Jess Cartner-Morley 

Rosie Huntington-Whiteley: the face of 2012

With the M&S and Burberry accounts already in the bag, an LA pad and a Hollywood boyfriend, the girl who grew up on a Devon farm has come a long way, says Jess Cartner-Morley
  
  

Rosie Huntington-Whiteley
Rosie Huntington-Whiteley: 'At some point, you have to start looking at yourself as a product. You have to do business with yourself.' Photograph: Sheryl Nields/August Photograph: Sheryl Nields/August

On Christmas Day 2010, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley's two worlds collided. As usual, she was spending the holiday at home on her parents' Devon farm – only this time, having just shot her first Vogue cover, and with her 2011 diary already filling up with ad shoots for Burberry and Marks & Spencer, she had brought her boyfriend with her from America. Who happens to be action-hero Jason Statham, who, in classic couples-who-only-happen-in-LA style, lives with Rosie, playing real-life Ken to her junior-supermodel Barbie.

The couple were out for a Christmas morning walk when "all of a sudden, we turned a corner on this country lane and there was a bull. It was pretty intimidating, because he had his ladies with him, and that's when you don't want to mess with a bull." For a moment, the bull and the Huntington-Whiteley-Stathams stood still, staring at each other. It's quite an image: Statham – in wellies – with his bodacious girlfriend to protect, versus a grumpy West Country bull with his bovine entourage, facing each other on a country lane. Who flinched first? "We threw ourselves over a wall and ran as fast as we could. It was funny – once we'd got away."

It is the morning after a late night at the Golden Globes, but Huntington-Whiteley still gives good chat, especially considering she and Statham had a late night – "You don't usually get many fun parties in LA, so we've been bopping around all weekend, sorry." Her party trick, apparently, is to do her "model strut", that pout-and-prance walk peculiar to the catwalk. "It sounds so dumb, but there always comes a point in an evening when it seems really funny to get a cape or some kind of crazy outfit out of my closet and show everyone how to catwalk. Actually, I'm pretty good at teaching people."

Rosie Huntington-Whiteley is the face of 2012. In an era when most models in catwalk shows and designer advertising campaigns are anonymous to all but those inside the industry, she has both high end and commercial appeal. She has appeared on the covers of Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, but can also be found on the walls of teenage boys' bedrooms all over the country (as a one-time Victoria's Secret model, she retains a loyal lads-mag following). She is also the face of Burberry's new fragrance (Christopher Bailey, she says, is "the nicest man in fashion, just head and shoulders above the rest"). With the high-end and low-brow audiences thus assured, last year Huntington-Whiteley, who is 24, added the final piece of the jigsaw when she landed what is perhaps the most high-profile modelling job in the country, as the star of the new Marks & Spencer Autograph campaign. In terms of commercial fashion, which actually influences the way a nation dresses, what M&S puts on its billboards carries more clout than any inside-front-cover magazine ad.

It is part of supermodel fairytale lore that the girl who grows up to cover Vogue is always plain, awkward and ignored by boys in her early life. I guess we like the story better that way. Huntington-Whiteley insists that "I grew up in Devon on a farm. There was definitely no one there who was telling me to be a model. I was shorter, I didn't know how to dress, I was gangly and awkward. I had braces and over-plucked eyebrows – all the things a girl from the West Country has." It is true that (as is almost always the case with successful models) her face, in the flesh, is more exaggerated and unusual-looking, less softly pretty, than it appears through a camera lens, but still it seems a little hard to believe that when the schoolgirl Huntington-Whiteley arrived for an internship at a modelling agency ("I wanted to work in the fashion industry, maybe as a designer, and it seemed like a start"), no one took much notice. "Mainly I made coffee and lit people's cigarettes." The internship ended without incident, but a few months later she dropped by the agency when visiting London, "because I was looking for a way into the industry, so I wanted to keep alive the contacts I had made." This time, someone did notice her potential and she was offered modelling work. "I jumped at it because this was my chance to get on a photoshoot and find out what happened there."

She combined modelling and studying for a year until, worn out, she had to choose between them. "I told my mum I didn't know which to do. And she said, 'Go for it, darling – whatever you choose, you've got our blessing.' But then she said – I've never forgotten it – she said, 'Just remember, opportunities like this one don't come along very often.' I was like, OK, I get it. It was the right thing to do. She's my rock, my mum." Aged 16, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley left school.

Her memories of being a 16-year-old unknown model are not rosy. "I don't want to moan, because I left school to pursue this and it was what I wanted. And it's fashion, so people will roll their eyes and think, 'How hard can it be?' But it was hard. You can get a bit bullied. You're a child surrounded by adults and you don't have a voice. You get pushed around by agents; your needs don't matter. You say that you need a day off, or that you don't feel comfortable doing such-and-such, and people just don't listen."

The contract with Victoria's Secret changed all that and the power balance has now shifted firmly in her favour. "The last couple of years, things have been different. I have earned my right to be heard. All I ever wanted to do was to be part of the industry, to collaborate with people and have a voice. I love fashion, I love what I do and I have an opinion. The best thing about working with Marks & Spencer has been how welcoming they are. They treat me like I'm part of the family, not just some clothes hanger. They listen to what I say and that means a lot to me."

Her favourite Rosie Huntington-Whiteley shots, she says, are "the candid ones, those sneaky ones the photographer gets when you are in hair and make-up, or laughing at something. Rankin gets a lot of those, and they're special to me because I'm being Rosie." But as a model, "at some point, you have to start looking at yourself as a product. You have to do business with yourself. I look at Gisele – she has the career that everyone wants. She has made herself into a brand." For now, that kind of ambition means that LA – where, as well as modelling, she recently had a lead role in the third Transformers movie – is the best place for her to be. But, "I miss Britain. I miss the culture, the TV, the radio, the pubs, the comedy, the food, the beautiful countryside. I miss Marks & Spencer – no, honestly, I really do."

LA has its perks, however. "It is sunny every day, which I love – when you've grown up in the West Country, you don't take that for granted – and I love how geared up for health and fitness it is. I exercise a lot, because it allows me to eat the things I want to eat." She is adamant that modelling hasn't given her an unhealthy relationship with food. "If anything, it's the opposite. Even when I was working for Victoria's Secret, the girls were super-healthy. I was a meat-and-two-veg girl when I came to America, and I've become more educated in healthy eating. Now it's lots of vegetables, lots of stir-fries. But not all the time – I'm pretty famous in LA for my chicken pot pie and my roast dinners."

A model who moves from Devon to LA and becomes famous for her chicken pot pie and roast dinners is not something you come across every day in fashion. Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, it seems, is a woman who stands her ground. "When I was younger, if I was getting brushed aside or being given a hard time, I always managed to tell people to fuck off when they needed telling. That's what has kept me sane, I reckon – that I'm a bit feisty." Indeed. Jason Statham might just have met his match.

 

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