LA VIE EN ROSE
An extraordinarily successful businesswoman whose annual earnings of $11.5 million now put her in the top three of the world’s most highly paid supermodels, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley has remained a woman’s woman, with the ability to inspire her legions
Los Angeles is the kind of place that wears you out. It’s a sullen, sunless March afternoon and I’ve arrived, neurotically early, to meet Rosie Huntington-Whiteley at a new member’s club in West Hollywood, which turns out to be so cool and cleverly disguised that my taxi driver can’t find it. When he finally does – it is masquerading as a bungalow on an otherwise nondescript residential strip – I’m asked to hand over my iPhone before being allowed in. An unsmiling hostess slaps branded stickers over its camera lens, front and back.
‘A gentle reminder that we do not welcome social media,’ she says, before declining my jet-lagged request for coffee and sending me off to wait in a corner with a glass of tap water. I dressed up this morning, but feel all wrong. LA does that, somehow. What’s our English rose doing in a city like this?
The first time I met Rosie Huntington-Whiteley was in 2011 when she had just moved here to live with the English actor Jason Statham, now her fiancé and father of their 22-month-old son Jack. Back then, she was a perfectly ordinary girl in possession of the most extraordinary physicality; someone who had spent much of her career modelling lingerie, a Victoria’s Secret Angel and Pirelli-calendar pin-up who was now trying to seduce Hollywood. We had breakfast together at the Beverly Hills Hotel, the epicentre of power dining. She was 24 and it was her first proper interview, apart from men’s mags, and she was endearingly nervous, hands folded neatly on the table in front of her, a look of polite and serious concentration on that exquisite face. ‘I’ve worked every day since I was 16 years old,’ she said. ‘I’ve tried to be professional in every way. I have really dedicated myself to my career. Yes, I am determined. You have to be if you want to continue working. It doesn’t just hand itself to you.’
Eight years later, she arrives exactly as scheduled – many things have changed, but not Rosie’s manners. She’s wearing high-waisted jeans, a slim sweater, Jessica McCormack diamond earrings and her five-carat Edwardian engagement ring. A black Hermès Kelly bag – a more understated choice than the celebrity-mandated Birkin – hangs casually from an arm. She tells me she crashed her new Jeep into the back of Statham’s car on their driveway earlier, laughing, which she does a lot. She talks with enthusiasm, her enunciation careful and precise. Clearly, she’s still highly motivated – but now she exudes a more polished professionalism as well as the glossy, glamorous vitality that is her signature. ‘I go through moments of feeling that I want to be back in London,’ she says, ‘but right now I am really happy here. Being homesick is something I’ve learnt to live with. When I first arrived, I was like, “Am I going to act? Am I still modelling?” That took a couple of years to figure out. I would have periods when I wasn’t working – that’s the life of a model – and would find myself a little bit lost. But since becoming a mum, I’ve felt so much more confident within my own skin and much more confident about who I am. It’s been life-changing.’
This is Rosie’s sixth cover story for Harper’s Bazaar and the third time I’ve interviewed her – on every occasion she’s been charming and self-effacing, generous and giving. She wears her beauty lightly; what comes through most emphatically is her desire to do well, to behave well. ‘I just want to come across like a decent person,’ she told me once. ‘I want to make my family proud.’ Her parents are still together, still living in the Devon farmhouse where she grew up. ‘I have that solid background,’ she says. The fact she remains so relatable may go some way to explaining her phenomenal success; for as well as starring in two feature films (Transformers: Dark of the Moon in 2011 and Mad Max: Fury Road in 2015) and continuing to model, choosing allegiances carefully and strategically, Rosie has also spent the years since our first meeting becoming a multi-millionaire businesswoman. Forbes estimated her earnings in 2018 as $11.5 million, placing her third in its list of the world’s most highly paid models, just behind Kendall Jenner and Karlie Kloss. A majority of that comes from her work with M&S, where she has a bestselling line of lingerie – one in three bras sold in its stores is from her collection – as well as, more recently, beauty and fragrance. ‘It’s something that’s for everybody,’ she says.
Supermodel she may be, but Rosie is also the very definition of a woman’s woman, which is why she wants to talk honestly now about how the past two years have been on a personal level, aside from that professional success. ‘One of my favourite things about being a mum is how it connects me to other women,’ she says. ‘I think I would be doing a disservice not only to myself but also to them if I weren’t open about my experience. I left home at 16 and had Jack when I was 30 – that’s a long time to focus on myself and my work, and I’m grateful that I got everything I needed to out of my system, but it’s been a big adjustment. Though I really felt ready to have a baby, it still pulls the rug out from underneath you. I am obsessed by him. I’ve never been more in love in my whole life; it blows everything else out of the water. But it’s just so overwhelming. It encompasses every single emotion I feel you could have as a human being and at such a heightened level. I don’t think I’ve been depressed at all, but there definitely have been periods over the past 18 months when
‘Motherhood is so overwhelming. It encompasses every single emotion, and at such a heightened level’
things are great and you think you’re on top of it, then maybe when there’s a lot on the schedule and it’s overwhelming… that can cause anxiety, you know.’
Perhaps unsurprisingly for someone whose curvaceous athleticism has been the foundation of her career – combined with a seemingly effortless ability to flit between girlish wholesomeness and full-on sex appeal – Rosie says the changes to her body caused by pregnancy were the most difficult thing to deal with. ‘It was a struggle for me, if I can be really candid. I gained a lot of weight; a lot more than people around me expected. I do not regret it – but I had a long way to go once I was cradling this baby. You give birth and then, after a certain amount of time, you look in the mirror and you’re like, “Right, I’ve got to get back. I’ve got to get back to me.”’ It took a year of training and discipline, she says. ‘I’m not joking. It took a year to the month to lose every single pound. Even after that, it took several more months before I could go on a shoot and feel good. But interestingly, it was a year of being really uncomfortable in my skin, and refinding my identity – as a woman, as a mother, having a career, being in a relationship – and finally being confident with that. Now, my perception of what I thought of as feeling great and looking great has shifted. I’m stronger, both physically and mentally. I feel, probably for the first time, that I’m a woman rather than a girl. It’s been a really great shift to see myself in the mirror and to be OK with the imperfection.’
We talk for a while about this reality versus the filtered vision of Instagram, which she agrees has been hugely important to her career. ‘I always want to be respectful of my personal life, because other people are involved in that, so I use it as a work tool. It has allowed models, who were always seen as quote unquote onedimensional figures, to create a more well-rounded vision.’ She pauses and adds: ‘Well, as well-rounded as it can be on a place where you see everyone at their best.’ She feels a sense of responsibility to the young women who view her page: ‘Do they leave feeling inspired? Do they leave feeling creative? Do they leave feeling positive from their experience? Or do they leave feeling insecure and unworthy? I certainly know, as a human being, that there are people I would perhaps rather not see on my feed.’ She pauses. ‘I don’t want anybody not to feel good.’
With 9.2 million followers, Rosie is in a position to leverage her online celebrity: as Forbes noted in a story on Kylie Jenner last year, ‘Social media has weaponised fame to the point that a realestate mogul can be president and a 20-year-old from a family “famous for being famous” can approach billionaire status by monetising that to the extreme.’ Rosie has taken a different approach, however. In May 2018, she launched Rose Inc, a digital-beauty forum dreamt up at her kitchen table during pregnancy: ‘Towards the very end, I had this urge to be really creative.’ This is not a brand based only on herself, though: like Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop, it has a broader reach, combining industry-insider curation and inspiration with the kind of wordof-mouth advice passed on from friend to friend. There are currently seven employees and communal offices where she goes every day. ‘It feels like my whole career led me to this point,’ she says. ‘I’ve never felt comfortable just waiting for the phone to ring – because there have been times when it didn’t. So I wanted to build something, instead of sitting back and being submissive. My mum always used to say, “Life’s not going to hand it to you on a plate, Rosie. Go out there and grab it.” I want this to be a platform to open up dialogue that feels two-way. It’s not like me sharing something on Instagram and then leaving. I didn’t call it after myself because I want it to be bigger than me – it’s a way to connect women.’
To that end, her new role is not only as entrepreneur and editor – ‘I can’t call myself CEO,’ she protests – but also as cheerleader for a more positive, inclusive take on beauty. In an editorial on the site, she writes: ‘Being confident doesn’t require you to be perfect. It doesn’t mean you have to be the prettiest or smartest person in the room. It just means that you have to take a good look at yourself and choose to like who you see.’ That’s not a message you get from Instagram but it’s one we should all share. Everything’s Rosie again.
‘My mum always
used to say, “Life’s not going to hand it to you on a plate, Rosie. Go out there and grab it”’