From Times Online 26.07.09
Erin Wasson is both grunge goddess and supermodel
America's answer to Kate Moss has more tattoos than a rocker, loves to surf, is a catwalk darling and now she's turned designer
Amy Larocca
Erin Wasson, supermodel, is tanned the colour of burnt caramel and her body is covered in tattoos. “This one here, that’s my Elvis tattoo,” she says, pointing at her forearm. It reads: “Taking care of business.”
She laughs and lights a cigarette from the lighter she wears on a long silver chain around her neck. There are loads of other tattoos: a string of little “earrings” along Wasson’s left lobe, and sayings (“This heart will start a riot in me”, and “Distant traveller” in Hawaiian). There was one on her heel, but it didn’t last. “The underlayer of the epidermis is different,” she explains, nodding her head seriously.
It’s the Elvis one, however, that resonates most with Wasson right now, as she is, on a number of levels, taking care of business, or, rather, businesses. There’s the modelling, of course, but now there’s quite a bit more as well: Wasson is on her way to being the kind of one-namer who defies the usual schedule for a model, a schedule that declares 30 the end of your employable life.
Certainly, at 27, she has had quite a run. “I’ve been the It girl,” she shrugs. “I’ve been really blessed.” Since her father submitted her photo to a television modelling contest 10 years ago, she has opened shows for Gucci and Chanel, and scored a lucrative cosmetics deal. She has already married an artist, moved to a loft, divorced the artist. (There’s a tiny diamond band on her ring finger, but of her current situation, she will say only that “I have a lot of love in my life. That’s the important thing”.) If she were ready to retire to a life of yoga, dive bars and bead work in the new house she has just bought in Austin, Texas, nobody would bat an eyelash. But Wasson is only getting warmed up. “I have a lot of things going on,” she says. “I have to steer my own ship. I have to make it a well-oiled machine.” She drags on her cigarette and narrows her eyes for emphasis. “You know?”
“I’ve always been interested in any medium in which you can express yourself,” she continues. Today, she’s on a break from a Maybelline shoot — she has been a face of the cosmetics giant since 2002 — in a photo studio on Manhattan’s West Side. Inside, Justin Timberlake’s SexyBack is blasting and a crew of people wearing really good glasses and even better jeans are fussing over lights and make-up and a rack of glamorous clothes. But Wasson prefers it outside, on a terrace overlooking the Hudson River, where she can recline in the sun, folding and unfolding her incredibly long, lean limbs.
There’s something of the surfer girl about her, never mind that she’s actually from Texas. She speaks in an Orange County drawl, freely uses words like “righteous”, and is given to rambling stoner monologues about what the island of Maui does for her spirit. (For the record, it does quite a lot.) “I’m a sun freak,” she says. “I need my environmental Prozac.”
The expansion of the Wasson brand began several years ago, when she bought an East Village apartment that turned out to be two floors below the young designer Alexander Wang. “I was in the elevator, and this guy is, like, ‘Oh my God! What are you doing?’ And I’m, like, ‘I just moved in.’ And he’s, like, ‘I’m on the fifth floor.’ And I’m, like, ‘Oh my God! I’m on the third floor.’ So then we just sort of started hanging out, and he would see the way I dress on a daily basis. Then he said, ‘Would you want to style my show?’ I was like, ‘My God, are you serious?’” He was serious, and Wasson, happily, did style his show.
She’d been on the other side long enough to know what to do, and her own sense of style was perfectly honed, and right in line with Wang’s aesthetic, which is culled from the skinny, groovy girls who hang around New York’s NoLita and the Lower East Side: teeny little hot pants, perfectly worn-in T-shirts and, sometimes, a pork-pie hat. She’ll wear sweatpants and high heels, a tuxedo blazer that hangs longer than her denim cutdowns. It’s sexy tomboy style, tough and urban, because Wasson, with her flat chest, narrow hips and a half-pipe in her Los Angeles back yard, is the sexiest tomboy of all.
After two seasons with Wang, Wasson decided to strike out on her own — she was itching to design. “I think it comes from modelling,” she says. “You know, you put on a dress and say, ‘Who is this girl?’ Then you get on set and say, ‘Okay, how do I project this woman? Where has she been? Where’s she going?’ It was up to you to relate some sort of message in a stagnant image. With clothing, and with designing, you’ve got 40 opportunities to project that.”
Through mutual friends, she met the CEO of the cult surf and skating label RVCA. “We’re just on the same page,” she says of herself and the label, “so it was, like, ‘Let’s do something cool.’ The thing about RVCA is that it’s a tribe, at the end of the day. We’re such hippies to think that we’re creating this universal tribe, but that is what it’s about.”
Wasson’s collection consists of floral minidresses, with a potential sweetness roughed up by denim jackets, dripping chains and heavy boots, and T-shirts with terribly slight, but terribly important, design touches such as an extra-deep V neck or asymmetric sleeves. “I think I’ve always appreciated the world of streetwear,” she says. “I was always into the girls that would be running around in jeans and a T-shirt, just effortless, not listening to fashion drums. If you think about surfers, they live on the beach, and I really connect with the nonchalance. I always say the paddle-out’s a b*tch, but the ride’s amazing. It’s a good metaphor for life.”
All of this “nonchalance” is mixed with plenty of savvy: Barneys did so well with the collection that it has asked Wasson to expand, and she has, gladly. She will show the larger collection this autumn in conjunction with Low Luv, the jewellery range she launched after working on accessories at Alexander Wang.
“This season, my colour palette is based on my dog,” she says. “I have a pit bull named Cream, and there’s something about the monochromaticness of the pink around his nose and his coat. That’s kind of where I started with the colour thing. And going back to that whole idea of being on this personal journey, my life, and making so many changes in me, and figuring out where I’m at and where I want to be.
“And, like, sunset. I think people ponder a lot of ideas at sunset. It’s, like, the end of the day, when you sort of reflect on the moments you had. It’s the end of something, and then, you know, sunrise is the beginning of something.”
With that, Wasson stubs out her cigarette and heads inside. She may be a righteous surfer chick, but this Texan model has clearly taken business to heart.
source: timesonline