"To be good-looking is nothing to be proud of"
Two years ago the Danish model Louise P. was one of the most admired models, doing jobs for the largest fashion houses in the world. But one day her skin started to break out. And then she quickly went down in a business which can transform young girls into huge stars only to dump them briefly after. Today Louise P is back as one of the best paied models and she's doing it in a pace where even she can keep up.
Two years of Louise P's life stands unclear in her memory still. There's a lot of things that she simply doesn't remember. Now she simply laughs about it and calls it a post-traumatic stress reaction. It's not a diagnosis that her doctor gave her but it's what she has concluded over the years after she had her big break-through as a model.
Practically from one day to the other she became the It-girl among the prestigious fashion designers i New York, Milan and Paris. She travelled the world. It's wasn't abnormal to do 27 shows in 5 days with exhausting fittings in the middle of the night, with jetlag and on an empty stomach. The period, from when the world-famous designer Marc Jacobs booked her for his show in 2002 until a skin disorder a couple of years ago put a stop to the hysterical demand, was such an eventful time for Louise P that she still can't recall much from it. What she remembers the best about the epoch-making event of the Marc Jacobs show is "something with a huge tent somewhere outside of New York and then myself on the catwalk .I had no idea who Marc Jacobs was at the time. But I found out" says Louise and laughs.
"I still can't completely identify myself with that image of being a model. And at the time it was even harder to. I thought it was embarrasing to see pictures of myself and I didn't think that I was pretty enough to be a model. And I couldn't live up to those diva expectations which especially a lot of fashion and makeup people had." Instead she found a professional facade, and she became good at her work. But most important of all - quite fast she stopped trying living up to other people's expectiations for how a world famous model should be behaving. "It's important to be yourself" says Louise.
And that is also how she comes off. Friendly, obliging and unusually unspoiled considering that she is one of the most used models in the international fashion world. Louise P. with the full name of Louise Hammelsvang Pedersen welcomes me in her agents appartment on Frederiksberg Allé i Copenhagen which is situated on top of the hotel in which she is staying herself while she's doing Copenhagen Fashion Week. Otherwise the now 25 year-old model lives in New York, London or in her new summer cottage on Djursland which she recently acquired. Out of the three, she prefers the last as she's close to her family and friends.
She laughs a lot and, with a typical Jutlandic accent, she explains about the fashion business which one day can make young girls superstars with skyhigh salaries only to dump the without reason the day after. "I have been incredibly lucky, that I have been doing so well. I only met kind people. And right now I'm quite content with that it's not as hectic and busy as when I got my break-through and worked constantly in a couple of years. I still book the big jobs but right now I am allowed to choose whatever fits into my life right now" Louise tells. At the moment she can be seen in campaigns for Pilgrim, La Perla, DKNY, Trussardi and the Nykredit commercials [which run on Danish television]. "Now I have gotten a lot more peace and quiet and I think a lot about the things that happened when I started out. It hasn't really been sorted out yet. That's also why it's nice to be interviewed and tell about it so it can fall into place in a better way".
This Friday morning after the late fashion shows for Bruuns Bazaar in Copenhagen, Louise is barefeet and wearing black tights and a black hoodie with a light grey cranium and "Zero" on the front. She bought it the previous night on Christiania where it all of sudden got chilly outside and the Mads Nørgaard show inside was packed. She serves Nescafé, water, and she lights up a red Cecil while telling about her life which has been full of contrasts and where the modeling carreer almost came by coincidence.
Scouted in train
It was not glamour, haute couture and makeup that she dreamt of. Rather anything but. She wanted to work with animals. But since killing an animal was completely out of the question for her, she couldn't become a vet so instead her choice fell on veterinary nurse. The 32 spaces, which exist in Denmark, were all occupied so a few years before she would strut on the runways for designers such a Lagerfeld, Gucci and Balenciaga, she was in an activation program for 6 months on Bundsbæk Mølle Friluftsmuseum in western Jutland. Here she had the responsibility for 11 shetland ponies - with lice! "Fastidious, no, that I'm not. And that wouldn't be any good being a model either" she says laughing.
As a child Louise was very much into horses but at the same time she was a little princess, too. She loved to dress up and get attention from friends and family as the middle child in a family with father, mother, big sister and little brother in the small city Stauning in western Jutland. The modeling came by coincidence.
She was 20 years old on her way to Norway to work as a maid. In the train she was scouted by a friend of Peter Damsgaaard, the guy who is now her agent. But Louise went to Norway. The business card from the agency she kept, though. And when she returned 3 weeks after she went up to the agency, which to this day still is her agency. "We made some pictures. It was horrible - it completely exceed by limits. I was shy, I didn't know how to act in front of the camera, and I didn't think that I was pretty enough to be a model. After that day I didn't hear anything from the agency in a month. It thought that was it! Very don't-call-us-we-will-call-you. But I was simply relieved that it was over with and I had survived."
2pm hadn't forgotten about her, though so shortly after she was launched as a model and she got into foreign agencies, too. But she still wasn't completely ready for the modeling. One of the obstacles was her (now ex-) boyfriend: "I didn't have any problems with being photographed in underwear. But he had! His dad and granddad would ask if it wasn't time for me to get a decent job. He wasn't crazy about it. Maybe he was jalous. In any case, it limited me. I could simply have said "Now, you listen, I'm going to New York now!" but I didn't. In the beginning I didn't even have the selfconficende to do such a thing."
Louise!
