A kittenish Lara Stone stars in the new season's high-voltage and high-hemline eveningwear for the August issue of Vogue.
Now here is an equation for calculation: take one half-British, half-Dutch 31-year-old woman with bust-waist-hip measurements of 34-25-36 (which equates, in real terms, to men's and women's racing hearts). Add white-blonde hair that falls an inch below the bra strap and multiply the effect by two pale, glowering eyebrows. Divide front teeth with a 3mm gap. Cap off with size-five feet - too small for standard fashion-week shoes (they're a mean size seven) - and gain a wobbly runway walk that has come undone twice, in 2006 and 2007. And now you are approaching the sum that is called Lara Stone.
Read more: Style File - Lara Stone
At the time of going to press, Lara has amassed 95 magazine covers - 30 of which are for Vogue, and four of those for British Vogue. And although the catwalk isn't Lara's favourite modelling plane, owing to those small feet and that idiosyncratic walk, she has nevertheless paraded for some of the world's most prestigious fashion houses on 24 separate occasions, recently opening Chanel's pre-autumn 2015 Paris-Salzburg show and closing Prada's spring/summer 2015 show.
And comfortably tucked under her size-eight belt, Lara has 22 different brands' advertising campaigns. In the autumn of 2010 she became, and remains today, the exclusive face of Calvin Klein - following in the well-heeled footsteps of Christy Turlington and Kate Moss - a gig that became very visible indeed when, this spring, she cavorted semi-naked with Justin Bieber, also semi-naked, on billboards, television and every possible social-media outlet for Calvin Klein Jeans. In 2013 Lara won the golden ticket that fast-tracks models on to Forbes magazine's highest-earning list: a L'Oréal beauty contract. While this May she appeared alongside Tom Ford in front of Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin's lens to sell the designer's latest fragrance, Noir. In short, Lara is a model who has every conceivable fashion base covered.
Read more: Lara Stone Biography
This year Lara's personal life has also generated some new statistics, and not all pertaining to happy circumstances. In March it emerged that her five-year marriage to comedian-turned-national-treasure David Walliams had ended and that Lara had moved out of their marital home in north London, taking with her the couple's two-year-old son Alfred and Bert the border terrier. While neither Lara nor Walliams have yet made a formal statement, Lara, who has 121,000 Instagram and Twitter followers (and, yes, she still follows David on the latter), posted a series of compellingly cryptic messages. February 15: "Be nice or leave - thank you." February 28: "Cuddle me hardcore." March 18: "A certain darkness is needed to see the stars." March 26: "Fuck what you heard."
Whether or not the latter messages suggest a reckoning - on May 16 she posted a picture of a broken heart, so perhaps not - Lara, who fell off a pair of Rodarte heels in March and badly injured her foot, has not missed a day's work, either from anguish or crutches.
Today is no different. Vogue's cover shoot is taking place in a whitewashed studio in north London, where Lara is standing in an electric-blue knee-length Christopher Kane dress, cradling a kitten, before Mario Testino's tripod. All isn't quite quiet, it can't be, for Lara's very physical presence emits a megawatt magic that, like her trademark tooth gap, plays with expectations. Because while her conventional pin-up body, peachy-soft pale skin and thick blonde hair send out a straightforward come-hither message, the angular structure of her face, the lips that spell out sullen, her detached stare, suggest something off-kilter, which makes you, me, designers, photographers and fashion editors want to look at her, endlessly. And then there is her voice. "Look," she gestures to the cat, Mr Beans, "he'th… thooo… cute!" - somehow managing to exclaim in monotone. She sounds very Dutch, despite not having lived in the country since she was 16, and about an octave too low for a sex siren.
It's a compelling fact of fashion that what often turns a handful of models "super" in each generation is the strength of their personalities. And Lara, as you might hope from a girl who married a comedian - and not a movie star or billionaire (surprisingly perhaps, given the way she looks) - is funny. Not Kate Moss cheeky-funny, nor Cara Delevingne extrovert-funny, but deadpan droll. And honest. When asked repeatedly in interviews why she continued to model with little success for six years, before Riccardo Tisci cast her in a 2006 Givenchy show and her career began, she replies, simply, that it seemed preferable to returning to McDonald's to flip burgers. She has talked too of the pressure she has felt to lose weight and fit into unforgiving sample sizes. And then she has skewered it. "I think of dieting," she memorably said, "then I eat pizza." And she has considered out loud, as a highly paid beauty ambassador, how her mother has great, youthful-looking skin but "didn't use face cream at all".
Read more: Bieber On His Calvins
It was back in December 2009, just after she met her husband, that she admitted to Vogue, without an iota of fanfare, that the longest she had stayed in any one place in the last two years was when she visited South Africa for four weeks to check in to rehab.
Back on set, a commotion is stirring, and it has little to do with Lara. Bert has arrived in the studio. At first his wagging tail suggests that he is looking for his owner, but then, clearly, from his acceleration, he smells kitten. A lead tightens, paws scrabble on the wooden floor, and the set designer, who borrowed Mr Beans for the shoot, runs, cat in one hand, carry case in the other, towards the exit.As Lara appears from behind a black screen, now scantily clad in Versace sequins, to look at Bert, he slowly sits before her, steadily returning her gaze with a twitch of his whiskers.
"You'd rip vat poor thing apart ith you could," she says, her eyes momentarily wide and sad. Then she throws her golden head backwards and out of that Disney-princess-sized mouth come big, low heaves of irrepressible laughter.
Can't wait until you get to the newsstand? Download the new issue of *Vogue * here.
