SHE’S THE ONE Meet Britain’s Next Top Model, Olivia Wardell
If you haven’t heard of Olivia Wardell yet, you soon will. Meet the winner of Britain’s Next Top Model, and future supermodel in the making
Playsuit, Sessun. Bralet (just seen), Topshop. Earrings, Next
Imagine being 18 years old and discovering that you could turn the one thing you hate about yourself into a lucrative career? The dream, right? Well, that is exactly what happened to Olivia Wardell earlier this year when she won Britain’s Next Top Model.
At 6ft 1in she had always resented her height, stooping over at school in Southampton to fit in with the boys and girls in her class who she would otherwise tower above. It made her feel “abnormal” and she’d refer to herself as “the BFG”, with her posture taking a hammering in the process.
Then, in 2016, not long after finishing her A-levels, ‘Liv’ saw an advert recruiting contestants for the 11th series of the reality TV show. And following encouragement from her boyfriend, she applied.
Fast-forward a year and she has just flown back from the island of Cape Verde after beating 5,000 hopefuls to win the show, having wooed judges Abbey Clancy, Paul Sculfor, Nicky Haslam and Hilary Alexander with her sweet nature, ethereal looks and eagerness to learn. She is now preparing to move to London to start her modelling career.
“People used to tell me that I had the height and the looks to be a model, but I wasn’t so sure,” Liv tells me. “I was ›
“It was the right path for me as I wasn’t feeling university”
always the tallest at school and it was horrible. It was only when the boys started catching up with my height, aged 16, that I started to think, ‘Oh, I’m not actually too bad.’ I’ve always loved fashion and used to cut pictures of models out of magazines and stick them on my wall, but I never considered it as a career.”
When she applied for the show, Liv was working in a local café post-A-levels and trying to figure out what to do with her life. “It came along at the right time,” she says.“It was the right path for me because I wasn’t feeling university. It was a blessing in disguise.” At just 18, Liv was the youngest girl in the competition, so moving into an apartment in Shoreditch in east London with 11 strangers for five weeks, with no contact from home, was daunting. “Producers took away our phones and purses on the first day! It was hard. I thought that being surrounded by other girls constantly would mean I wouldn’t feel homesick but I did, and it would hit me when I was least expecting it, like when I was in the shower or just lying in bed. It didn’t help that I was sleeping in a bunk bed, which was too small so my legs hung over the end!” Predictably, with so many girls in such close quarters, the atmosphere could be strained.
“There were a few tiffs about small things,” laughs Liv. “But it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. There was a bit of a divide between the older and younger contestants, though.”
The main focus for Liv, however, was just getting through the weekly challenges, which wasn’t always easy.
“One week we had to film a vlog, which was overseen by [reality star] Ferne McCann and [blogger] Sarah Ashcroft. Ferne told me I was a pretty face and that was as far as it went. It was like, ‘Ouch,’ and it made me cry afterwards. [Now I’m like] Up yours, Ferne!”
Another tricky task was being shot underwater in a glass tank. “I couldn’t handle it. In the end they had to push my head down under the water. It was scary, I panicked and the photo was awful. It wasn’t my finest moment.”
So it was a shock to Liv when she actually won the show. “I thought getting onto Britain’s
Next Top Model was as far as I was going to go. So it was a massive surprise. Now I’m moving to London! The appeal of modelling was partly to be surrounded by people who were a similar height to me. My own people finally!”