PLAY WITH PATTERNS
It’s no longer about the mono print. Mix and match completely contrasting patterns (for example stripes and leopard print) to create a striking and memorable result.
Confession: when I was first asked to interview Amy Jackson, I had to Google who that was. I had been hearing noises about the new English actress on the block, and as it turns out, had even seen the trailer of Ek Deewana Tha— I just hadn’t made the connection. Here’s why: wearing mostly non-descript Indian clothes, and toting an old fashioned bazaar bag, Amy is meant to blend into her role as a conservative Malayali-christian girl, not be the film’s exotic sell. “It’s true,” she says in her sonorous Liverpool accent. “I even had to switch my green eyes for brown contact lenses.” One of the smaller switches she’s had to make in recent times, to be sure.
Only Amy knows just how transplanted her current life is. Having grown up a hardy tomboy, riding horses on her family’s farm in suburban Liverpool, had someone told her that her life was about to take a turn for the glamorous, she’d have left them standing there in a cloud of her horse’s dust.
As these things tend to go, Amy was approached by the head of modelling agency, Premier, and just like that, the ball was set rolling. No sooner was she signed on by the agency that the plaid-and-breeches girl transformed into a beauty queen, quickly going on to win a spate of big ticket beauty pageants. At 15, after winning Miss Teen Liverpool and Miss Teen Great Britain, whose prizes included a modelling contract in the US on a scholarship, she shifted to America with her mum. And at 16, she bagged the big one: Miss Teen World 2008. She then received a call from her new modelling agency, Boss, telling her a South Indian movie director had seen her pictures on Google and was flying over to meet her.
“When I met Vijay, he asked if I could act or dance, and I said, ‘I have no idea’,” laughs Amy. But the