This girl is incredible! Other than her being obviously drop-dead gorgeous shes's honest and pretty funny. I love her uber-healthy outlook.
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Sunday Style Australia-July 2014 HQs
Ph: Ben Morris
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Interview text:
Is Kelly Gale the hottest body in the business?IT’S COAT weather in New York, an unseasonably foggy, damp day that really has no business here, it being summer in the city. But inside Chelsea’s Milk Studios, things are getting hot. Kelly Gale is in the house.
She’s in block-heeled sandals, a sharp blazer, an itty-bitty pair of black Bonds briefs and nothing else. As the stylist adjusts Gale’s collar, two make-up artists kneel at her feet and moisturise her insanely good legs in unison — and Gale towers over it all, like some mythical goddess. There’s a wind machine, for goodness sake!
As her glossy dark mane wafts on its breeze, it’s impossible not to think of a thoroughbred galloping down a beach, or at least an ’80s supermodel smouldering through George Michael’s Freedom video (she’d be Naomi in the headphones or Cindy in the bath).
It’s a surreal moment; one of those insights into what it takes to make a fabulous fashion picture that we rarely get to see. It takes a village to shoot a cover.
Sometimes the model is almost incidental; a blank canvas for the creative vision of the photographer, the editor, the designer, the hair and make-up teams. Not here. Gale, 19, is the flame that draws the moths, crackling with an almost palpable pizzazz. In the business, it’s what they call ‘personality plus’.
You don’t get to be an Angel without it. “You’re looking for confidence … positive, positive energy,” enthuses Victoria’s Secret’s Ed Razek as he eyes up some of the world’s leggiest ladies in Casting for Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show: Making of an Angel (watch it on YouTube next time you need motivation for the gym, or just want an excuse to sob into your ice-cream).
The clip is a testament to the mighty power of the American lingerie giant. On December 10, 2013, when US television network CBS screened the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show live, 9.71 million viewers tuned in and many more watched it online.
Runway angels past and present (Gisele Bündchen, Miranda Kerr, Heidi Klum) have become household names, celebrities with similar pull to their Hollywood counterparts. If some move on to become movie stars and TV presenters (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Tyra Banks), it’s only logical. But this is an exclusive club: aside from Kerr, only seven other Aussie girls have walked in the parade since it began in 1995. Now it’s Gale’s turn.
“Victoria’s Secret changed everything,” says the half-Australian (dad), half-Indian (mum) model, who has lived in Göteborg, Sweden, since her folks moved there from Melbourne when she was three. Gale made her debut as a runway angel last year in long, black leather gloves and a Swarovski-covered basque worthy of Moulin Rouge! Seven months on and she’s hot property — look for her in new campaigns for H & M swimwear and Ralph Lauren A/W ’14, plus she’s the new face of Bonds, following on from predecessors Kerr and Sarah Murdoch. She’s well on her way to being very famous.
“After Victoria’s Secret was on TV, people started going a bit nuts,” says Gale. “One time I was walking down the street with my friend, and this girl came up to me from behind. I nearly jumped out of my skin. I was holding a bag of water bottles and they started smashing everywhere. [The fan] was so upset, she started crying. That was when I thought, ‘OK, this is not normal.’ Before that, I was just an ordinary schoolgirl.”
Part of that statement is true. In October, the then-18 Gale was in her final year of high school in Sweden. She took a few weeks off to base herself in New York (her mum, Gita, came with her while her dad, Jeff, stayed home with Kelly’s two younger brothers), but that was nothing new for them — Gale has been modelling since she was scouted in a coffee shop at age 12, and sometimes that’s meant juggling study with long-haul flights.
It’s the ordinary bit we take exception to. Gale is 1.77m tall with a toned, athletic body to rival the young Elle Macpherson’s. She’s busty enough to look good in lingerie but not too busty for high fashion (she’s done runway for the likes of Chanel and Tom Ford, and shot for Indian Vogue).
But, unlike the great underfed — fashion’s scrawny models who spawn those “Too skinny!” headlines season after season — Gale glows with health and vitality. As a sports nut whose hobbies include nutrition, boxing and hardcore skipping, she is one of a new breed of healthy girl pin-ups inspiring the #fitspo craze. She has 38,000-plus Instagram followers. Her feed (@kellybellyboom) is all “Wakey-wakey, we’re going for a 10km run!” and #workout.
The reason our interview takes place in a juice bar is because it’s close to the hotel where Gale is staying while she’s in Manhattan to shoot the Bonds summer ’14 campaign. But it’s fitting, isn’t it, being surrounded by whirring blenders and bunches of veg? “Probably, yes,” she laughs. “I take care of myself physically. I care about what I eat and drink.”
Ask her how often she’s in the gym and she says, “I work out, like, seven hours a week at least. My mum is so supportive, she comes with me; we do boxing, go running. If I’m in Sweden we go to a spin class together every Saturday. I see working out as fun. I love feeling fit and strong.” The models Gale most looks up to are older members of the Angels set, such as Adriana Lima and Izabel Goulart, both fitness freaks. Lima, says Gale grinning like the Cheshire cat, uses the same trainer as she does. So, after crushing on her for years, Gale now knows her. “She’s not, like, my best friend or anything [subtext: I wish], but I’ve met Adriana a few times. She is really down-to-earth, so lovely with everyone. She’s into boxing, she works hard to maintain a healthy body. She works hard to be a good person as well as a beautiful one. I want to be like that,” says Gale, “to set a good example.”
To my ancient ears it’s funny — and fabulous — to hear a model focusing on this sort of thing, because 15 years ago, when I was starting out in magazines, the chatter was all about how many ciggies you had to smoke to quash your hunger. After the supers of the ’90s, the noughties were all about waifs; that terrible term ‘heroin chic’ was in and models really did look like a breeze would blow them over, with their bones jutting out and their skinny little arms.
A lot more of them were living off coffee and Diet Coke (and, if we’re honest, actual coke) than were seriously excited about quinoa and boxercise. In this way (and I know this sounds weird, but bear with me) the whole Victoria’s Secret thing and, more broadly, the celebration of the lingerie-slash-swimwear model has been a bloody good thing for femalekind.
Young girls these days want to look like Lima and Gale, not wilting famine victims. Young girls want to be strong, they want to kick arse. Or at least a football. Which Gale, being the alpha achiever that she is, did herself for a good few years. Following in her father’s footsteps, she played representative soccer. Was she any cop? “Yeah! I was great. I wanted to play as a career. I enjoyed tennis a lot, but I thought soccer would be my thing.”
How old was she when she locked on this goal? “Maybe 10.” She’s the same with her grades. Don’t think being the Bonds girl means being too busy for school. Three weeks after our shoot, she will graduate. She “definitely” wants to go to university — just not right now, while the really big modelling stuff is coming her way.
“My school has been supportive as long as I get everything done,” she says. “If I do an assignment and get an A immediately, I don’t need to keep going back to class.” Does she get the As? Silly question. “Yeah, I get As.”
“Kelly is very competitive,” smiles Gita, a softly spoken mathematician and former airline pilot. She’s also a dentist, “but I do research for my work now”. At the moment she’s doing “a PhD in oral medicine”. OK then, we see where her daughter gets it from. “Kelly was always driven, with schoolwork, with tennis, soccer. When she was younger, she was worse! She’d cheat if
she had to, to win!” she says in mock-horror.
Later Gale will talk at length about the importance of trying to be “a good person” and “the best
person I can be”, both because her parents instilled it in her and because she knows she’s a role model. So I think we can forgive her this early bout of cheating, no? “She has to win,” adds Gita. “She gets it from her dad.”
Before he became a filmmaker and photographer, Gale’s father played football for Melbourne team Brunswick Juventus. He met Gita on holiday in Thailand. After they married, there was that brief stint back in Australia (until Kelly was three) before they relocated to Sweden, where Gita, who was adopted as a child, had been raised.
Does Gale feel like an Aussie? “I don’t know. I feel a bit of everything,” she says.
“I don’t really remember living there, but we go every year for Christmas, so I get it. I love the
beach, I love Bonds.” Sweden is home, though. She loves it because it’s “friendly and clean” and “in summertime, a bit like Australia: everyone is happy, everyone wears short shorts”. In winter? “Don’t go then! It’s very cold, everyone is miserable. We get, like, three hours a day of sunlight.”
By the time winter rolls around there again, Gale will be living in New York. She plans to rent an apartment with her best friend in Midtown, “because I love to walk. I hate the subway.” She has no intention of moving into a model share apartment.
“Oh my god, one bathroom!” she says, rolling her eyes. “And I like hanging out with other people, not just models.”
I ask if she has any advice for young girls thinking of modelling and she scrunches that perfect
nose of hers. Was that a ‘don’t!’ face? I inquire.
“That was the face,” she laughs. “Only do it if you really want to. Some girls want it for the
wrong reasons, like, ‘I’ll get more attention at school’ or ‘I’ll feel more pretty in real life’.
That’s no good. Modelling is a job; you have to work hard, live out of a suitcase, give up
a lot of normal things in life. You have to be away from your family and friends, be willing to
work out a lot. [Then there are] the early mornings, the lonely flights — all of that.
“If you do want to do it, make sure you get a good agency. Make sure you never let anyone walk all over you. If something doesn’t feel right, tell them.”
Has Gale ever found herself in that sort of situation? I don’t mention the storm currently rumbling around photographer Terry Richardson, who has been accused by models of serious sexual harassment on shoots. “No way,” she says. “But if it did, I wouldn’t stand for it.”
The last question I ask Gale before she hops off for a massage with her mum is what her goals are now that she’s ticked Angel and Bonds off her bucket list? “I like books,” she says. “Seriously, I’m the one with my nose in a book. I read a lot of Swedish crime. I love
psychology, and could see myself studying for a couple of years.” She thinks for a moment, then
says, “But before that I want to shoot for Sports Illustrated. Can you write that? Maybe they’ll call! That’s my next modelling goal.”
Reinventing the concept of the undies model with brains and brawn? I like the idea,
don’t you?
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/is-kelly-gale-the-hottest-body-in-the-business/story-fni0cx12-1226976842649?nk=0c54b8a106d25b9b870c13f16eb44f29
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