ALVA CLAIRE
Ten years after she was first signed, Alva Claire is finally gaining recognition as Britain’s next top model, making headlines walking for Versace and baring all for Rihanna. Here, the 29-year-old tells Sara McAlpine why quitting was never an option
To you, Alva Claire may be one of fashion’s newest faces, but her boundary-breaking modelling career has actually been a decade in the making. ELLE discovers her story
A PARK BENCH ON A VERDANT HILLTOP, overlooking the most picturesque parts of South London, is not where you’d expect to find the biggest breakout model of 2021 crying. But Alva Claire, the British 29-year-old who made headlines walking for Versace’s SS21 show – following in the footsteps of Claudia Schiffer, Cindy Crawford and Naomi Campbell – and appeared alongside the world’s top stars to model underwear for Rihanna, has shattered expectations from the very beginning of her career. In more ways than one.
When the tears brim, they come with disbelieving laughter as Alva reflects on the highs and the lows of the 10-year journey leading up to this point – and the steps necessary to make it as a model whose measurements defy fashion industry norms. We pause – or I certainly do, to tiptoe around the term ‘curve’. Despite being the subject of headlines everywhere from the Daily Mail to Dazed because of her body (‘Three plus-size models just made fashion history at Versace’ and ‘Versace [chooses] THREE larger women for the first time ever’), it feels reductive to focus on her shape. It’s her fixing gaze (warm, with a cheeky, conspiratorial glimmer) and drive (pushing her forward throughout a decade of personal and professional knockbacks) that leaves such an impression, both on the industry and, as we speak – laughing and crying, well beyond the hour her publicist had agreed to – on me. But yes, she is also, by any measure, beautiful.
Alva Claire McKenzie, known in the fashion industry by her forenames, immediately stands out amid the throngs of suburban parents wearing North Face gilets walking sausage dogs in Horniman Gardens, where we meet (a stone’s throw from where she grew up in London’s Herne Hill). At 5ft 8in, with a seductive, heavy-lidded gaze, she cuts a striking figure. Even more so when wearing a denim minidress, leather jacket and knee-high Prada bovver boots, with a clutch of chains layered at her chest, engraved with her initials. We laugh as a nearby child falls over himself as he cuts across our path, momentarily distracted by her and her crop of buoyant curls.
Last year was stellar for Alva, despite the odds being firmly stacked against her due to Covid-19. In the summer, amid a global shutdown, she fronted a worldwide campaign for MAC, before being snapped up by IMG (with Gigi Hadid, Joan Smalls and Kate Moss also on their roster). In September, she confidently stormed the runway for Versace during Milan Fashion Week, wearing a slinky yellow plissé dress (making those headlines along with models Precious Lee and Jill Kortleve). Weeks later, she made her second appearance in Rihanna’s Savage x Fenty Amazon-streamed spectacular, in nothing but lacy lingerie, latex boots and a crystal choker, alongside Cara Delevingne, Bella Hadid and Demi Moore. Add to that a slew of glossy editorials and campaigns. It’s been a string of successive hits – especially for a model once led to believe that she would never make it.
Just a few years ago, Alva was working down the road from where we’re sitting (selling jar candles in a local shop called Bunka), struggling to find success after nearly 10 years of pursuing a career as a model. It had been an active pursuit, too, buoyed by a real love of fashion. ‘I always loved it;
I was so interested in magazines as this world of fantasy, imagination and expression,’ she says, animated by the memory of getting lost in them as a teen. ‘Modelling and magazines seemed like a portal to the world I wanted to be in.’ That’s why at age 17, having spotted the phone number for a modelling agency in a magazine, she called it. And it worked. She was signed. She enrolled on a foundation course at the London College of Fashion, also interested in a career as a stylist – a two-pronged approach to getting involved in those escapist shoots.
Was she a beauty, I ask. Was a career in front of the camera an obvious route? Her eyes widen as if to say,
Of course not! ‘I was not a babe,’ she laughs, remembering a ‘weird’ phase of wearing a school skirt covered in badges on weekends, paired with sparkly Dr. Martens: ‘I wasn’t quite a misfit, but I wasn’t exactly cool.’ She laughs often, seeking to lighten the mood for my comfort when we stray towards more difficult topics, reserving her biggest smiles for the delivery of self-effacing wisecracks. ‘I did not feel good about myself,’ she admits, soberly. ‘I wasn’t popular at school. I didn’t feel as if I was very attractive. But I remember stopping and saying, “But that’s OK.” It was always OK. My parents always made me believe there was so much more to me, walking me around exhibitions at the V&A, getting me to ask questions and explore my interests; encouraging me to be independent. Being myself was always OK.’
As well as equipping her to see past setbacks, she credits her artist parents for her interest in fashion and creativity. Her Jamaican father Everal worked as a graphic designer (‘He worked on the graphics for Top of the Pops!’), and her American mother Susan (‘Good ol’ Sue!’) is a former book
“I couldn’t see myself anywhere. I couldn’t be MYSELF, EITHER”
artist and lecturer at Camberwell College of Art. ‘We were so free; we were allowed to draw on the walls if we wanted to,’ she remembers. (She’s the youngest of two: her brother Jasper works as a speech therapist for the NHS.) But modelling, as she discovered, was not quite as freeing as she’d expected from her hours leafing through the pages of Dazed and i-D, drawn in by the creativity of their fantastical fashion shoots.
‘I didn’t want to do catalogue work,’ she says, talking of the disappointment of being signed to a run-of-the-mill,