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 The Sunday Times Style 2017 

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INTERVIEW: ROSIE HUNTINGTON-WHITELEY ON CELEBRITY EGOS, SELFIES AND HAVING A SHELF LIFE

She’s helped sell 11 million items of clothing for Marks & Spencer and is one of Britain’s most successful models. Rosie Huntington-Whiteley talks to Dolly Alderton.

Full disclosure: I quickly shove on a couple of layers of mascara and a dab of concealer as I sit in my Camden flat in my slippers waiting for Rosie Huntington-Whiteley to FaceTime me. Wouldn’t you? This is a woman who is so aesthetically exquisite, even seeing a photo of her can feel as potent as looking directly into the sun during an eclipse. “It’s extraterrestrial beauty,” a woman who has worked with her in the flesh tells me. “It’s almost too much to take in. You just get your head around the pillowy lips and then you’re confronted with those feline blue eyes.”

“Like a tiramisu served on top of a crème brûlée?” I ask her.

“Exactly!” she replies.

Rosie’s call arrives, her cheekbones light up my shattered iPhone screen, and I can confirm that she is, without a doubt, a tiramisu served on top of a crème brûlée. She wears a simple grey T-shirt, her hair is scraped back off her face,and she still looks like a cross between Brigitte Bardot and the Cadbury Caramel bunny. She speaks from her office in the LA house she shares with her fiancé, the 50-year-old British actor Jason Statham, their three-month-old baby boy, Jack, and two sausage dogs.

This autumn is the fifth anniversary of her hugely successful range for Marks & Spencer. To mark it, she has launched another line of products with the brand, including underwear sets, pyjamas and a new fragrance. “It’s a … it’s a …” she says in her surprisingly clipped English cadences, raising her eyes to the heavens in slight frustration. “I’m forgetting all my words, I’m so sorry, it’s a thing that happens when you have a baby. It’s a … milestone. M&S is the biggest lingerie retailer in the UK.”

It’s estimated that 1 in 50 UK women own a Marks & Spencer Rosie for Autograph bra, and what started out as a 33-piece lingerie collection in 2012 has expanded into sleepwear, active wear, swim and beach collections that together have sold 11m items. Rosie herself works in collaboration with the retailer’s design team, and she measures the success of her collections by the sheer range of women who buy her products. “I didn’t want to make something niche for a twentysomething girl who’s a size 6,” she says. “I wanted to create a line that’s for everybody, that’s inclusive and accessible, but still felt elevated and luxurious. Sometimes I’ll be in London and some lady will stop me in the lift and say, ‘I love your lingerie, it makes me feel fantastic.’ That’s really the most rewarding part of the job.”

Despite her searing sex appeal, she has a huge female fanbase. It might be that she has retained a quintessential English girl quality, which is perhaps also the reason her alignment with the high-street stalwart Marks & Sparks has never felt jarring. Much has been made of her green-wellie upbringing in rural Devon, but the reality is a life of constant travel that began for when she signed as a model at the age of 16. She moved to America shortly after she met Statham in 2011, aged 24, and since then she has made her acting mark, too, with parts in Transformers: Dark of the Moon and Mad Max: Fury Road. But she says she feels “very English” and has relished the opportunity to come home for work every six to eight weeks in recent years.

“The LA lifestyle is so fantastic, but there’s this niggling part of me, every single day, that says, ‘When am I going to come home?’ ” She feels a sense of “comfort” the minute she touches down at Heathrow, and loves stockpiling everything from “paracetamol to toiletries” in Boots. She has also managed to reconstruct bits of Blighty in LA, hunting down stores where you can buy English chocolate in the middle of the night (her preference is Cadbury) and hosting traditional roast dinners for her friends.

In the past, she has spoken passionately about the prospect of starting her own family. Has the reality of motherhood matched those expectations? “I don’t know how to explain it without sounding incredibly clichéd or terribly smug, but it is the most amazing time right now. I feel so happy, all the way from the bottom of my heart. Life just feels so full. The thing that surprised me the most is how all-consuming and deep a love you can feel. I’ve been very lucky to experience love in my life, but with your baby, there’s nothing else like it.”

As well as becoming a mother this year, she also turned 30, which she describes as being “the best”, as she feels more confident in knowing who she is. And she doesn’t really worry about getting older. I ask her how this can be, when she makes money from her looks in an industry so unforgivingly ageist.

“There is a shelf life with what I do — that’s a no-brainer. So that’s what was exciting about creating the brand as something that can hopefully live beyond me being the face of it,” she says. “Having said that, I do think society is changing, and there is acceptance of faces that are more mature. All the supermodels from the 1990s who are now in their forties and fifties are as celebrated as they were back then, if not more. Look at the recent Versace runway.” (Donatella sent Cindy, Naomi, Claudia et al down the catwalk in Milan earlier this month to huge acclaim.)

The job description has obviously changed drastically, however, since the golden age of 1990s supermodels. How does she feel about the three-dimensional presence of a model in the age of social media? “I love the fact that it’s acceptable now for models to have a voice. When I started, models didn’t give interviews — it was almost considered to be beneath them. It was all about being mysterious, and it wasn’t cool to be a celebrity. Even 10 years ago, it was all about ‘the model off-duty’, the undone, rock’n’roll bohemian look, and now it’s completely the opposite. It’s totally acceptable for things to almost feel overly contrived.”

Where she struggles, she says, is giving her 7.6m Instagram followers access to her life in the way that they want while retaining both her privacy and a level of modesty. “People want to see sexy photographs, selfies, pictures of you in your bikini,” she says, “and at the same time, I know that when I scroll through Instagram, I don’t love seeing those things from other people. I always try to remember there’s a 13-year-old girl out there who’s looking at my feed, and I hope that I don’t make her feel insecure.”

The problem is, I suggest, that if we’re being totally honest, it is really nice to share a flattering photo of yourself and watch thousands of likes pop up. “Of course!” she bellows, “because there’s so much ego attached to it. It feeds this front part of your brain, and it’s totally addictive. If you’ve done your make-up and you feel fantastic, or you’re in a bikini and you feel wonderful, there’s nothing better than being able to share that, but it’s about being really aware of the psychological effect of it all.”

I tell her that I find it a huge scoop that even she has a moment of feeling cringed-out as her ego and self-awareness battle each other right before she posts a selfie, just like the rest of us. “Every. Time,” she says. “I’m still human, I’m still a young woman.” She waves her hand toward me then back to herself, as if our selfies could be similar, which I take as a vastly charitable gesture. “Although, there are probably people who will go through my Instagram and think there is absolutely nothing modest about this woman at all,” she laughs.

It’s time to say goodbye. She gives me a wave and a golden California grin, the screen goes black and she’s gone. The extraterrestrial beauty leaves my broken phone in NW1 and floats back into the sky.

thetimes.co.uk

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