STELLA TENNANT
The British model has always dared to be different. Her enduring career now encompasses her work as a designer and loyal supporter of the Scottish textile mills that are so close to her heart. CONTRIBUTION TO BRITISH FASHION
It is a measure of Stella Tennant’s continuing importance to the fashion industry that she arrives at our Kensington rendezvous straight from New York, where she has been for a single day to stride along the catwalk for Ralph Lauren. ‘A very long way for a very short walk,’ she observes, drily.
Tennant has been modelling for 23 years, during which time she has given birth to four children. Now in her midforties, she remains triumphantly at the pinnacle of her profession, exquisitely beautiful despite – or, more justly, because of – her refusal to surgically smooth out her laughter lines or even to dye her greying crop. ‘It is brilliant when I turn up on a shoot and people say, “Oh, I love your hair colour,” as if I’ve done something really clever. But really it’s because I’m too lazy.’
In fact, Tennant’s allure has always lain in her iconoclastic individuality. When she was first spotted, as an art student, she had a nose ring and it was thus that she appeared in her first campaign for Versace; shortly afterwards, Karl Lagerfeld gave her an exclusive contract to be the new face of Chanel. In subsequent years, the gamine aristocrat (Tennant is the granddaughter of the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire and the great-niece of Nancy Mitford) has modelled for all the major fashion brands, worked with photographers from Richard Avedon to Irving Penn, and appeared on Bazaar’s cover on numerous occasions. Yet Tennant’s influence on fashion goes far beyond her modelling career, successful though that has been.
Brought up on a sheep farm in the Borders, she learned early how important the fashion industry was to local agriculture. ‘All those boxes going out of the back of the textile mills were heading for Chanel, Vuitton, Hermès…’ she says. Over the years, she has forged connections between her fashion-designer friends and the Hawick mills, to their mutual benefit. Since teaming up with her friend Isabella Cawdor to launch a collection of lifestyle wear at Holland & Holland earlier this year, Tennant has been able to have a more direct impact on the British textile industry. The luxurious, elegant designs are created using Hawick tweed and cashmere and silk from Suffolk, and there are hand-knitted socks from Cornwall. ‘Stella’s input has galvanised a lot of mills to take the new-product development much more seriously than before,’ says James Sugden, a director of the Scottish cashmere company Brora. ‘It’s very satisfying for me,’ says Tennant. ‘I’m always banging the drum when I can.’
When she isn’t globetrotting, Tennant returns to Scotland where she lives with her husband David Lasnet, a photographer turned osteopath, and their children. Here, she revels in the peace of her rural existence, digging the garden and going for long walks with her whippet, Freud. ‘If I ever wrote a biography, it would be called Dog Shit and Diamonds,’ she says, laughing. Coco Chanel once declared that ‘in order to be irreplaceable one must always be different’. The winner of our Contribution to Fashion Award this year is living proof of the truth of this dictum.