Laura Bailey

[Lady Bird]

I stood next to Laura on the w/end in a off licence on kensington church street buying a pack of ciggies ... she looked absolutely divine. Wearing duck egg blue 50's style skirt, red cropped jacket and the most lust-worthy white chanel quilted bag and holding a big bunch of flowers. No sign of the kid
I've seen her lots of times, but she looked even thinner than usual and very drawn with dark rims around her eyes

 

[raphaella]

yeah i saw her on saturday with her baby who was sooo cute and she looked v thin with fab sunglasses and coat on. she was sitting right round the corner from where sienna lives

 

[skim_hazelnut_latte]

 

[skim_hazelnut_latte]

 

[skim_hazelnut_latte]

 

[cosmocat]

^Thanks for those. This is just a piece of fluff but never mind. www.femalefirst.co.uk

Laura Bailey the equally stunning other half of The FACE of BAA chats about travel essentials and why BAA airport stores are one of her Top Essentials as a frequent traveller.



How often do you fly - to where, from where I fly so often, every couple of weeks or at least once a month. So I'm in and out of Heathrow all the time, travelling to New York or a quick jaunt to a European city such as Paris or Rome. I usually have a couple of long haul holidays once or twice a year too.



How much time do you allow before check in - do you get there early or not I always plan to give myself a couple of hours at the airport to relax before my flight, indulge in a little shopping and just wind down before I travel. That's the plan but sometimes I do end up racing through check-in and regret not having the time to enjoy the time at the airport.



What do you do between check-in and departure

Shopping is a priority of course but I always have something to eat and drink before I get on the flight and just take a little time to relax.


How do you pack - light, everything? Carry on bags only, lots checked in? What do you include in your hand luggage? I usually try to pack as little as possible to check-in - make sure what I take works really hard for me so I have quite a minimalist approach to packing. That isn't always possible and certainly not now with a baby! I now need to take everything - I pack twice as much for baby Luc as for me!!

My hand luggage is my in-flight essentials - moisturiser and lip balm are absolute necessities, I love Crème de la Mer as it's really rich in the dehydrating cabin atmosphere and my Lancome Juicy Tube (I like the Melon shade) is both pretty and moisturising. Then my ‘entertainment', I don't travel without my iPod (I love the new iPod Shuffle) and when I'm at the airport I always pick up a couple of paperback novels and stock up with fashion magazines.





Luggage - type and brand My favourite suitcase is a blue and white Prada one which just holds everything and I always take my Marni hand luggage, favourite handbag at the moment has to be Chanel.





Travel tips - planning, packing, mid flight activities, stuff you couldn't travel without Having time to plan is such a rare luxury but as I travel so often I have my own little routine: as far as packing goes I try to be as minimalist as possible, I used to take so much with me and not use half what I packed so I try to have a streamlined approach with a few favourite bits and treats such as luxurious perfumed bath oils (insert brand).

No matter how minimalist I try to be I couldn't travel without my camera, books and music -so I've things to read and listen to on the flight and at my destination. I also watch the in-flight movies and sometimes even use the flight time to catch up on my writing and draft an article..

Suitcase contents/'can't-travel-without' essentials



My capsule wardrobe:

• Bikini (Accessorize)
• Sundress (LK Bennett)
• White vests (Quiksilver)
• Running gear (Nike)
• Underwear (Agent Provocateur)
• Denim mini skirt (French Connection)
• Flip flops (Accessorize)
• Camera (Dixons)
• Notepad and pen (Smythson)
• Make-up - again I favour a minimalist approach a Lancome mascara and Chanel palette
• Sunhat and sunscreen (Lancome suncreen)

Pre-holiday beauty tips - treatments and products

A Thai Yoga massage to completely relax before travelling is a real treat. Manicure and pedicure are essential, strong colours look great with a tan (I'm particularly fond of a coral shade by Estee Lauder at the moment)

Clinique Sparkle Skin exfoliator before sunbathing ensures my tan lasts and Lancome sunblock gives me both the UVA and UVB protection to tan safely



Favourite shops - airport, highstreet, overseas boutiques

• Chanel at Heathrow for great savings
• Barneys in NY
• NikeTown

Best thing about shopping at the airport

Travelling always feels like a bit of a treat so I might splurge on something special or stock up on more practical necessities, plus a couple of hours of shopping just ‘me' time is a rare luxury. I love to browse through all the fabulous stores at the airport, it's a real pleasure.

I also love the fact that if you buy at the airport when flying to Europe and have shopped, you can leave your purchases at the airport if need be and collect on your return!



Favourite products:

• CDs - Damien Rice, The Strokes
• Books - Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Philip Roth
• Magazines - Vogue
• Fragrance - Chanel No 19
• Beauty products (inc suntan lotion) - Lancome suncare, mascara and juicy tubes lip gloss, Chanel for the rest of my cosmetics
• Travel bag - Chanel
• Bikini/beachwear - Prada, Chanel or Heidi Klein bikini and cotton kaftan over the top (Temperly if I'm choosing a designer piece but Liberty has some gorgeous printed ones too)
• Flip flops - I've a favourite pair of Hairanas but I love the great new collection at LK Bennett
• Sunglasses - Gucci or Chanel, World Duty Free has a wonderful selection of designer brands
• Accessories (bag, watch, jewellery) - Chanel watch Dream holiday - beach, sightseeing, citybreak, sporty, partying
  
  For a beach trip it has to be Bali, I love the sights of Paris and a for classic city break (mix of sightseeing, food, culture) Rome is a real favourite. If I'm looking to party, New York would be my destination of choice!
  
  Favourite holiday memory
  
  
  
  So many amazing memories - I particularly remember learning to scuba dive in Zanzibar and the Parrot Cay Hotel in Turks and Caicos is wonderfully romantic..,/p> Top 5 destinations
  
  Rome, New York, Vietnam, India, Ireland
  
  What do you eat/drink at the airport, pre-during travel
  
  A pret a manager sandwich and a cup of tea or a glass of champagne in the lounge
  

 

[a984mel]

i love her style, but i could never pull it off, would feel overdone. but I really love how she doesn't conform, and wears beautiful coats and tights with dresses on the red carpet. it looks great

 

[skim_hazelnut_latte]

 

[blondebella]

candid pics

hi there - great site and thread on one of my favourite stylish people.
I can't post pics but here's a couple of great sites with images of ms bailey.
there's a few candid pics of her at starfacephoto.com here's the link http://62.23.125.151/wimsol_starface/ go to access visiteur and search for her name
Other agencies: olycom.it
xposurephotos.com
topixx.com
There's a few of her pushing her bugaboo but unfortunately none of baby luc.
I remember a spread of her house in an old issue of Vogue or Elle - don't supose anyone has a copy of it they could scan and post?

 

[AnaisF]

her boobs went huge in her pregnancy!
blondebella, thanks for the sites, i'll go check them out!
why can't you post pics? sorry for asking.
oh, and welcome to tFS!
i have the issue of Vogue with that in, so i'll look for it and get my scanner working. i have loads of candids of her from old Vogues.

 

[FashionFix]

I have not heard of her before now. She has great style! Even pregnant--looking fabulous!

 

[AnaisF]

yeah! she's great

 

[blondebella]

hey anaisf - that'd be unreal! I've been looking for AGES for that vogue spread!

I can't post cause I have no idea how to! am completely clueless!
wireimage also has some recent pics of her - and brunopress.nl is another good one for celeb images

 

[blondebella]

thanks anaisf - that'd be unreal if you could. I've been searching for that mag for AGES! Which issue is it?
I can't post pics cause I have no idea how to! I'm so clueless.
A couple of other sites for great celeb pics are wireimage.com and brunopress.nl.
happy searching x

 

[blondebella]

right - seems I'm also clueless on how to use these damn forums! Apologies for the double-up. it didn't appear to work the first time.

 

[skim_hazelnut_latte]

Pics that accompany the travel article (hello magazine

 

[cosmocat]

I love that there are other fans of Laura on this site, seeing as she isn't very famous.
Some random photos...

www.cover.es

www.olycom.it (thanks for the link blondebella)
And in the attrachment, www.mediumphoto.com

 

[AnaisF]

thanks anaisf - that'd be unreal if you could. I've been searching for that mag for AGES! Which issue is it?
I can't post pics cause I have no idea how to! I'm so clueless.
A couple of other sites for great celeb pics are wireimage.com and brunopress.nl.
happy searching x

I’ll go look for it in a minute. I hope it’s the one you’re after, and if not, sorry!



Thanks for all the new pics! I love her on her motorbike!

 

[blondebella]

interview

found this recent interview with her for the fans
Laura Bailey has clearly never read those warning diatribes from disillusioned superwomen who claim it's impossible to have it all. So far, she seems to be making a pretty good job of it: she's got two glamorous careers running in parallel as an international model cum globetrotting travel writer; a multimillionaire partner, absurdly successful producer Eric Fellner (the other half of Working Title Films with Tim Bevan), and now a three-month-old son, Luc. In fact, she is juggling her life so successfully that it's easy to forget she has a new baby. Sometimes, she confesses, she forgets, too.

On the day Luc was born at 3am, she took Fellner out for a sandwich a deux at a cafe near the hospital 'I hate feeling cooped up,' she explains. Three weeks later, she was back down to a size eight and celebrating at the Evening Standard British Film Awards.

'A friend told me I'd be back to my normal dress size within a week or two,' she says casually.

'I laughed at her, but she was right. I barely looked in the mirror and when I did it was, oh yeah, back to normal. It wasn't really an issue.' She drags the orange Celine dress she has been wearing over her blonde ringlets, offering a confirmatory glimpse of smooth, perfectly flat, tanned tummy as she does so, and flings on her own outfit, a rather eccentric ensemble of electric green Ghost sundress over a black turtleneck jumper. Firmly, she switches off her mobile phone. What if there's a baby emergency?

'I'm sure Luc's having a perfectly lovely time in the park,' she says briskly. 'Much nicer for him than being cooped up in here with a lot of strangers. It's not like I can't breathe without him.' There would be something a little unnerving about such insouciance if one didn't suspect it was a facade masking Laura's intense desire for privacy. I bet she's a mass of new-mother jitters, but she's got no intention of revealing anything so personal. 'I'd like to be much more mysterious and enigmatic than I actually am,' she says, sighing. 'I relish the thought of no pictures, no nothing' It's a strange position for a model to take but then Laura has never been a run-of-the-mill clotheshorse.
​

She first hit fame in 1994 when she was spotted climbing over a wall at Richard Gere's London home. She was 22 and he was 45 and still ostensibly happily married to Cindy Crawford.

From being a relatively obscure model, working for Italian Glamour magazine and appearing in Primal Scream videos, Laura was catapulted on to front pages all over the world. The relationship fizzled out, but ten years later she's still top of the tree; she was the face of Jaeger and Helena Rubinstein last year, and is working for Clairol now. 'But I'm not going to give you a list of my clients,' she says. Why not? 'It's too tacky.' It's an attitude that reflects her academic upbringing. Laura is the daughter of Gwen, a lawyer, and Professor Peter Birks, the late Regius Professor of Civil Law at the University of Oxford and Fellow of All Souls.

She was brought up with her brother Ben in a rambling country house in the Oxfordshire village of Wheatley and her early childhood seems to have been a Blyton-esque idyll. 'I wanted to be an astronomer,' she recalls. 'I was obsessed with space, I used to rush out to look at the stars.' But when she was five years old, her parents divorced doubtless with some bitterness, since her father didn't mention his first family in his Who's Who entry.

It was clearly devastating for Laura, to such a degree that she now shies away from any discussion of her childhood. 'When your absolute hero your father doesn't come back, it's really frightening, whatever age you are,' she once said.

Was it an enjoyable childhood? A long pause.

'Yeah' she says reluctantly. 'I definitely had fun, I had wonderful friends and a big extended family. I've got lots of steps and halves.' Did they get on? 'I don't think anyone can ever generalise with a very complicated situation involving three families. You can't say we all got on but, in the end, things all work out. Having a child of my own, I realise that everybody did their best at the time,' she says.

After attending the local comprehensive where, as well as being top of the class, she was a 'seriously violent' hockey player (she still has the scars on her shins to prove it), she went to Southampton University where she got a first in English (special subject: images of women in Victorian art and poetry).

When she graduated, she was planning a career in academia, the theatre or journalism, but was spotted by a model agent walking down the King's Road and signed up for what she thought would be a lucrative summer job.

To her surprise, she found that modelling was not only good money but that she enjoyed it. She still does, she says. 'I love the collaboration and the relationships with stylists and makeup people. I'm not that interested in seeing any more pictures of myself ever again but I do enjoy the process, the dressing-up game of it all, and I genuinely love fashion and telling a story.

It's certainly not like, oh God, another boring day in the studio' Her family, so the story goes, were not nearly so accepting of her decision.

It's widely believed that the coolness between Laura and her father stemmed from her chosen career, a lifestyle choice he despised.

'The day that Laura went into modelling was the saddest day of my life,' he announced.

'That's completely misinterpreted,' says Laura uncomfortably, but won't say more as her father died of cancer last summer and the family's wounds are still fresh.

She has admitted that her parents' divorce is 'probably a huge part of all the relationships I have had with men'. And when she met Richard Gere, then twice her age, at a party in honour of the Dalai Lama, the attraction was immediate.

What Laura didn't expect was the massive press interest. 'It was very weird.

I was relatively naive; but I knew who he was and the hassle he had had in his life. But it was bloody annoying at the time. I'm sure my phone was tapped.' She shudders. 'Ugh!' Almost as annoying was being catapulted to fame as a film star's arm candy. 'I'm ruthlessly independent and the idea of being labelled as somebody's girlfriend, especially when I was young and trying to do my own work, was anathema to me.' So she left London for New York 'It made sense to get out of the goldfish bowl.' She rented an apartment in a brownstone in the West Village, hung out with Sophie Dahl, rode her fleamarket bike to photographers' studios and 'somewhere backwards and forwards between London and New York' met the forty-something Fellner.

Talk of her 'boyfriend' brings her jitters to the fore again. Laura never mentions his name, as though this might somehow preserve the mystery of his identity. They have been together for several years, certainly since she moved back to London four years ago. At first Laura lived in her own Notting Hill flat; she's now moved in with Fellner but otherwise it seems that having a child has had no effect on her reluctance to be seen as someone's appendage.

She calls herself an 'independent working girl with a mortgage', which is curious given she's just had a baby by a multimillionaire. Isn't he supporting her at all? 'No!' she says, highly indignant, adding hastily, 'It's just the way I am.

I've always worked, it's the way I like it.' Friends hint that the couple's relationship has been stormy in the past. But Laura says, 'I'm happier than I've ever been, and I'm not leaving him, put it that way.' Would she consider marrying? She bursts into roars of embarrassed laughter. 'Oh God, I can't bear the idea of my boyfriend seeing this in print. He hasn't asked me, absolutely not. God. To be honest, I would consider it, yes, but am I sitting waiting to be asked, no.' Given the traumas of her own upbringing, she must be concerned not to inflict a broken home on her own son. 'I'm sure that's true of absolutely everybody who ever has a baby, not just a child from a broken family. Nobody has a child without hoping that more than anything. But I know there are no guarantees. I'm amazed at how natural motherhood is, and how vulnerable and tough Luc seems at the same time. I'm really trying not to worry if things go wrong,' she says.

Perhaps it's a trick of the light, but her saucer eyes seem to fill up at this point. 'I'm not overly maternal or an emotional touchy-feely person, but I'm a complete mess at the moment.

My friends say they definitely prefer me as a mother to before. I don't know whether they thought I was some selfish career b*tch but I think they feel I've mellowed.' Still, she says, she's anything but an earth mother.

'I'm not going to stay at home and cuddle and breastfeed and wear my smock,' she says. 'I'm keen to keep travelling and having adventures, and take Luc along for the ride.

Having been grounded at the end of my pregnancy, I'm restless to travel with him. I know that will make me a better mother.' But her real ambition is to move on from modelling into novel writing. 'I've written one chaotic chapter, but I've got to get beyond that. I try to write for four hours before lunch. In some ways, I'm extremely disciplined. I work really hard and I'm very organised beneath the surface chaos. But now I have to make decisions about priorities and Luc comes first. So I'm lucky if I get to return my emails at the end of the day.' She grins with sudden glee: it's obvious Laura Bailey isn't going to waste her second chance of family happiness.

 

[cosmocat]

^Thanks very much, interesting article.