SADIE FROST’S LIFE IN THE FLOW LANE
SWAPPING LATE NIGHTS FOR SUN SALUTATIONS
SADIE FROST is flat-out, but she always makes time for her 20 minutes of zen every morning. The actress, producer and fashion designer is on a flying stopover in the capital after Paris Fashion Week and before jetting off to India to cast for her next film.
Yoga, she tells me over coffee at Knightsbridge beauty house Urban Retreat, is her one constant — “like brushing my teeth”. “If I don’t do it every day I end up feeling a bit out of sorts — I don’t feel grounded, focused.”
Frost, 54 and a mother to four, is straight from production meetings and still in her yoga kit: sleek black mesh-patterned leggings and a matching jacket featuring a symbol of the lotus flower — the most popular item in her new yoga collection, Frost, which launched last month.
The chakra-inspired activewear brand is Frost’s first solo fashion line after her lingerie label Frost French with childhood friend Jemima French and is a tribute to all her yoga teachers over the years: Nadia Narain from Triyoga, Hortense Suleyman from Urban Retreat, Stewart Gilchrist from the East London School of Yoga — now a favourite amongst Frost’s Primrose Hill set.
Frost is still close with her old party pals Kate Moss and Rosemary Ferguson but admits “that side of things gets boring”. “We all like to have fun — and I can see it in my kids and what they’re doing — but in the last 15 years we’ve all really grown up.” Now, they prefer walks on Hampstead Heath, wild swimming (most recently, on a group holiday in St Tropez), and going out for dinner at 6pm “so we’re home by nine,” laughs Frost.
Ferguson is now a nutritionist with
her own detox meal line, The Five Day Plan, and all three “talk about health things” and practise yoga together. Moss, Ferguson and It girls Mary Charteris and Josephine de La Baume have items from Frost’s new line.
“It’s very Fame,” says Frost, showing me her Mantra shorts paired over black mesh tights, and yoga leggings with a red waistband and foot stirrups. The Eighties-inspired details are a nod to her dancing days while the “I Am Enough” bra and “I Am Strong” mat reflect her “yogi” side.
“I’m doing a lot of work with chakras and affirmations so I wanted the clothes to have elements of healing,” says Frost. Her sister Holly Davidson — 15 years her junior but with the same dark hair and delicate features — is the face of the brand, and Frost wants to grow it to be lifestyle line, not just clothing: a range of chakra sprays and oils are all in the pipeline.
Frost’s own spiritual journey has been a long one. She first started yoga 40 years ago with her mother but it was just nine years ago — on joining former yoga studio Alchemy in Camden — that she started practising “with every cell of my body”.
“I’d go there, read a book in the candlelight and have amazing food… I just started feeling so comfortable in my own skin. I felt safe and spiritual and wholesome, whereas before I felt all fragmented, like I didn’t know if I was coming or going — or who I was.” It was around that time that Frost met Gilchrist and began attending his retreats in India. “I was going through a difficult time — whether it was worrying about relationships or work or health or career or children,” she says, a nod to her divorce from actor Jude Law and struggles with postnatal depression. “Going to something like that where you really have to focus on meditation mantras got me through those difficult times.”
Frost wants to pass that onto her children. “Raff keeps asking to do yoga with me now,” she smiles, talking about her eldest son with Law, now 22. Her 18-year-old daughter, Iris, is also doing classes but Frost “[doesn’t] want to push anything.”
It’s all part of her newfound approach to yoga: “just keeping a gentle kind of calm and not getting obsessive,” says Frost, admitting she used to be “crazy” about exercise.
Rushing to a yoga class defeats the point, she’s learnt: now, she gets up early and practises a sun salutation routine, “whether that’s aligning my hips or opening up my shoulders”. She keeps a kettlebell in her bedroom for bone density.
“Sometimes 20 minutes is all I’ve got,” Frost continues, insisting she’ll stick to her daily yoga in India. “Other days I have a bit more but I’m not going to be fanatical.
“We’re now living a good 20 or 30 years longer so we have to keep healthier for longer. You also have to finance yourself, and your children, and your parents. It’s so important to be focused and calm because we’ve got to be the ones holding everything together.”