She's the one
[FONT=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]Bright, funny and beautiful, model turned TV presenter Alexa Chung is Britain's rising It girl. She talks to Laura Barton about fame, fashion and her dream job - discussing books on Radio 4[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Monday March 31, 2008[/FONT]
There is no eggs benedict.
"Oh dear," says Alexa Chung, looking a little green. "I've got a slightly hung-over stomach." What happened, she explains with considerable alacrity, was that last night she was "drinking whisky at the Groucho" with the producers of her new television show. "And they're all really nice, but they can drink ... I got embarrassingly drunk, actually," she adds. "Are we allowed a croissant?"
Chung is a 24-year-old former model turned television presenter, who may be seen most mornings at 7am hosting a music show called Freshly Squeezed for Channel 4. She is also Britain's rising It-girl-in-chief - and looks set to replace former It-girl-in-chief Kate Moss as the face of Rimmel - thanks to her cool-list ubiquity, plethora of television shows, rock star boyfriend (Alex Turner of the Arctic Monkeys), gossip column appearances and jewellery collection (ethical, and skeleton-themed). She has also hosted the Diesel U music awards and the Elle style awards, shows up regularly on the hep-cat site Cobrasnake.co.uk and, as Vogue noted, "took prime position in most of 2007's best-dressed lists".
In person, she wears, not surprisingly, the glow of someone who has recently been handed the keys to the city. And, of course, she is stupidly beautiful. But there is also something pleasantly sprawling about her - the long limbs, the mussed hair, the estuarine straggle of her voice and all of the "likes" that spring up in her conversation like a virulent weed.
Chung grew up in "a quiet sleepy place" in Hampshire. Her mother is English, her father Chinese, she went to state school. It was all, she says "very nice. I had a pony. Called Pippi. I was wondering the other day if he was dead." She frowns. "But I have no way of knowing. We sold him to the butcher." She took ballet classes, too. "Though not," she insists, "in a good way. People who are long [by which she means tall] - everyone's like, they must've done ballet. Well, I can imagine people like Elle Macpherson did proper ballet, but I was really **** at it.
I preferred tap and modern - it's kinda like jazz freestyle dancing, and tap-dancing outfits are amazing - black fishnets and a black leotard. When I was 11 I felt really sexy." As nice as her childhood was, with its ponies and fishnets, she was always itching to leave. "I knew I was going to go and live in London as soon as I possibly could," she says.
She had ambitions to be a photographer or a fashion journalist, and won places on both an art foundation course at Chelsea, and King's College, London to read English, but decided instead to pursue modelling for a while. She is adamant that she will go to university one day. "I definitely will. Because I just don't feel like my education's complete really. I do feel like there's gaps," she says. "It would be great to work really hard for a time and then go and study after that. I don't ever want to stop learning. And I really want to learn French fluently. It would be great to go and live in France." She laughs. "I still do this now, every day I'm like, I wanna be a fashion designer! or I'm gonna be a ... I don't think I've lost being a seven-year-old about professions."
"What's your favourite book, Laura?" she asks, suddenly, and writes down my answer - Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates - in a little Moleskine notebook where she has also, she shows me, drawn a picture of Vladimir Nabokov. "I just haven't read anything for so long," she says wearily. "I have to read scripts. I've been reading a lot of poetry at the moment because I don't have time to read a book. Ted Hughes, he's really good. The one where he's staring at the sea and imaging the sea's his father. What a clever guy!"
She was 16 when she was spotted by a model agency scout, standing in the comedy tent at the Reading festival wearing big skater trousers, and flowers in her hair. "I think it's every girl's dream, a little bit, to be a model because it seems from the outside to be a glamorous industry and I was really into fashion, and I remember just being excited and wanting to be part of that." She grins. "And it was also a little bit of a ****- you to my brothers - when I told them I'd been scouted they were like, 'No you weren't'." They had, apparently, long teased their younger sister for looking like a boy.
The six years she spent modelling largely involved jumping around on trampolines for teen magazines and trips to Puerto Rico for Urban Outfitters, Westlife videos, Tampax adverts and catalogue work in Manchester, which kept her in handbags. "I was always classed as the girl next door, really tomboyish, when I always wanted to be really kitteny." What, I ask, is her best model pose? "Well," she says, "now people are more about chin up, but when I was modelling it was all about chin down, relax your mouth, look up. The other thing is to look stern. I read an article the other day about the new trend for the sacrificial-virgin look. I thought it was really interesting - super-young girls, blonde, really wide-eyed."
She didn't ever do any particularly saucy shoots or lads' mag spreads. "I think I made it quite clear that that really isn't the route I want to go down," she explains, "a) because I don't feel comfortable doing that and b) don't have big t*ts, and also because I think that gives you a certain shelf-life, and I want to be on Radio 4 when I'm older talking about books, and I think if I get my t*ts out now I won't be able to do that later." She looks suddenly earnest, adopts a po-faced tone - she is rather good at voices - and says: "Or I could do it in a post-ironic way. Like 'Yeah, these are my t*ts, I'm proud! Don't look at them though! Not like that!' That makes me laugh," she says, back in her normal voice, "people who are like, 'I'm dressing for myself!' But Rihanna! You're wearing a latex bikini!"
Chung's television debut came in 2006 on the T4 show Popworld. Channel 4 paired her with former MTV presenter Alex Zane to replace the programme's much loved outgoing hosts, Simon Amstell and Miquita Oliver. It was a hard act to follow at first. "I was learning for the first few weeks," she recalls. "I'd get really panicky in the studio environment and start tripping over my words." Arguably Chung's defining moment came when she was dispatched to interview the rock band Panic! at the Disco, asking them, in deadpan tones, about the bottles of "wee" famously thrown at them when they played at the Reading festival and correcting their grammar. The band did not respond well. "Definitely an interesting interview," she notes. "I'm a bit gutted though because I thought they had split up, but they've got a new song out."
Her next show will be a music and comedy programme for BBC3 called The Wall, which she will co-host with the comedian Rhys Thomas. She is also soon to be seen in an ethical fashion documentary, and another fashion show "which would be more like Top Gear but with clothes ... asking models if they'd eaten anything that day, that sort of thing." For the time being, she can be seen hosting a show called Vanity Lair, which she describes as "classic hangover TV" and which pitches against one another 10 contestants who all consider themselves to be flawlessly attractive.
The It-girl tag arrived with remarkable speed, though it is perhaps not so surprising when one considers the good looks and sense of humour, and the fact that her taste is impeccably hip: she talks of loving Chloë Sevigny and going to see the Larry Clark exhibition and the compilation she recently made for a friend which included "lots of Shangri-las and Ronettes and Shirelles, and bands like that" and of how she "can't stop listening to Roy Orbison at the moment". She has a stylist, Steph Stevens from ElleGirl, who helps her choose clothes for television shows: "But in all the pictures you see in the papers I've chosen my clothes. People are **** when they deny they have a stylist, but she hasn't changed how I dress. She literally has the discount cards. And she got me into stripes." Today she is wearing a miniskirt and a shruggy kind of top and two necklaces. Her legs are bare and far, far away on her feet she wears a pair of platform heels. The hair, once longer and more 60s yé-yé girl, is now messily bobbed.
How many invitations does she get each evening? "Hmm," she muses. "There's three tonight. And it's a wide range - one's like an art gallery thing, one's a Mulberry party and the other one's a friend's birthday, a party party. But d'you know what? Recently I've been staying in because I've been working so much that I can't do my job properly and be hung over. So I'm sorry," she adds, "that I'm hungover today. Plus I don't want to shove my face down everyone's throat. Because I always got bored with reading Heat and Hello! seeing the same faces around. I don't want to look like I'm ..." She flounders a little. "I dunno, I hope it doesn't look like I'm desperate for the ..." She shuffles in her seat. "I don't want to be famous for going out."
But it must be quite thrilling, all the same. "Mmm," she says, "you can't deny that it is exciting when it first happens to you and you're walking down the street and there's cameras flashing. It's weird. And you can see why people like Britney Spears get addicted to the rush of it. But then it gets kind of intrusive and if you wanted to go out somewhere nice with your boyfriend or whoever, you start to get paranoid that someone's going to write about where you are. But then again you can't court it and then, you know ..."
It hasn't been too intrusive so far, however. "I know quite a lot of them [paparazzi] now, and if they ask for one picture you're like, yeah. It's when they don't ask that it can be annoying."
At other times they can be quite kind, she says, and recalls an incident at the NME awards when she had food poisoning and they asked for her photograph, "And I said sorry, I'm really ill, and they didn't hound me. Which was really nice. Though I did actually have sick down my dress so they probably didn't want a picture of that. Down my Charles Anastase dress. Sorry, Charles. Do you want this back? Didn't think so."
The sick-down-dress episode was widely reported in the tabloid press, with many papers claiming not only that Chung's illness was the result of a little too much to drink, but also that she vomited on Turner. "Well I wasn't sick on Alex," she says grumpily. "That was really unfair." What other stories have irked her? "There was a really upsetting one when Alex had written me a Valentine card and I had accidentally left it in a bar. And someone sold it to the Sun and then they printed it, and they changed it so it didn't look like a Valentine card, and they just said it was a love letter. They slated him for being really soppy.
"Look, it's my boyfriend and it's Alex. Of course it's gonna be written like a story."
Was he peeved? "He was really cool with it," she says, "and he said, 'I'm not upset that everyone saw it because that's the truth and I couldn't give a ****.' And then he went [Chung dons a comedy northern accent], 'Eh, but at least you've got a copy of it now, eh?'"
Chung's private life has been picked over quite thoroughly in the last couple of years, her romantic interludes and friendships proving the source of much showbiz tittle-tattle. She seems to be taking it with a pinch of salt: "Can you write about Team Evil?" she asks. Team Evil, she explains, consists of Chung and her closest female friends, including the Los Angeles band the Like, the model Valentine Fillol-Cordier and Kelly Osbourne. "They're like the hottest collection of girls ever!" she declares.
"And they're evil. We're having some Team Evil Awards, awarded for how many hearts you've broken in the year. Like the New Member Award - we're going to give to Agy [the model Agyness Deyn] because we're trying to recruit her at the moment. But we're not sure that she's a heartbreaker, because she's too nice. She doesn't look evil. We made T-shirts," she rattles on, "and they've got Lolita sunglasses with Team Evil written on them - you have to be obsessed with Nabokov to be in Team Evil." She is quite breathlessly giddy.
Does she perhaps ever get caught up in it all? In the paparazzi and the parties and the Nabokov T-shirts? "It's very difficult if you're in the middle of something to see it clearly," she admits soberly, "and I don't have any idea of what it looks like from the outside or how I'm perceived. But I live in a room the size of a pea in east London with my flatmates, and so I'm always reminded of what it all means."
And though she undoubtedly has a splendid career ahead of her, just how long will it be before the backlash begins? How long can the It girl reign? "Um," she says, with a shrug, "just as long as you're in fashion for." There is a shake of the bob, a smirk to the lips: "I'm sure there'll be some new whippersnapper coming up pretty soon, with a new snappy new haircut, and wearing Marni, and vintage T-shirts".
