With her refreshing honesty and undeniable sex appeal, supermodel LARA STONE is infinitely alluring. Famed for her industry-mold-breaking curves, she tells JENNIFER DICKINSON why, post-pregnancy, her attitude to her body has changed.
Meeting Lara Stone is heavy with expectation. Rarely has a model so united the sexes in admiration and this writer is certainly not immune. Why? In part it is the intensity, that challenging gaze; and the disarmingly open nature plays a part, too – see the unending Instagram images of beloved Bert, her Border terrier, for evidence. However, in truth, and though she may well loathe the frequency with which they are mentioned, it is Stone’s delicious curves that so entice. Not to sound inappropriate, but when the Dutch model finally made her high-fashion debut on the cover of Vogue Paris (relatively late, at the age of 22 after six years on the ‘circuit’), the sheer presence of rounded hips and full breasts elicited a strong reaction. Campaigns were booked, editorials were conceived, hearts were won. Here was a woman who looked like a woman. And wow, what a woman.
Finally meeting her, though, is somewhat disconcerting. Wait, hear me out! The Stone of 2014 – post-maternity leave, mid-fitness fanaticism – is a gym-honed, well-toned version of that bodacious blond bombshell. At first glance, clad in her Bodyism gear (Stone has been working with A-list trainer and Bodyism Gym founder James Duigan since her son Alfred was six weeks old), hair scraped back in a ponytail, she appears as youthful as a schoolgirl. Less womanly wiles, more guileless girl.
And yet, your other senses tell you something different. A frequent belly laugh, with a definite dirty edge; the cheeky banter that puts everyone on set on the back foot as they dissolve into laughter, ruining take after take. Meek and mild, Stone is not. Instead she is feisty, frank and very funny. Infinitely appealing. An hour later, Lycra swapped for a loose cashmere sweater and jeans, Stone is more serious. Interviews are clearly not something to be relished. And yet she is charming, not womanly in the sense of coquettish or cozying up for a girlie chat, but very much someone you feel you can trust. She is the antithesis of contrived, open to the point of blunt, and all the more attractive for it. There is no game playing, and why should there be? Stone has nothing to hide and no agenda to push.
The lack of agenda is down to the simplified nature of her work these days. With an exclusive Calvin Klein contract, Stone is not struggling to schedule multiple campaigns. She is also a face of L’Oréal, but again, the requirements of this are entirely manageable compared to the demands of being, say, a Victoria’s Secret Angel. No, Stone is free to pick and choose her projects, play with Bert and hang out with her husband, British comedian David Walliams, and just-turned-one son, Alfred. “On his birthday, I cried the whole day,” says Stone, in a wonderfully dismissive Dutch accent. “When they’re born and just a helpless little blob laid on your chest, they’re so vulnerable and little. And now he’s this huge monster – in the loveliest way.”
Little Alfred is clearly a force to be reckoned with in the Stone-Walliams household. Having quickly made friends with the beloved Bert (a wise move), he is making his presence felt in no uncertain terms. “He doesn’t really say words, but he can make himself understood,” smiles Stone. “He’s very strong-minded and he knows exactly what he wants to do, and if it’s not right he’ll have a huge tantrum. He’s completely hilarious – this little boy, stamping his little foot.” Does she look at him and recognize parts of herself? “Yeah, the tantrums, but I don’t look as cute as him when I do it!”
Stone’s approach to motherhood seems, like her, refreshingly take-me-as-you-find-me. The modeling sisterhood is at times attributed with a certain pressure to give birth as naturally as possible, but Stone employed her endearing dose of realism. “The only thing that should matter is that you and your baby are both healthy – alive, even – by the end of [giving birth],” she points out. “I had friends who were saying they were going to have a water birth, music and candles. I was like, “Who gives a s*** if you had an epidural or a C-section or you just breathed through it? The reward at the end of it isn’t that you can say to your friends, 'I had a natural birth.' Your reward is that you have a beautiful, healthy baby. It’s so sad that people then get depressed and disappointed about ‘failing’.” Not for her, either, the apparently innate grasp of Parenting 101. “You feel so vulnerable after you’ve just had a baby. It’s brand new – they don’t come with a manual! You just have this child and [then it’s], “You have a good day, bye! Off you go!'”
Stone began working again four months after Alfred’s birth. Having struggled during pregnancy with her changing body and the enforced career hiatus, she was nervous yet keen to get back in front of the camera. Enter Duigan and his training methods to get her back in shape. “If it wasn’t for my job, I’m not sure how worried I would have been about the whole thing. During my pregnancy, I wasn’t exercising a lot,” Stone admits. “I was in maternity-wear at nine weeks. I was just eating whatever I wanted; I wasn’t being careful about that at all. I was huge. Maybe in hindsight… No, I don’t give a s***. It was great!”
Stone met Duigan when she was nine months pregnant and he told her to come along to the gym after her six-week post-birth check-up. “He kept poking me in my tummy to make sure that my muscles had gone back together before doing any sort of abs work,” she says. “I felt like I was in a really safe place.”
In the modeling world, when maternity leave begins almost as soon as your pregnancy begins to show, it can feel as though you are out of the picture, quite literally, for a long time. The pressure to rush back into work, though often self-applied, can be intense. “I was ready to do something again,” shrugs Stone, despite admitting that she is only now feeling “back to normal”. “By about nine months [after the birth] I began feeling more normal and I started to fit into my old clothes again, but my body still felt different. My ribs had expanded because Alfred was really high up, so for the longest time I couldn’t fit any dresses higher than my waist.”
She’s keen to state, though, that her new look was not about losing baby weight: “It was about getting healthy. So that’s the eating aspect of things – which I’m not always good at, I go through stages – and then there’s the going to the gym aspect. It’s a whole change in lifestyle. I feel a lot more balanced. My energy is much steadier. I feel stronger and more confident.”
Stone never billed herself as a model with curves or ever championed a more womanly fashion figure. The rest of us may have seen the advantages of a less ubiquitous body shape in the industry, but Stone was just doing her job. So this change, this refining of those feminine attributes, is not a rejection of the voluptuous. In fact, when Stone bounces onto The EDIT’s set the following day in a succession of body-skimming dresses, it is abundantly clear that those curves are still very much present – less exaggerated, but definitely, desirably apparent – and that she is still at the top of her game. Each shot could be a cover, each frame a triumph of genetics – the camera doesn’t just love Lara Stone, it worships her.
The shoot, says Stone, is “right up my street”. “Even though it’s very ’90s, it’s still modern,” she says, before screwing her face up with a, “Oh God, I sound like such a t***”. The partnership with Calvin Klein, then, must be a natural one. “Yeah, I like the simple, clean [aesthetic] and it’s easy to wear. It’s nice to have an option where you can feel feminine and womanly but don’t feel like you have to hunch your shoulders so you don’t see your boobs or suck in your tummy.”
From most models, that could sound disingenuous, but Stone knows exactly what it is like to feel uncomfortable in your clothes. “Everyone’s got arm flab or saggy boobs. It’s the way it is. I’m just trying to accept it right now. And it’s OK, because the things women can do with their bodies are amazing. You have to sit there and really think about it: ‘Oh, I grew this little person’s fingernails in my tummy.’ After that, do you really give a s*** about arm flab? Because I don’t.”
Curves or no curves, Lara Stone is a dream woman, don’t you agree?
