^I'd put the link in my favourites to post and forgot...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,,1813897,00.html
Beyond the frame
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If Modigliani were alive today, model Erin O'Connor would surely be his muse, says Hadley Freeman[/FONT]
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Saturday July 8, 2006
The Guardian
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Last February, I found myself at what I think I can safely describe as the worst fashion show ever. Let's not dignify it by naming the label it was promoting: suffice to say it involved luminous tracksuits and Tara Palmer-Tomkinson and Michael Owen looking understandably bemused up on the catwalk. About halfway through, British model Erin O'Connor appeared, clad in a neon tracksuit and topped with a spiralling designer hat. My first thought was, what on earth is O'Connor doing in this public embarrassment? But this was quickly superseded by a sense of what can only be described as awe at how O'Connor managed to make even this tracksuit look good. She stood on the podium and curved her improbably long body into an S and struck what has to be the most elegant pose ever pulled in a tracksuit.
</IMG>Six months later, O'Connor and I are sitting in a town house in central London and, while her outfit has definitely improved, the gestures are just as dramatic. "I'll often catch myself pulling these shapes in the mirror, but it really isn't deliberate," she says, laughing, curled in a chair in wide-legged jeans and a pretty striped jumper, her arms still swimming outwards dramatically.
Since she was discovered by an agent in 1996 near her hometown of Walsall, O'Connor has been repeatedly compared to an artist's model. "I've been Dali, I've been Kandinsky ..." she says. But more than anything else, she looks like a Modigliani painting made flesh and so, to mark the opening of a Modigliani exhibition in London today, O'Connor agreed to recreate some of his most famous works.
Having such strong looks has not always been easy for O'Connor, and she has plenty of the requisite model stories of it-wasn't-easy-being-so-tall-and-thin-at-school (my favourite is how she spent most of her PE lessons in the bushes trying to find the tennis ball that she always hit too hard, underestimating the power her long arms gave her). Even after finding acceptance in the fashion industry, she has still suffered indignities. One make-up artist generously took the time to inform her that the oft-invoked description "striking" was a way of sugar-coating the word "ugly". I suspect this might be part of the reason she is increasingly modelling only in projects that interest her, namely ones that capitalise on her looks and ask her to assume a character, such as Cleopatra in a recent Christian Dior couture show.
Boyfriends, though, are always going to be an issue when you're over six foot. "I actually grew out of my first boyfriend, which I thought was pretty funny," she smiles. She is inevitably drawn to tall men now, and when talk briefly turns to the World Cup, she suddenly unfurls her long limbs with alacrity and cries out delightedly: "Who's that really tall footballer?" Peter Crouch? "Yeah! Isn't he just great? But I always look at him and wonder - why don't you break?"
· Modigliani And His Models runs from today until October 15 at the Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London W1, 0870 848 8484
Not literally. As Picasso said, "We're all somnambulists." It has to do with a certain mental state in which all deeply inspired artists seem to exist at moments of profound creativity. I see those qualities in Erin. 
