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Erin O'Connor
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From today's G2
www.guardian.co.uk
Standing tall[FONT=Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]
Mocked at school for being 6ft and skinny, today Erin O'Connor is one of the world's leading models and the star of the M&S ad campaign. But in the current backlash against underweight models, she has been singled out for setting a bad example to young girls. That's unfair, she tells Hadley Freeman
[/FONT][FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Hadley Freeman
[/FONT][FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Thursday September 21, 2006
[/FONT][FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]
Guardian
[/FONT][FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]It was unfortunate that the day the very private and rather guarded British model Erin O'Connor agreed to meet for an interview, she was being cited in the press as the harbinger of no end of ills for young women. A couple of days after Madrid Fashion Week announced that it was to ban skinny models from its catwalks, Britain jumped on this undoubtedly worthy but suspiciously headline-grabbing bandwagon, and culture secretary Tessa Jowell announced that London Fashion Week should follow suit. The following day, a newspaper printed a photo of O'Connor to illustrate Jowell's point: models are too thin and fill women with self-loathing and unhappiness.
While there are plenty of models out there who are obviously not getting their three hot meals a day, with her lanky build and androgynous figure, O'Connor, 28, is clearly naturally thin. There is a debate to be had about why being thin seems to be a prerequisite for models, but it might have served the press's purposes better if they had picked a sallow-faced, hollow-eyed frail young thing - of whom there are many to be found on the catwalks - to illustrate their point.
But perhaps it's no surprise O'Connor was chosen, if only because she is one of the most recognisable models in Britain. Her painterly, angular features have made her hugely successful and she has worked for most top designers, from Armani to Versace, though she is probably best known in this country for starring in Marks & Spencer's highly successful current campaign. She is now about to front an M&S financial initiative to lure big-name models to London, who normally give the city's fashion week a miss.
Born and raised near Walsall, where her parents live and to which she returns frequently, yet a favourite among Paris's designers: it is this combination of elegance and normality, glamour and visible intelligence, that has been a major part of her appeal. With the exception of a relatively high-profile relationship with broadcaster Jamie Theakston, O'Connor has always kept her private life just that: no rock star boyfriends ("I know - and I dare to call myself a model . . ."); no drugs ("It's not a moral stance, they're just not me"); and a preference for reading - her favourite book is Wuthering Heights - and seeing her friends. She is currently in a long-term relationship with a television news producer and her cheeks turn pink when talking about their hearty weekend bicycle rides and camping trips. The closest she has come to scandal was last year - not when she was photographed falling drunk out of a nightclub, but when she publicly distanced herself from the diamond company De Beers, for ethical reasons. Even the way she began her career - she was spotted at a Clothes Show event when she was a teenager - has a pleasing smack of normality to it. Her father and mother work, respectively, in a welding factory and a nursery school and, before O'Connor left school at 16 to go into modelling, she was planning to be a schoolteacher. Such a down-to-earth background and attitude is refreshingly unusual in fashion.
When O'Connor arrives in the hotel bar, a very un-Naomi Campbellish 15 minutes early, she looks both wary and weary, yet she is surprisingly happy to engage in the skinny-model debate. "It is a tricky one as it's still really fresh. But it is an important issue, so all opinions welcome," she says. One of the more grating aspects of this whole furore - since Jowell's comments, Stuart Rose, chief executive of M&S, has also weighed in, describing it as "a knee-jerk reaction, using the fashion industry as the focus", and the story hasn't been out of the newspapers since - is that it implies that a woman's weight is the most important thing about her and is the first (and only) quality onlookers notice. The fault here, at least partly, lies with the Heat magazine agenda and the media's obsession with women's bodies, as O'Connor says. "The problem with the press is that no one's a winner: thin women are disgusting and so are fat women. Yes, there's room for debate, but it's not always so simple."
Of course, the fashion world badly needs to widen its scope and start to acknowledge women who weigh more than eight stone. But, O'Connor says, the emphasis here should be on the industry as a whole: "I could handle taking some of the responsibility for this, but what about looking deeper and asking designers and others in the industry [about it], not just the models ... I can only speak from my own experience, but the designers also have a responsibility to look at what's going on and accommodate slightly more to the individual." She has been in several "sticky incidents" herself when even she wasn't able to slip into the catwalk clothes. One time, when she couldn't squeeze into a cinching waistband, the designer noted cattily: "Oh, so you can't fit into the clothes." O'Connor replied, "Well, why don't you make them bigger?"
While it is very easy to vilify the fashion industry, the thinnest women in magazines are no longer the models, but the celebrities. Last week at New York Fashion Week, front row features such as Kate Bosworth and even Demi Moore were notably smaller than the women on the catwalk. "I now look in magazines and I see women half my size," O'Connor says. However, there is no question that models are getting thinner - O'Connor has said in the past that she is often on the bigger side among the new models, in both height and body frame - and this is, she says, because models have been getting younger, with rumours of girls as young as 14 appearing in shoots.
"It amazes me that this hasn't become more of an issue," she says. "These are girls who haven't yet established their boundaries and it's a great responsibility to be a young girl interpreting femininity without having any real-life experience. You can't really identify with them and I guess that's what this whole argument is about - that women can't identify with me, but that's what I find so difficult. I could never identify with the women I saw, and I only recently learned self-acceptance."
O'Connor is strikingly beautiful, with an emphasis on the striking: her facial features are sharp and exaggerated and she is, she points out repeatedly during the interview, very flat-chested. And although willowy androgyny might be desirable to some women today, for a teenage girl growing up with two curvaceous sisters, it was mortifying. She was called Morticia at school and classmates would click their fingers to The Addams Family theme tune when she walked down the hallways. "My teenage years were ridiculous. I desperately wanted a boob job, I desperately wanted a nose job, I constantly had sore feet because I would wear shoes two sizes too small because I couldn't bear to buy my big shoes. But that," she says, warming to one of her favourite themes, "is because I had no perception of how a woman was meant to be and how she was entitled to go with what her version of whatever being a woman was. It was only in my late teens and early twenties, when I started modelling, that I began to appreciate myself." So much so that when she recounts how she recently went to a gay club with her boyfriend and a man chatted her up, having mistaken her gender, she laughs delightedly: "I was hugely flattered! After all, gay men are so picky." In a recent newspaper interview, she said her favourite nickname for herself is "the Nose".
London distinguishes itself among the other fashion capitals for its more avant-garde clothing styles - an aesthetic that is reflected in the models. Britain has produced some of the most successful models working today, such as O'Connor, Stella Tennant, Karen Elson, Lily Cole and, of course, Kate Moss: all beautiful women, obviously, but a far cry from the bland and blonde homogeny one tends to find among models from other countries. Karl Lagerfeld, for example, once criticised Moss for having bandy legs. But it seems as if the British models soon taught the rest of the fashion world to appreciate assymetrical beauty: Lagerfeld has since said how much he wants Moss to model again for Chanel and decreed O'Connor to be "one of the best models in the world". Nevertheless, it is hard to imagine that other countries would have seen their potential from the beginning.
"There isn't this need for aesthetic perfection here, which is a real thrill for a model," says O'Connor. "We don't have to be these homogenous creatures to satisfy someone else's needs. It has never been about, 'Oh look at her perfect glossy hair, her perfect eyebrows.' I would certainly not have done so well or got anywhere near the self-acceptance had I started anywhere else but London."
As if to prove this, almost all of the initial negativity she encountered in the modelling world about her looks happened abroad. "In Los Angeles, in particular, they were baffled and almost annoyed that I had such inner confidence at how my body turned out. Just because they were uncomfortable with the idea that I didn't have breasts, they felt I should be, too," she recalls.
It at first seems a touch ironic that modelling, that most aesthetically fascistic of all industries, gave O'Connor her self-confidence and, to use one of her favourite terms, self-acceptance. "Well, it was only when I was modelling that there wasn't that sense of a need to conform because it was the extremes that people were interested in," she says. "As a model, I felt I was being celebrated for my individuality. Also, I grew up in an era of women when we all suddenly realised we don't live in a female clone society and I began to feel like, 'Oh great! I'm not going to go out and buy a pair of t*ts because I don't need to! That's wonderful! What a positive message! Yee ha, thank God.' But I guess I sensed today that now I'm the negative element to people and that," she finishes quietly, "is very hard."
For all her talk of self-acceptance, there are still some ****** through which the insecure teenager shines through, as proven, perhaps, at how hurt she is by the press criticising her appearance. When I say how different she looks from other models, there is a flicker of annoyance in her eyes and she audibly riles: "Do you think? You see, I don't, I don't, I just don't think like that ..." she trails off. When I later ask how it felt when Anjelica Huston, to whom O'Connor bears a startling resemblance, said to her, "You'll never be pretty but you'll always be magnificent", she rises up defensively: "That was something someone said to her once and she passed it on to me. It wasn't some big statement, it was just kind of, 'Here's a theory for you, honey, and it will get you through your life.'" But how did it feel to be someone who makes their living from their looks being told they weren't pretty? "Well, it happened to her, so it was her experience," she insists. Despite the current anti-skinny vogue, O'Connor clearly feels a great loyalty to, and love of, London. She recently bought a house in south London and, aside from fronting the M&S Scholarship, she is also looking to become more involved with the British Fashion Council to promote London Fashion Week. She is also rumoured to be writing a book, though she squirms a little self-consciously when asked and won't comment. She still obviously feels much affection for the industry which gave her, she says, both her confidence and a voice. Yet when I ask if she would let her daughter be a model, she pauses: "Well, a psychic told me I'd have two sons, so I'll have to get back to you on that one," she says.[/FONT]
www.guardian.co.uk
Standing tall[FONT=Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]
Mocked at school for being 6ft and skinny, today Erin O'Connor is one of the world's leading models and the star of the M&S ad campaign. But in the current backlash against underweight models, she has been singled out for setting a bad example to young girls. That's unfair, she tells Hadley Freeman
[/FONT][FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Hadley Freeman
[/FONT][FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Thursday September 21, 2006
[/FONT][FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]
Guardian
[/FONT][FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]It was unfortunate that the day the very private and rather guarded British model Erin O'Connor agreed to meet for an interview, she was being cited in the press as the harbinger of no end of ills for young women. A couple of days after Madrid Fashion Week announced that it was to ban skinny models from its catwalks, Britain jumped on this undoubtedly worthy but suspiciously headline-grabbing bandwagon, and culture secretary Tessa Jowell announced that London Fashion Week should follow suit. The following day, a newspaper printed a photo of O'Connor to illustrate Jowell's point: models are too thin and fill women with self-loathing and unhappiness.
While there are plenty of models out there who are obviously not getting their three hot meals a day, with her lanky build and androgynous figure, O'Connor, 28, is clearly naturally thin. There is a debate to be had about why being thin seems to be a prerequisite for models, but it might have served the press's purposes better if they had picked a sallow-faced, hollow-eyed frail young thing - of whom there are many to be found on the catwalks - to illustrate their point.
But perhaps it's no surprise O'Connor was chosen, if only because she is one of the most recognisable models in Britain. Her painterly, angular features have made her hugely successful and she has worked for most top designers, from Armani to Versace, though she is probably best known in this country for starring in Marks & Spencer's highly successful current campaign. She is now about to front an M&S financial initiative to lure big-name models to London, who normally give the city's fashion week a miss.
Born and raised near Walsall, where her parents live and to which she returns frequently, yet a favourite among Paris's designers: it is this combination of elegance and normality, glamour and visible intelligence, that has been a major part of her appeal. With the exception of a relatively high-profile relationship with broadcaster Jamie Theakston, O'Connor has always kept her private life just that: no rock star boyfriends ("I know - and I dare to call myself a model . . ."); no drugs ("It's not a moral stance, they're just not me"); and a preference for reading - her favourite book is Wuthering Heights - and seeing her friends. She is currently in a long-term relationship with a television news producer and her cheeks turn pink when talking about their hearty weekend bicycle rides and camping trips. The closest she has come to scandal was last year - not when she was photographed falling drunk out of a nightclub, but when she publicly distanced herself from the diamond company De Beers, for ethical reasons. Even the way she began her career - she was spotted at a Clothes Show event when she was a teenager - has a pleasing smack of normality to it. Her father and mother work, respectively, in a welding factory and a nursery school and, before O'Connor left school at 16 to go into modelling, she was planning to be a schoolteacher. Such a down-to-earth background and attitude is refreshingly unusual in fashion.
When O'Connor arrives in the hotel bar, a very un-Naomi Campbellish 15 minutes early, she looks both wary and weary, yet she is surprisingly happy to engage in the skinny-model debate. "It is a tricky one as it's still really fresh. But it is an important issue, so all opinions welcome," she says. One of the more grating aspects of this whole furore - since Jowell's comments, Stuart Rose, chief executive of M&S, has also weighed in, describing it as "a knee-jerk reaction, using the fashion industry as the focus", and the story hasn't been out of the newspapers since - is that it implies that a woman's weight is the most important thing about her and is the first (and only) quality onlookers notice. The fault here, at least partly, lies with the Heat magazine agenda and the media's obsession with women's bodies, as O'Connor says. "The problem with the press is that no one's a winner: thin women are disgusting and so are fat women. Yes, there's room for debate, but it's not always so simple."
Of course, the fashion world badly needs to widen its scope and start to acknowledge women who weigh more than eight stone. But, O'Connor says, the emphasis here should be on the industry as a whole: "I could handle taking some of the responsibility for this, but what about looking deeper and asking designers and others in the industry [about it], not just the models ... I can only speak from my own experience, but the designers also have a responsibility to look at what's going on and accommodate slightly more to the individual." She has been in several "sticky incidents" herself when even she wasn't able to slip into the catwalk clothes. One time, when she couldn't squeeze into a cinching waistband, the designer noted cattily: "Oh, so you can't fit into the clothes." O'Connor replied, "Well, why don't you make them bigger?"
While it is very easy to vilify the fashion industry, the thinnest women in magazines are no longer the models, but the celebrities. Last week at New York Fashion Week, front row features such as Kate Bosworth and even Demi Moore were notably smaller than the women on the catwalk. "I now look in magazines and I see women half my size," O'Connor says. However, there is no question that models are getting thinner - O'Connor has said in the past that she is often on the bigger side among the new models, in both height and body frame - and this is, she says, because models have been getting younger, with rumours of girls as young as 14 appearing in shoots.
"It amazes me that this hasn't become more of an issue," she says. "These are girls who haven't yet established their boundaries and it's a great responsibility to be a young girl interpreting femininity without having any real-life experience. You can't really identify with them and I guess that's what this whole argument is about - that women can't identify with me, but that's what I find so difficult. I could never identify with the women I saw, and I only recently learned self-acceptance."
O'Connor is strikingly beautiful, with an emphasis on the striking: her facial features are sharp and exaggerated and she is, she points out repeatedly during the interview, very flat-chested. And although willowy androgyny might be desirable to some women today, for a teenage girl growing up with two curvaceous sisters, it was mortifying. She was called Morticia at school and classmates would click their fingers to The Addams Family theme tune when she walked down the hallways. "My teenage years were ridiculous. I desperately wanted a boob job, I desperately wanted a nose job, I constantly had sore feet because I would wear shoes two sizes too small because I couldn't bear to buy my big shoes. But that," she says, warming to one of her favourite themes, "is because I had no perception of how a woman was meant to be and how she was entitled to go with what her version of whatever being a woman was. It was only in my late teens and early twenties, when I started modelling, that I began to appreciate myself." So much so that when she recounts how she recently went to a gay club with her boyfriend and a man chatted her up, having mistaken her gender, she laughs delightedly: "I was hugely flattered! After all, gay men are so picky." In a recent newspaper interview, she said her favourite nickname for herself is "the Nose".
London distinguishes itself among the other fashion capitals for its more avant-garde clothing styles - an aesthetic that is reflected in the models. Britain has produced some of the most successful models working today, such as O'Connor, Stella Tennant, Karen Elson, Lily Cole and, of course, Kate Moss: all beautiful women, obviously, but a far cry from the bland and blonde homogeny one tends to find among models from other countries. Karl Lagerfeld, for example, once criticised Moss for having bandy legs. But it seems as if the British models soon taught the rest of the fashion world to appreciate assymetrical beauty: Lagerfeld has since said how much he wants Moss to model again for Chanel and decreed O'Connor to be "one of the best models in the world". Nevertheless, it is hard to imagine that other countries would have seen their potential from the beginning.
"There isn't this need for aesthetic perfection here, which is a real thrill for a model," says O'Connor. "We don't have to be these homogenous creatures to satisfy someone else's needs. It has never been about, 'Oh look at her perfect glossy hair, her perfect eyebrows.' I would certainly not have done so well or got anywhere near the self-acceptance had I started anywhere else but London."
As if to prove this, almost all of the initial negativity she encountered in the modelling world about her looks happened abroad. "In Los Angeles, in particular, they were baffled and almost annoyed that I had such inner confidence at how my body turned out. Just because they were uncomfortable with the idea that I didn't have breasts, they felt I should be, too," she recalls.
It at first seems a touch ironic that modelling, that most aesthetically fascistic of all industries, gave O'Connor her self-confidence and, to use one of her favourite terms, self-acceptance. "Well, it was only when I was modelling that there wasn't that sense of a need to conform because it was the extremes that people were interested in," she says. "As a model, I felt I was being celebrated for my individuality. Also, I grew up in an era of women when we all suddenly realised we don't live in a female clone society and I began to feel like, 'Oh great! I'm not going to go out and buy a pair of t*ts because I don't need to! That's wonderful! What a positive message! Yee ha, thank God.' But I guess I sensed today that now I'm the negative element to people and that," she finishes quietly, "is very hard."
For all her talk of self-acceptance, there are still some ****** through which the insecure teenager shines through, as proven, perhaps, at how hurt she is by the press criticising her appearance. When I say how different she looks from other models, there is a flicker of annoyance in her eyes and she audibly riles: "Do you think? You see, I don't, I don't, I just don't think like that ..." she trails off. When I later ask how it felt when Anjelica Huston, to whom O'Connor bears a startling resemblance, said to her, "You'll never be pretty but you'll always be magnificent", she rises up defensively: "That was something someone said to her once and she passed it on to me. It wasn't some big statement, it was just kind of, 'Here's a theory for you, honey, and it will get you through your life.'" But how did it feel to be someone who makes their living from their looks being told they weren't pretty? "Well, it happened to her, so it was her experience," she insists. Despite the current anti-skinny vogue, O'Connor clearly feels a great loyalty to, and love of, London. She recently bought a house in south London and, aside from fronting the M&S Scholarship, she is also looking to become more involved with the British Fashion Council to promote London Fashion Week. She is also rumoured to be writing a book, though she squirms a little self-consciously when asked and won't comment. She still obviously feels much affection for the industry which gave her, she says, both her confidence and a voice. Yet when I ask if she would let her daughter be a model, she pauses: "Well, a psychic told me I'd have two sons, so I'll have to get back to you on that one," she says.[/FONT]
Little interview at Vogue/Mulberry party
http://vogue.co.uk/video/player/default.aspx?id=233&category=4
http://vogue.co.uk/video/player/default.aspx?id=233&category=4
the latest marks & spencers pics. 
http://www.marksandspencer.com
and a video of the old commercal..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mC8wMy38KQ8
http://www.marksandspencer.com
and a video of the old commercal..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mC8wMy38KQ8
wheneveriwakeup
a hymn to darkness
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I can't believe Erin doesn't receive more credit for her impeccable taste and style. She puts Kate Moss to shame.
SiennaInLondon
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cosmocat said:
Hey guys, I was wondering if anyone with a Getty account could get these photos of the GAP party off them?
