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Like the jeans and shoes but hate that ugly floral grandma shirt.
Sienna Miller
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I like the floral top, at least its not what everyone else is wearing
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From timesonline.co.uk
The Millers' tale
Lovebird close, Sienna and Savannah Miller have always looked out for each other. Our correspondent spends time in the sisters’ bohemian world.
At Pinewood Studios, west of London, a 70-strong film crew is wrapping the last scenes of The Edge of Love, the big-budget Dylan Thomas biopic starring Sienna Miller and Keira Knightley. In a cafe called Vicki’s, near her home in Maida Vale, London, one of its two female stars is investigating an alien growth on the upper, outer edge of her elder sister’s right ear.
“Ouch! That’s my earring hole.”
“Just one second. Onnne second . . .”
“Ow, that’s cartilage!”
“It’s okay – I’m done.” Sienna removes herself from her sister’s face. With her hair dyed strawberry blonde (“I hate being a ginger”) and kitted out in black, she’s a trifle world-weary. Only days later, the papers announce a romantic liaison with P.Diddy that, so they claim, almost certainly played a part in the break-up with his baby mama, Kim Porter. For the record, the two are excellent party friends only, and at this moment, it’s doubtful that the Diddy is uppermost in Sienna’s mind. Outside, undeterred, five men with cameras lounge in cars and against railings, a loyal fan club she would probably rather not have.
You might not immediately have Sienna Miller down as a family girl. But when she hit the red carpet for the UK premiere of Factory Girl, she wasn’t accompanied by an A-list actor or some guitar-toting, straggly-haired boy. Standing beside her was a long, blonde drink of water with a dancer’s poise and a faintly embarrassed look on her face – her sister, Savannah.
And here they are now. On first impressions, they could be out of the same egg. Lovebird close, they speak in the same tumble of words, interrupting each other constantly and intertwining their hands without noticing they’re doing it. They are public-school self-possessed, with an honesty reminiscent of the time before the kind of celebrity for which Sienna is known was invented. Their stepmother, the third wife of their father, Ed, says that she is sure they were best friends in a past life who promised to come back as sisters.
“Yeah, we’re very connected,” Sienna says. “Well, we grew up in the same place and we’re made of the same stuff.”
“But we’re different, too,” Savannah says. “For one thing, she shares and I can’t share. And if I have a glass of wine, I’m hungover and feel terrible, whereas she’s got the most incredible tolerance.”
At 28, Savannah is three years older and 5in taller than Sienna, who speaks in a slightly lower voice. But the differences are more than just physical. While both have infectiously busy brains, Sienna exudes sexuality, like a girl boys have always fancied, whereas Savannah tries to disguise her old soul with nonchalance. And when Sienna is making and promoting films back to back, burning up dancefloors, playing kiss chase with the world’s press and living the life, Savannah is working in London, before returning to her husband, Nick, who builds ecohouses, her 12-year-old stepson, Java, and her two-year-old son, Moses, to bake cakes in a house overlooking a wooded valley in Gloucestershire.
Though they have gone in different directions, they came from the same place. Their dad left when they were six and nine, and they were brought up by their mum – who taught drama and went on to run an exercise school – in a terraced house in Fulham, London. They spent their free time at a farm called the Manor, which belonged to a family friend, where they rode horses and became themselves.
“We were tomboys,” Savannah says. “And we played a lot of games of make-believe.”
“We went to a party when Sav was 14,” Sienna says, “and the dress code was futuristic. Sav got these rubber trousers, some bubble-wrap, from which she fashioned a top with wire boobs, and silver plimsolls and a silver swimming cap, both with tinsel – and she painted her face silver, too.
“Do you remember the time when we were in Cornwall at some festival or other?” she continues. “Mum and Dad had just got divorced, and the whole idea was to go on a jolly holiday. Actually, we were freezing . . . and I stuck a cardboard box on my back, huddled on the ground in it and refused to come out of character or stand up for hours.”
A month ago, on the shoot for this story, Sienna showed no such reticence. A lingering paparazzo had snapped her outside the building with her dogs, wearing a cotton dress from Twenty8Twelve, the clothing line the sisters have designed together. “Savvy, a pap just got me in the dress,” she said, bursting into the room with a look of panic. The conversation quietened as everyone – photographer, stylist, make-up artist, hairdresser, agent – visualised pictures of the frock flying down the digital highway to sweatshop workers in Southeast Asia, only to reappear in Britain, three days later, as perfect high-street copies, priced £14.99. And then Savannah said matter-of-factly: “It’s okay, Sien. I already wore it to the premiere, remember?” And everything was all right again.
Savannah is definitely the big sister. “I think when Dad left, I stepped into his role,” she says, back in the cafe.
“Sav was always the one who’d load the car when we were going back to school,” Sienna adds.
Was she protective of her little sister at school (they both went to Heathfield, in Surrey)? “She didn’t need protecting,” Savannah says. “She’s always been pretty feisty.”
“Well, I was at boarding school from eight, so I learnt how to look after myself. I blame Sav for my corruption. She was quite wild between 15 and 18, and I was doing things at 12 that she was doing at 15.”
I first met Jo Miller, Savannah and Sienna’s mother, at the end of last year, at a Christmas party for friends in the house where the girls grew up. The guests were the sort of gentle, well-born free spirits who have occupied that corner of London since the late 1960s. Jude Law was there, too (“I think Jude made Mum’s night. She’s a bit obsessed,” Savannah says), as were the interior designer Kelly Hoppen, Ed’s second wife, and her daughter, the girls’ stepsister, Natasha.
And in the midst of it all was Mama Miller, the dream laissez-faire hostess in a printed silk kaftan, who, halfway through the evening, rallied a raucous disco in the kitchen. The party went on all night. At 6am, as Savannah got up to drive home to Stroud to be with her family, Jamie Dornan was still running around the house in his boxer shorts.
“Mum knows everything about everything we get up to and always has. She had her first date with Dad in a see-through white cheesecloth dress with no bra and loose hair,” Savannah says. “And she was a back-up singer for David Bowie.”
“She wasn’t a back-up singer. She can’t sing a note,” Sienna says.
“Well, she definitely snogged him.”
“I don’t think you should say that...”
“She did!”
Jo named Savannah after the grasslands of Africa, where she once lived, and Sienna after burnt sienna, because, according to Savannah, she “came out orange”. Her influence is clear. “We were three girls living in a doll’s house with our dogs and cats, and we were like sisters,” Jo says. “I think that seeing me working gave them a very strong work ethic. They were never spoilt. They know that life isn’t a free ride and that they’re very fortunate to have passions, Savannah with fashion, and Sienna with acting. Aren’t they lucky to get out of bed every day and look forward to going to work?”
“Mum was the sort of mother who gave us apples to take to school, even though all the other kids had Peperami and Monster Munch,” Savannah says, neatly summing up her mother’s child-rearing philosophy.
Also at the shoot where Sienna was papped in the dress was a tall, tanned, laconic-looking man in his fifties. This was Ed Miller, the girls’ dad. An American banker, he had just arrived from the British Virgin Islands, where he lives with his third wife. I asked him whether it was strange to be the Millers’ dad. “Hmm, yes. It boggles the mind, this global media machine that my daughter is caught up in,” he said. “I used to have a Google Alert set up, so I’d know when one of the girls got a mention. But Sienna started getting 58,000 a day. Now I just have one for Savannah.”
Savannah met Nick four years ago at a wedding. “It was such a relief when I met him,” she says. “I felt like I’d been looking for him my whole life.”
“She was 24,” Sienna says, who was 22 when she got engaged to Jude Law. “And she felt like she was on the shelf. She wanted marriage and babies. And now I’m 25, with nobody.”
“Mum didn’t meet Dad until she was 29 or 30. We weren’t born until she was 35 and 38,” Savannah says.
“Yeah – but if you come from divorced parents, you always crave the family environment you didn’t have. We’re a very close family, but not a nuclear family.”
The Millers' tale
Lovebird close, Sienna and Savannah Miller have always looked out for each other. Our correspondent spends time in the sisters’ bohemian world.
At Pinewood Studios, west of London, a 70-strong film crew is wrapping the last scenes of The Edge of Love, the big-budget Dylan Thomas biopic starring Sienna Miller and Keira Knightley. In a cafe called Vicki’s, near her home in Maida Vale, London, one of its two female stars is investigating an alien growth on the upper, outer edge of her elder sister’s right ear.
“Ouch! That’s my earring hole.”
“Just one second. Onnne second . . .”
“Ow, that’s cartilage!”
“It’s okay – I’m done.” Sienna removes herself from her sister’s face. With her hair dyed strawberry blonde (“I hate being a ginger”) and kitted out in black, she’s a trifle world-weary. Only days later, the papers announce a romantic liaison with P.Diddy that, so they claim, almost certainly played a part in the break-up with his baby mama, Kim Porter. For the record, the two are excellent party friends only, and at this moment, it’s doubtful that the Diddy is uppermost in Sienna’s mind. Outside, undeterred, five men with cameras lounge in cars and against railings, a loyal fan club she would probably rather not have.
You might not immediately have Sienna Miller down as a family girl. But when she hit the red carpet for the UK premiere of Factory Girl, she wasn’t accompanied by an A-list actor or some guitar-toting, straggly-haired boy. Standing beside her was a long, blonde drink of water with a dancer’s poise and a faintly embarrassed look on her face – her sister, Savannah.
And here they are now. On first impressions, they could be out of the same egg. Lovebird close, they speak in the same tumble of words, interrupting each other constantly and intertwining their hands without noticing they’re doing it. They are public-school self-possessed, with an honesty reminiscent of the time before the kind of celebrity for which Sienna is known was invented. Their stepmother, the third wife of their father, Ed, says that she is sure they were best friends in a past life who promised to come back as sisters.
“Yeah, we’re very connected,” Sienna says. “Well, we grew up in the same place and we’re made of the same stuff.”
“But we’re different, too,” Savannah says. “For one thing, she shares and I can’t share. And if I have a glass of wine, I’m hungover and feel terrible, whereas she’s got the most incredible tolerance.”
At 28, Savannah is three years older and 5in taller than Sienna, who speaks in a slightly lower voice. But the differences are more than just physical. While both have infectiously busy brains, Sienna exudes sexuality, like a girl boys have always fancied, whereas Savannah tries to disguise her old soul with nonchalance. And when Sienna is making and promoting films back to back, burning up dancefloors, playing kiss chase with the world’s press and living the life, Savannah is working in London, before returning to her husband, Nick, who builds ecohouses, her 12-year-old stepson, Java, and her two-year-old son, Moses, to bake cakes in a house overlooking a wooded valley in Gloucestershire.
Though they have gone in different directions, they came from the same place. Their dad left when they were six and nine, and they were brought up by their mum – who taught drama and went on to run an exercise school – in a terraced house in Fulham, London. They spent their free time at a farm called the Manor, which belonged to a family friend, where they rode horses and became themselves.
“We were tomboys,” Savannah says. “And we played a lot of games of make-believe.”
“We went to a party when Sav was 14,” Sienna says, “and the dress code was futuristic. Sav got these rubber trousers, some bubble-wrap, from which she fashioned a top with wire boobs, and silver plimsolls and a silver swimming cap, both with tinsel – and she painted her face silver, too.
“Do you remember the time when we were in Cornwall at some festival or other?” she continues. “Mum and Dad had just got divorced, and the whole idea was to go on a jolly holiday. Actually, we were freezing . . . and I stuck a cardboard box on my back, huddled on the ground in it and refused to come out of character or stand up for hours.”
A month ago, on the shoot for this story, Sienna showed no such reticence. A lingering paparazzo had snapped her outside the building with her dogs, wearing a cotton dress from Twenty8Twelve, the clothing line the sisters have designed together. “Savvy, a pap just got me in the dress,” she said, bursting into the room with a look of panic. The conversation quietened as everyone – photographer, stylist, make-up artist, hairdresser, agent – visualised pictures of the frock flying down the digital highway to sweatshop workers in Southeast Asia, only to reappear in Britain, three days later, as perfect high-street copies, priced £14.99. And then Savannah said matter-of-factly: “It’s okay, Sien. I already wore it to the premiere, remember?” And everything was all right again.
Savannah is definitely the big sister. “I think when Dad left, I stepped into his role,” she says, back in the cafe.
“Sav was always the one who’d load the car when we were going back to school,” Sienna adds.
Was she protective of her little sister at school (they both went to Heathfield, in Surrey)? “She didn’t need protecting,” Savannah says. “She’s always been pretty feisty.”
“Well, I was at boarding school from eight, so I learnt how to look after myself. I blame Sav for my corruption. She was quite wild between 15 and 18, and I was doing things at 12 that she was doing at 15.”
I first met Jo Miller, Savannah and Sienna’s mother, at the end of last year, at a Christmas party for friends in the house where the girls grew up. The guests were the sort of gentle, well-born free spirits who have occupied that corner of London since the late 1960s. Jude Law was there, too (“I think Jude made Mum’s night. She’s a bit obsessed,” Savannah says), as were the interior designer Kelly Hoppen, Ed’s second wife, and her daughter, the girls’ stepsister, Natasha.
And in the midst of it all was Mama Miller, the dream laissez-faire hostess in a printed silk kaftan, who, halfway through the evening, rallied a raucous disco in the kitchen. The party went on all night. At 6am, as Savannah got up to drive home to Stroud to be with her family, Jamie Dornan was still running around the house in his boxer shorts.
“Mum knows everything about everything we get up to and always has. She had her first date with Dad in a see-through white cheesecloth dress with no bra and loose hair,” Savannah says. “And she was a back-up singer for David Bowie.”
“She wasn’t a back-up singer. She can’t sing a note,” Sienna says.
“Well, she definitely snogged him.”
“I don’t think you should say that...”
“She did!”
Jo named Savannah after the grasslands of Africa, where she once lived, and Sienna after burnt sienna, because, according to Savannah, she “came out orange”. Her influence is clear. “We were three girls living in a doll’s house with our dogs and cats, and we were like sisters,” Jo says. “I think that seeing me working gave them a very strong work ethic. They were never spoilt. They know that life isn’t a free ride and that they’re very fortunate to have passions, Savannah with fashion, and Sienna with acting. Aren’t they lucky to get out of bed every day and look forward to going to work?”
“Mum was the sort of mother who gave us apples to take to school, even though all the other kids had Peperami and Monster Munch,” Savannah says, neatly summing up her mother’s child-rearing philosophy.
Also at the shoot where Sienna was papped in the dress was a tall, tanned, laconic-looking man in his fifties. This was Ed Miller, the girls’ dad. An American banker, he had just arrived from the British Virgin Islands, where he lives with his third wife. I asked him whether it was strange to be the Millers’ dad. “Hmm, yes. It boggles the mind, this global media machine that my daughter is caught up in,” he said. “I used to have a Google Alert set up, so I’d know when one of the girls got a mention. But Sienna started getting 58,000 a day. Now I just have one for Savannah.”
Savannah met Nick four years ago at a wedding. “It was such a relief when I met him,” she says. “I felt like I’d been looking for him my whole life.”
“She was 24,” Sienna says, who was 22 when she got engaged to Jude Law. “And she felt like she was on the shelf. She wanted marriage and babies. And now I’m 25, with nobody.”
“Mum didn’t meet Dad until she was 29 or 30. We weren’t born until she was 35 and 38,” Savannah says.
“Yeah – but if you come from divorced parents, you always crave the family environment you didn’t have. We’re a very close family, but not a nuclear family.”
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^continued...
“My relationship with Dad was very different from Sienna’s,” Savannah says. “Dad had hepatitis when I was four, so we spent a lot of time together and were very tight. Sienna’s always been closer to Mum, and her relationship with Dad was quite volatile. I think that has affected her a lot. You look to reform that pattern because you feel comfortable with it.”
“I think I’ve changed, though,” Sienna says. “I’m getting better.”
While Sienna waits for The One, the male hero of the family is her 34-year-old brother-in-law, Nick. Before today, the last time I saw a Miller in the flesh was in the Lost Vagueness field at Glastonbury festival at 6am one chilly, muddy late-June morning. Sienna had been choppered in from Pinewood Studios on a 12-hour exeat from filming and, having spent some of the previous evening pulling pints with friends at the fashion designer Alice Temperley’s dad’s
Somerset cider bus, had found Nick. Lucky, since Nick – who’d been running the Rabbit Hole, an Alice in Wonderland-esque sideshow, with a mate – was disguised as a 6ft caterpillar. (This was before hefound the discarded angel’s wings that allowed him to metamorphose into a butterfly.) “I just saw him and threw my arms around him. He’s a man-rock,” Sienna says.
Nick’s caterpillar costume – an old Victorian wool waistcoat, shiny green Aladdin pants, sparkly blue cuffs and bib, a bowler hat, giant glasses and a long yellow-and-black tail – was a Savannah special.
“Neither me nor my sister think about what we’re going to wear every day,” Savannah says. “We get dressed in five minutes, and she’s fortunate to have some great stuff to grab from. I’ve hit an age where I need to put on shoes and make-up to feel together, but Sienna can pull off the scruffy thing.”
Despite Herculean efforts, Sienna’s “scruffy thing” remains tantalisingly elusive for the high-street brands. Since her long skirts, sandals and bed hair captured the public imagination back in the summer of 2005 (“It wasn’t even a very original look. I think I’d just come back from travelling or something”), they have tried their hardest to flog her image to the thousands of teenagers who want to be her, but she is too unpredictable, and they can’t quite nail it. You get the feeling that being a style icon isn’t really what she wants. “It was a strange social experiment, to be responsible for all that. It made me self-conscious, which, inherently, I’m not. People would say, ‘I’m sick of boho’, and I’d think, ‘But I liked those clothes – it’s not my fault that they were copied, you wore them and now you’re sick of them.’ Now I just don’t care. I threw it all out of the window wearing those big pants in public. That was an Edie Sedgwick thing. Copy that, you f***ers! And they did.” At Asda, weekly sales of black granny pants went up by 230% after she wore a version to the American premiere of Factory Girl.
“These days, I’ll go out in my pyjamas, and they’ll say, ‘Look, she’s in her tracksuit: she’s been partying too much.’ Well, I’m not going to wear heels to pick up dog sh*t.”
And now there is the fashion line, which is backed by Pepe Jeans. “Not more clothing sort-of-designed by a celebrity,” you could be thinking, but you might be surprised. Combine Savannah’s love of costume – she got a first in womenswear from Central St Martins and worked at Alexander McQueen for two years before going freelance – with Sienna’s Sienna-ishness, and what you get is rather good.
The first collection is called An Anthology of Rebellion, after the famous book of early Beat poets, who would be astonished to learn that 50 or so years after Kerouac’s On the Road and Ginsberg’s Howl, all it takes to be considered a rebel is a pair of skinny jeans and a feature haircut – or would they?
“This culture is geared towards everybody being the same,” Savannah says. “We aren’t trying to be trendy. We just want to make things you want to wear but can’t find, and we want them to be made well enough to last and become old friends.”
After the greedy sugar rush of Kate Moss’s line for Topshop, that actually sounds weirdly radical. Opening a shop in Westbourne Grove, as they are about to do, is a stroke of genius. The Notting Hill massive will be mad for it – and the rest of us will probably follow suit, especially at £150 a skirt, which, for something decent that you’ll want to wear again and again, isn’t bad. The skintight Bolen jeans with zips up the back of each leg – Sienna’s idea – are expected to sell out.
Well, who wouldn’t want a taste of Sienna’s life? Her adventures make you realise that fame isn’t just an opportunity to get your face on the telly; it’s the best travel-agent-cum- social-networking website out there. In June, at the Isle of Wight festival with her friend Theodora, Sienna finally met one of her all-time heroes, Keith Richards. “Theodora said, ‘This is my dad.’ I got in the car, and I think I kissed him hello on the lips. Whoops! But I didn’t care. I love him. I love his search for the holy grail. I love how inappropriate he is, the fact that he doesn’t care.”
“I do understand Sienna’s life,” Savannah says. “There’s a crossover. She’s very similar to me when she comes to stay in Stroud. We like doing the same stuff – cooking and hanging out at home. And we look after each other, in a way. I very much feel that she’s there.”
“God, I so often worry that I’m not there,” says Sienna, who took 75 transatlantic flights and wrapped five films last year.
“You’re so there. It’s me who isn’t. It’s the nightmare of the working mother. I always feel like I spread myself too thin.”
“I feel like that.”
“You were going to have a year off!”
“Yeah, well, obviously that isn’t happening. But I have my house now. I didn’t have one before. I was only at home in a hotel room or on a plane. When I was shooting in Wales three months ago, and the bluebells were up, I realised how long it was since I’d been away from a city. It was heaven.”
“Moses and I went out the other day and picked fresh shelled peas from the bush,” Savannah says. “We had them raw with rocket. I’ve never tasted anything so good in my life.”
Sienna’s cab is here. She’s meeting her mother for lunch, and on Saturday, the film wraps with a party at the newly opened Shoreditch House (“Wanna come, Sav?” Sienna asks. “Nah, I’ll be at home with my babies”). Next, she flies to Rome to shoot an American Vogue cover with Mario Testino and a Valentino ad campaign; then she’soff to Mumbai as an ambassador for the ecological initiative Global Cool.
The girls head through the door: Savannah first, then Sienna. The paparazzi move into position. “God, those f***ers put me on edge,” Sienna says under her breath. After seeing her sister into the taxi, Savannah slams the door shut and heads off alone in search of her own transport.
“Is there anything about your sister’s life that you envy?” I ask her later, on the phone. “Oh, God, no,” she says. “No, I don’t envy her – unfortunately not. I’ve always just worried about it; felt, ‘Oh sh*t, I hope she’s all right – this is horrendous.’ If I had that life, I would disappear, and you wouldn’t see me again. Big style, running fast.”
In two weeks, the girls leave on a four-day, whistle-stop tour of America and Canada to promote the line. There was no original plan to sell there, and the girls seem gobsmacked by the enthusiasm with which American retail buyers are trying to get their hands on the clothes. There’s a big, fancy launch party at Ian Schrager’s Gramercy Park Hotel in New York, and I’m invited.
“Shame, I’m going to be in Wales,” I text Savannah, toying with the idea of cancelling my holiday in favour of Cristal-quaffing with P.Diddy and co on a private rooftop with city views.
“Not shame,” Savannah texts back. “I wish I was going to Wales, too.”
“My relationship with Dad was very different from Sienna’s,” Savannah says. “Dad had hepatitis when I was four, so we spent a lot of time together and were very tight. Sienna’s always been closer to Mum, and her relationship with Dad was quite volatile. I think that has affected her a lot. You look to reform that pattern because you feel comfortable with it.”
“I think I’ve changed, though,” Sienna says. “I’m getting better.”
While Sienna waits for The One, the male hero of the family is her 34-year-old brother-in-law, Nick. Before today, the last time I saw a Miller in the flesh was in the Lost Vagueness field at Glastonbury festival at 6am one chilly, muddy late-June morning. Sienna had been choppered in from Pinewood Studios on a 12-hour exeat from filming and, having spent some of the previous evening pulling pints with friends at the fashion designer Alice Temperley’s dad’s
Somerset cider bus, had found Nick. Lucky, since Nick – who’d been running the Rabbit Hole, an Alice in Wonderland-esque sideshow, with a mate – was disguised as a 6ft caterpillar. (This was before hefound the discarded angel’s wings that allowed him to metamorphose into a butterfly.) “I just saw him and threw my arms around him. He’s a man-rock,” Sienna says.
Nick’s caterpillar costume – an old Victorian wool waistcoat, shiny green Aladdin pants, sparkly blue cuffs and bib, a bowler hat, giant glasses and a long yellow-and-black tail – was a Savannah special.
“Neither me nor my sister think about what we’re going to wear every day,” Savannah says. “We get dressed in five minutes, and she’s fortunate to have some great stuff to grab from. I’ve hit an age where I need to put on shoes and make-up to feel together, but Sienna can pull off the scruffy thing.”
Despite Herculean efforts, Sienna’s “scruffy thing” remains tantalisingly elusive for the high-street brands. Since her long skirts, sandals and bed hair captured the public imagination back in the summer of 2005 (“It wasn’t even a very original look. I think I’d just come back from travelling or something”), they have tried their hardest to flog her image to the thousands of teenagers who want to be her, but she is too unpredictable, and they can’t quite nail it. You get the feeling that being a style icon isn’t really what she wants. “It was a strange social experiment, to be responsible for all that. It made me self-conscious, which, inherently, I’m not. People would say, ‘I’m sick of boho’, and I’d think, ‘But I liked those clothes – it’s not my fault that they were copied, you wore them and now you’re sick of them.’ Now I just don’t care. I threw it all out of the window wearing those big pants in public. That was an Edie Sedgwick thing. Copy that, you f***ers! And they did.” At Asda, weekly sales of black granny pants went up by 230% after she wore a version to the American premiere of Factory Girl.
“These days, I’ll go out in my pyjamas, and they’ll say, ‘Look, she’s in her tracksuit: she’s been partying too much.’ Well, I’m not going to wear heels to pick up dog sh*t.”
And now there is the fashion line, which is backed by Pepe Jeans. “Not more clothing sort-of-designed by a celebrity,” you could be thinking, but you might be surprised. Combine Savannah’s love of costume – she got a first in womenswear from Central St Martins and worked at Alexander McQueen for two years before going freelance – with Sienna’s Sienna-ishness, and what you get is rather good.
The first collection is called An Anthology of Rebellion, after the famous book of early Beat poets, who would be astonished to learn that 50 or so years after Kerouac’s On the Road and Ginsberg’s Howl, all it takes to be considered a rebel is a pair of skinny jeans and a feature haircut – or would they?
“This culture is geared towards everybody being the same,” Savannah says. “We aren’t trying to be trendy. We just want to make things you want to wear but can’t find, and we want them to be made well enough to last and become old friends.”
After the greedy sugar rush of Kate Moss’s line for Topshop, that actually sounds weirdly radical. Opening a shop in Westbourne Grove, as they are about to do, is a stroke of genius. The Notting Hill massive will be mad for it – and the rest of us will probably follow suit, especially at £150 a skirt, which, for something decent that you’ll want to wear again and again, isn’t bad. The skintight Bolen jeans with zips up the back of each leg – Sienna’s idea – are expected to sell out.
Well, who wouldn’t want a taste of Sienna’s life? Her adventures make you realise that fame isn’t just an opportunity to get your face on the telly; it’s the best travel-agent-cum- social-networking website out there. In June, at the Isle of Wight festival with her friend Theodora, Sienna finally met one of her all-time heroes, Keith Richards. “Theodora said, ‘This is my dad.’ I got in the car, and I think I kissed him hello on the lips. Whoops! But I didn’t care. I love him. I love his search for the holy grail. I love how inappropriate he is, the fact that he doesn’t care.”
“I do understand Sienna’s life,” Savannah says. “There’s a crossover. She’s very similar to me when she comes to stay in Stroud. We like doing the same stuff – cooking and hanging out at home. And we look after each other, in a way. I very much feel that she’s there.”
“God, I so often worry that I’m not there,” says Sienna, who took 75 transatlantic flights and wrapped five films last year.
“You’re so there. It’s me who isn’t. It’s the nightmare of the working mother. I always feel like I spread myself too thin.”
“I feel like that.”
“You were going to have a year off!”
“Yeah, well, obviously that isn’t happening. But I have my house now. I didn’t have one before. I was only at home in a hotel room or on a plane. When I was shooting in Wales three months ago, and the bluebells were up, I realised how long it was since I’d been away from a city. It was heaven.”
“Moses and I went out the other day and picked fresh shelled peas from the bush,” Savannah says. “We had them raw with rocket. I’ve never tasted anything so good in my life.”
Sienna’s cab is here. She’s meeting her mother for lunch, and on Saturday, the film wraps with a party at the newly opened Shoreditch House (“Wanna come, Sav?” Sienna asks. “Nah, I’ll be at home with my babies”). Next, she flies to Rome to shoot an American Vogue cover with Mario Testino and a Valentino ad campaign; then she’soff to Mumbai as an ambassador for the ecological initiative Global Cool.
The girls head through the door: Savannah first, then Sienna. The paparazzi move into position. “God, those f***ers put me on edge,” Sienna says under her breath. After seeing her sister into the taxi, Savannah slams the door shut and heads off alone in search of her own transport.
“Is there anything about your sister’s life that you envy?” I ask her later, on the phone. “Oh, God, no,” she says. “No, I don’t envy her – unfortunately not. I’ve always just worried about it; felt, ‘Oh sh*t, I hope she’s all right – this is horrendous.’ If I had that life, I would disappear, and you wouldn’t see me again. Big style, running fast.”
In two weeks, the girls leave on a four-day, whistle-stop tour of America and Canada to promote the line. There was no original plan to sell there, and the girls seem gobsmacked by the enthusiasm with which American retail buyers are trying to get their hands on the clothes. There’s a big, fancy launch party at Ian Schrager’s Gramercy Park Hotel in New York, and I’m invited.
“Shame, I’m going to be in Wales,” I text Savannah, toying with the idea of cancelling my holiday in favour of Cristal-quaffing with P.Diddy and co on a private rooftop with city views.
“Not shame,” Savannah texts back. “I wish I was going to Wales, too.”
misstarshine
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I love the interview and am dying for more ibiza pics!
!ShoeGal4Eva
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ibiza pics arent uploading for me for some reason
anyways,she's goin to be on us vogue's september cover
anyways,she's goin to be on us vogue's september cover
