact from the Magnificence, so as to you collide full on with Erin O'Connor's intense, instant human-ness. It's unavoidable. It's in her big, lolloping comedy gestures. She's got an John Cleese-ish slapstick physicality about her. She does double thumbs-up a whole lot. She throws her gangly limbs about, she waves her hands. 'I think this is because I have got such a long span,' she says, opening her fingers and stretching her arms in demonstration. 'Whatever I really do, stuff which I think over the internet is subtle, happens massively exaggerated. To make sure: "Hello! This i am!"'It's in their perspective. After seven years available, she's not jaded about her profession, nor is she deluded. 'It's a passion. I seriously, revel in working the clothes. Especially the monsters.' And: 'My job is usually to sell clothes to very wealthy women.'And it's in Chris. Chris is her cousin, that has dropped for that night. A sweet, shambolic 19-year-old art student with a Black Country accent and Strokes hair that has got just how it's got because he's having a competition with his friends never to make the grade. 'I think I'm her entourage,' he states.Erin O'Connor: the nice and cozy, accessible, artlessly charming, take-your-cousin-along-for-the-ride, human face of your industry that's all about aloof, distance, elitism, exploitation, body fascism, shallow and gloss. This is her brand-new public persona. She's the officially nice face of fashion.How does that feel?'It's weird, being labelled on a regular basis. But they do similar to their categorisations, don't you think, the press?'Well, yes, we do. How many other labels are we given her?'Lager lout and obsessive McDonald's eater. They liked that one, ahead of time. Working-class girl goes from Birmingham on the catwalk. They still that way one. However don't mind. I've learnt that's what the press like to do: place us.'Erin O'Connor isn't from Birmingham. She's from Walsall, although she's only got the faintest trace of your accent. She knew growing up two sisters, one older, one younger, and her mum and foundry-worker dad, whose working-class roots are actually talked up within the name of facilitating categorisation. She was obviously a weird- looking kid. They called her Morticia at school. And Witch Fingers. 'Of course it absolutely was difficult, with my nose how big Concorde and my feet and my height and my lack of breasts,' she says. 'All the ladies around me were petite and getting boobs and bums and boyfriends. I was just vastly growing out of hand. And I think that when you might be growing like this, out of hand, it stops your mind developing in a way. You stay very young. When you find yourself physically we were young, you develop emotionally achievable. However i only agreed to be growing.' It made her unbelievably shy, she says. She didn't speak, 'literally, for 10 years'.The very first time I met Erin O'Connor - actually, the only real other time I ever met Erin O'Connor - was in the NEC's annual rag-trade bash, The Clothes Show Live, in 1996. She was an utterly fledgling model, i was obviously a hapless 24-year-old PR for teen clothing emporium Miss Selfridge. The organization was in the throes of launching a grand model-hunting extravaganza in association with Models 1. For reasons uknown, and despite being completely unqualified, I used to be doing Erin's make-up on the small stage that fronted the store's exhibition stand. A bunch of target demographic teens were ranged about us, looking on inside a suspicious fashion. We smiled at each other a lttle bit, however i do not think we spoke. Erin had very long, very straight, very heavy hair, plus a brace, and she was indeed excruciatingly shy. She didn't seem particularly magnificent, either. Relatively, she forced me to be feel developed and composed and like I knew things i was doing, possibly initially inside my life. She was, she now informs me, moments from making her catwalk debut. 'And I had been terrified. And many types of I knew was there are boys during my class there. And I had to work a feather boa. And there was this one boy, and his awesome name was Stefan and I is at love with him, and there he was, i was required to work a feather boa!'O'Connor had been scouted with the previous year's NEC event by Models 1's Ellis, model spotter extraordinaire. Until that moment, she hadn't seriously considered one. 'No, no, no, no, no. I want to to become ballerina.' She'd attended the NEC with your ex friend Michelle Smith and it had been raining, and her mascara had run.But as she and Michelle skulked around the exhibits, Ellis pounced.That which was her opening gambit?Erin drops her voice an octave or two, and looks at me intensely. 'I'm not being funny or anything, but you are you a model?' It's a very accurate imitation.And what do you say?She squeals. 'Oooooh, my goodness! No! No! Me? And needless to say, when I had been spotted, I had been directly on it. On the point that Used to do want to do it. Even when it had not been really my own belief. It's like wow! Physical acceptance! This really is unbelievable!'Erin's rise was not stratospheric. She continued with school for quite a while, took the National Express around to London once per week before eventually packing in their A levels and moving to London fulltime. She didn't, however, land lots of work. 'And we tried every avenue.' She took endless Avon castings, nonetheless they 'didn't even want my hands'. She thought often times about quitting. 'Not because of a specific moment, as a result of another thing that anyone said, although obviously lots of people said plenty of hurtful things. More because I used to be thinking: am i allowed to do that? Could it be braver just to walk away?' But she began to grab catwalk shows, which she found easy, as a result of ballet training. 'Walking in heels felt being a holiday after points.' She also found the runway empowering. 'That's where I found my freedom, that is certainly still where my biggest feeling is, when I'm on stage.'Erin's big break came a couple of years after she'd started modelling in earnest. She was 20-ish, plus Brazil, with photographer David Sims and hairdresser Guido, on a Harper's Bazaar shoot. She decided to get her hair cut off.'And that's my liberation,' she says. 'They checked out me, plus they were all similar to this and that way, lifting my hair, and so they went: Well? Is there a problem to accomplish? And i also sat there and said: Make the grade off. Plus it was a real release. I found my femininity initially, really and truthfully and genuinely, my personal version than it. It absolutely was like: Oh, here' am! It was sensational, that buzzer getting larger the rear of my head. And, needless to say,gucci outlet, which was it.' She clicks her fingers. 'It all went crazy.'O'Connor's appeal has endured and intensified since. Her looks are extremely not of-the-moment, so unprecedented and unspecific, they haven't limited her. They've made her rich. 'Am I insanely rich? Hmm. Depends which team you ask.' They provoke strong reactions, either rapture or rejection, which, she thinks, helped her to detach from their website a little bit, and to work out how she felt about them. And, just as one added bonus, also, they are improving as time goes on. 'My looks make more sense when i age,' she says. 'My age is by using me.'Erin O'Connor's our life is a good one, and she will not make any apology correctly. 'I would say I live half in The big apple and half in Claridge's. How decadent! How hysterical!' She hangs using the glossy modelling set, Sophie Dahl and Bay Garnett, etcetera and such like. 'Well, We have two teams of friends in each city,Louis Vuitton Outlet, but also, this also is actually nice, We've friends who travel around with me at night.'Her younger sister Clare shares her new apartment with your ex, the best part of Manhattan property O'Connor bought relatively cheaply inside the post 9/11 property crash. She's for each other, having a set designer called Jack, that's shorter than her. They've been together for two main years. He'll be getting into the Manhattan apartment, too, soon. 'Wow. The very first time I've endured anyone.'There's not a lot of angst about O'Connor, although she's not new to personal demon-slaying activities. Her long-term best ally, model Karen Elson, with whom she bonded very in early stages, recently wrote extensively about her eating disorders. 'She was always very quiet about this [whenever we shared a flat]. However was there when she was writing it, in The big apple. To be with her, I think it was a relief. She's been through everything now. And she's okay. She actually is all right.'There are chinks in O'Connor's essentially flawless persona of sweetness and ordinariness. She can overplay the grounded-girl card. And sometimes she forgets to try out it all together. She says, for instance, that they hoped the Channel 4 documentary might 'put across what exactly we do to tons of people, especially normal people, or things i would class being "normal" people, who don't know anything about fashion'. It is a statement with a touch from the Liz Hurleys about it - Hurley famously described the non-celebrity classes as civilians, that the famous are stored on leading distinctive line of life.But while you might object a bit in theory to this kind of thing, although you will find it a touch disingenuous when someone as eloquent as O'Connor falls back on empty platitudes, you do not actually mind very much when she's prior to you, waving her gangling arms about, laughing her good, strong laugh.She's got no wish to throw in the towel modelling, but she does do other items. She's writing. She loved the process of causeing this to be Model Life. Prime-time TV exposure is different things, she says. She would have been a question on The Weakest Link people these days recognise her now. A female came up to her recently and said: 'I saw your self on telly yesterday looking as shagged then while you do now,' and she or he belief that was brilliant. Less brilliantly, the much-celebrated revelation that Erin takes the amount of money offered her for first-class travel, downgrades to Economy, and banks the difference, will, she thinks, limit her the possiblility to pull the identical trick again. 'Why did I have faith that that?' she asks. 'What was I thinking about?'Erin O'Connor's entire life may be directed incidentally she looks. Her character may be substantially informed by it. She's entirely likeable precisely correctly, and never, perhaps you might expect, regardless of it. How strange. But maybe when you find yourself expected to confront the fall-out of that face which body each day, and needed to process other's extreme reactions nearer, it begins to make sense.And, whatever else, Erin O'Connor is actually at peace together with her imperfect beauty. 'It's a relief,' she says, like it's quite decreasing part of the globe. 'How awful becoming a perfect beauty! How confusing! God. Could you imagine?'