Can Alexa really rescue M&S fashion?
She’s feted by anorexic girls and mixes with a fast, louche metropolitan set. Is Alexa Chung REALLY the woman to lure Mrs Middle Britain back to Marks?
CoMEDIAN Noel Fielding recently observed: ‘Nobody wants a real job any more. Everyone wants t o be Alexa Chung.’ He has a point. Miss Chung’s name means next to nothing to millions of Britons over 40, but — clever, pretty and exceedingly rich, feted by designers and fashion magazines alike and boasting a galaxy of famous friends, but with no discernible day job — she leads an enviable existence.
That life became a little more charmed this week with the news she has become the new face of Marks & Spencer. Chung, 32, is to create a clothes collection for the store based on designs from its archives.
Whether it will impress its traditional clientele — for whom Miss Chung’s metropolitan world might as well be another planet — remains to be seen.
Pictures released yesterday showed her wearing a pie-crust blouse in baby pink and l ooking at a print of some androgynous brogue shoes — a strong hint they will form part of the collection.
Miss Chung told Vogue magazine, who declared the partnership a ‘clever match’, that she has ‘always had an affection for Marks & Spencer’.
She added: ‘It was so fun to be given the keys to the M&S archive and such a treat to get to cherry pick the very best of its vast collection.’
Given that Miss Chung’s sometimes shockingly stick-thin limbs have caused concern even among her admirers, she is an unlikely poster girl for the fuller-figured M&S customer.
Certainly, that she has been catapulted to such a coveted role seems like another stroke of luck in her oddly charmed life.
But suggest this to Miss Chung and you will be met with short shrift. ‘When I work really, really hard this is something that irks me,’ she remarked.
What this work amounts to has been a mystery to many. Following an early career as a model and a stint on music TV — both noted graveyards of youthful ambition — she has achieved fame among younger fashion lovers. Though as what is a moot point.
FoR she has found a lucrative niche in being little more than someone who wears clothes that others copy. Chung, whose daily choice of outfits is studied forensically by her fans, has only to pair the strangest of garments for a new look to be born.
She said: ‘ If I’m wearing something really normal and boring, it’s like torture.’
U.S. Vogue calls her: ‘ A style bombshell who flattens the best efforts of any American counterpart with the indescribable force of her courageous chic.’
Mulberry went as far as to name a bag after her. Needless to say, the £1,100 Alexa bag became a bestseller, helping to boost the brand’s profits by 72 per cent when it was launched in 2010.
Never, it seems, should one underestimate the economic power of a very thin, pretty girl who looks adorable in a Peter Pan collar and loafers.
In recent months she has been picking up contracts at a rate that would not disgrace one of the fame-hungry towie mob. She is a face of L’oreal hair dye and Longchamp bags, and has launched her own shopping app, Villoid. There is also a ‘collection’ with A G Jeans. The L’oreal contract alone is said to be worth £300,000.
The M&S deal for her ‘curated’ collection of 31 pieces will only add to her fortune, estimated at £5 million, but probably approaching double that.
The most recently filed accounts for her company, The Last Battalion Ltd, show net assets of more than £3 million, with £1 million in cash and no loans. Last summer she set up two companies, Alpha Charlie and Yankee Zulu.
She is on the books of Independent Talent, which looks after Strictly judge Bruno Tonioli. She has an agent for her occasional DJ work and a commercial agent in LA. Then there is a publicist, plus five model agents.
It seems her party- l oving persona — she is often found in the private members’ club Soho House with Pixie Geldof and pop star Rita ora — co-exists with a canny young woman who has carved out a role as the face of the younger generation.
With a house in London’s trendy Dalston and another in New York, and companies falling over themselves to give her freebies, hers is the most gilded of existences. She could probably never have to work again.
So how did it all start? Alexa was raised with her three siblings in the Hampshire village of Privett by her father Phil, a retired graphics designer whom she describes as ‘three-quarters Chinese’, and housewife mother Gill. It is her mother to whom Alexa attributes her style. She was signed to Storm aged 16.
She achieved two As and a B at A-level at her state-school sixth form Peter Symonds College and was offered a place to study English at King’s College London, but was too busy with her modelling career. She said in interviews the job gave her ‘low self-esteem’ and required her to ‘strip in front of creepy men’.
She has been cited on blogs as a ‘thinspiration’ by young women with eating disorders. She said: ‘I understand how, if you don’t know me and I just represent something, yeah [my body shape] might be annoying, but when people were going on about how thin I was, I thought, you don’t know what’s going on in my life.’
Her big break came in 2006 when she became co-presenter of Channel 4’s music show Popworld. She was noted for her sarcasm, famously correcting the grammar of a musician in mid-interview. She later said: ‘I thought “You’re a bunch of idiots” and I guess I didn’t hide it.’
She was hired by the weekend youth strand T4 and her hectic social life, which included friendships with model Agyness Deyn and socialite Daisy Lowe, began to get her noticed. As did her romance with Arctic Monkeys’ Alex Turner — not long after he had reputedly turned down Kate Moss. She has also reportedly enjoyed a flirtation with the newly uncoupled Chris Martin.
She is onto her latest famous boyfriend, the Swedish actor Alexander Skarsgard.
Meanwhile, she professes the fame is a little baffling — and that she and all her famous friends think the same. ‘ It’s fodder for us to laugh at.’
Let’s hope that the joke isn’t now on M&S and its devoted —but sometimes longsuffering—customers.