Model of the Week: Stella Tennant

I have to admit, the first time I saw Stella Tennant I didn’t much care for her. I thought she was very plain. But she’s grown on me. She’s plain, it’s true. There’s nothing unusual about her features. Yet she’s a top ranked supermodel, an icon. Stella in an anomaly in that she has celebrity appeal without being a celebrity. By celebrity appeal, I mean that she’s popular for who she is. And she’s a damn cool girl. She gets bookings just because she is so cool. She never smiles. She has piercings. She’s a British blue-blood who counts Princess Di as a cousin, but with a rock star attitude. That’s part of  her appeal. She has the social standing, and the money, to not give a shit about the whims of fashion, which of course attracts the fashion flock like nothing else. She’s made a career as the poster girl of Cool Britannia. her signature look – clean scrubbed face, unstyled hair, intense gaze – can be shocking at first. But I’ve come to admire her edginess and her stubborn dedication to her own self-hood. And of course her versatility and boyish androgyny is immensely fascinating.

(with Hannelore Knuts)

Coming Up

As if anyone needed another reason to love Paul McCartney even more. What makes Paul so ineffably charming is his steadfast refusal to take himself seriously. It would be very easy for him to decide “hey, I’m a big, important genius” and start behaving like a pompous twat. But he never does. He’s always been more interested in his home life than his image, and as a result he’s grown up to be one of our most likeable, well-adjusted, normal-seeming rock gods. He’s been accused of sliding through the second half of his career with a minimal amount of effort. That may be true, but he is Paul McCartney after all, and he can whip up a better ditty in his sleep than most people do in a lifetime. Coming Up is a perfect example (as is the rest of  McCartney II) of Paul making a ridiculously good song with absolutely no pretensions to anything but silly fun. The video is a masterpiece, no question. That Paul McCartney’s idea of comic relief is to poke fun at himself is endlessly endearing, but hardly a surprise. That he’s also paying (silly) homage to Ron Mael is surreal in the extreme.