Yasmin le Bon interview: ‘Our kids are not inheriting anything. There is no trust fund’
Yasmin Le Bon is pleased that we’ve agreed to meet outside a café not far from her home in Putney, south-west London, because she’s been able to drop some shoes at the cobbler’s en route. “Multitasking,” she beams, before launching into a rant about the wasteland Putney High Street has become and how the Boots on her local shopping parade has closed down. “The lady there knew everyone’s names and what pills they needed,” she wails.
So quotidian is the chat, you have to remind yourself you’re not nattering to an old friend or neighbour but to one of our greatest supermodels. Her face graced the covers of the very first editions of both US and UK Elle in the 1980s, who walked the runway for the likes of Chanel, headed campaigns for Dior, Ralph Lauren, Guess and Calvin Klein and also bagged her generation’s heartthrob: Duran Duran frontman Simon Le Bon – who has just been made an MBE in the King’s Birthday Honours.
Le Bon turns 60 in October. “When I did the [catwalk] shows in the early days, a lot of girls used to lie about their ages. They stayed 30 forever, but I can never lie about mine because they always print it next to my name,” she smiles ruefully. She doubts she’ll throw a party. “I know it’s a milestone, but I’m conflicted. These people who think everything’s fantastic about getting older obviously don’t have my back issues and saggy bum. But I’m just grateful I’ve made it this far. I never imagined I would and I now definitely want to hang on for a bit longer.”
Of that she’s assured: 43 years in she’s still modelling – albeit not as relentlessly as before – recently appearing in global campaigns for Giorgio Armani and Fendi, while she’s the brand ambassador for Boodles jewellery. No one could have predicted she – and her contemporaries Linda Evangelista, Cindy Crawford (“I had lunch with her last time I was in LA”) and Christy Turlington – would still be working on the eve of 60. “But we were having such a good time [modelling] we just wouldn’t be silenced. The phone was still ringing so why should we go away because somebody had made up some rule you can’t do this after a certain age?”
Work aside, she’s brought up three daughters: Amber, 34, a model turned DJ; Saffron, 32, a jazz singer (and mother of Taro, who’s nearly six and Skye, four) and Tallulah, 29, a fine art student.
Until recently, they all lived in the family’s sprawling home, but Le Bon decided to renovate (“we’d trashed the place so much”) and threw everyone out (she and Simon are currently living in a rented flat). “But they’re still nearby, the umbilical cord hasn’t been cut,” she affirms. “I don’t know whether it’s the right thing for them, but for me it’s pure heaven. They’re my best friends.” (As proof, Tallulah later joins her mother for lunch and proves a total hoot advising me on acts to check out at Glastonbury and commenting with a broad grin when discussing her sisters’ musical talents: “Amber’s really musical, Saffron’s got the pipes, I’ve just got [great] taste.”)
She says her daughters never felt embarrassed by their famous parents but implies it may have been tough for them to also be in creative fields, without reaching the same level of success. “I’d love my kids to do normal jobs,” she sighs. “It’s hard for all children who have parents who have excelled in any field. I see it a lot with other friends who’ve done very, very well – their children are struggling. It sounds really bad but there is a curse of wealth. If you work for it, it’s great. If you inherit it, not so.” She shrieks with laughter. “But our kids are not inheriting anything! There is no trust fund.”
Le Bon’s poised and huge fun, yet also totally open about the fact she’s an anxious soul, who’s benefited previously from therapy “when I had layers of issues I couldn’t talk about with friends or family.” She confides the fact that just sitting with her back to the road is huge progress.
“I’m a very fearful, worse-case-scenario person; I spend a great deal of time just calming myself down. Now I’m thinking, ‘What if a bus jumps onto the pavement?’ But I’ve let you sit [with the view of the traffic] because I’ve realised I can’t control everything. It’s been a lifetime of working through these issues and I think today I’m relaxed enough to have achieved it!”
Is Simon, 65, more chilled? “Not really. On an aeroplane he always turns to me and says, ‘So you know which door to use in an emergency?’ We have to have an escape plan.”
Le Bon grew up in Oxford, the younger of two daughters, where her British mother, Patricia, was a window-dresser for a department store and her Iranian father, Iradj, taught photography at a polytechnic. She attended the local comprehensive, before being spotted at 17 by a model scout in Oxford. By 19 she was one of the highest paid models in the world.
In 1985, aged 21, she married Simon – who’d seen her on a magazine cover and called her agent demanding a date – in the grotty Oxford register office. The band were at the height of their fame, with their single, The Reflex, number one in both the UK and the US, but the fact it was he – not she – who was punching above his weight was echoed in the very first episode of beloved sitcom Absolutely Fabulous in 1992. Where the ditsy assistant Bubble exclaims: “Very modern of [Simon] to have taken his wife’s name.” “Simon still wets himself at that!” Le Bon shrieks. Did she feel threatened by Simon’s groupies? “Oh no!” she exclaims. “They were just fans.”
It was their marriage, she says, that prevented her ending up a casualty of her brutal industry. “Simon saved me. Without being in a love bubble with him, God knows what ditch I would have ended up in. I would have had a cracking time and that would have been the end of me. I’d have fallen off a cliff.”
Similarly, having Amber at age 24 gave her new grit and she returned to the catwalk within weeks of giving birth. “My kids were the making of me, without them I would have remained an utterly useless human being with no drive and ambition. I used to be really intimidated by commonplace things – going to the post office or paying bills or finding a plumber you trusted; regular grown-up stuff that you have to deal with. But when you have kids, you just have to drop all that and get on with it. Being a mother propelled me and gave me motivation to be a professional and really take on the challenges head on that I had shied away from my whole life, because there was nobody else doing it for me: no personal assistant, no secretary, no manager – just me and if I didn’t open the mail and pay the bills the bailiffs would be at the door.”
Hang on! Simon had hits such as Rio, Planet Earth and Hungry Like the Wolf in his back catalogue. Surely she could have been a stay-at-home mother? “No, I had to work for money like everybody else. Simon worked exceptionally hard, was exceptionally successful, never stopped – but he signed incredibly bad deals. I don’t know why it’s OK for artists and musicians to be exploited. People say, ‘well, that’s commonplace’, but that doesn’t make it OK – you don’t get what you deserve.”
Le Bon talks animatedly, laughing a lot and with a complete lack of airs. I’m sure she has plenty of starry friends but she doesn’t talk about them, while any questions about Duran Duran are deflected as Simon’s territory. Naturally, she looks fabulous in a black Ro & Zo dress (she has me check the label so I can confirm she’s a size 12) accessorised by a medley of jewellery, a jaunty multicoloured scarf tied round her neck and high lace-up brown suede Marc Jacobs boots – “incredibly old”.
Her black hair (which she admits happily to dying) falls poker straight to her shoulders, her face is as striking as ever, helped – again confessed freely – by “one or two” Botox sessions a year. She eats and drinks sensibly, has a couple of sessions a week with a personal trainer focusing mainly on muscle tone, and after years of dodging supplements now swears by a liquid collagen Gold Collagen Forte Ageless (￡59.50 for 10 doses) to plump her skin and boost her energy levels (“it’s really strong stuff – only do one shot, never two or you’ll be off to the Americas,” she cautions me).
What’s it like being an active grandmother? “It’s a great club to be in, but I have to keep up with these little scuffles; I want to play football with them and fling them over my shoulders.”
Like all middle-aged women, Le Bon has bugbears about the younger generation. She “gets stressed” about how schools aren’t teaching them “real life lessons – how to sort your rubbish out, how to pay the bills, how to do a tax return, how to use your fridge leftovers, how to be a responsible, civilised pedestrian. And cyclists should have to take a test,” she adds firmly.
What does she think about the Conservative’s manifesto plans for national service for 18-year-olds? “People used to talk about bringing back national service in my day; it’s just a 1970s trend that’s come back. I was actually somebody who would have wholeheartedly stood up and done it – I loved all things physical. I would have enjoyed the training, learning things I’d never learnt at school, the camaraderie. And we do have an issue with the smallest standing army we’ve ever had. But at the moment it’s nothing but a device – telling people what they want to hear.”
Everyone comments on the Le Bons’ 38 years of marriage, a longevity that’s rarer than four-leaved clovers in their respective industries. Many relationships are scuppered when both are constantly travelling but she’s adamant it was their punishing work schedules that kept the couple together.
“We’d never have lasted if we’d spent the first 15 years in each other’s pockets; I found it challenging living with someone who’s a very strong personality, finding that middle ground. But now we want to be together all the time. I go on tour with Simon, which I never used to.”
When he returns from a long stint away there’s a period of readjustment for both. “He’s used to having everything done for him, then it’s ‘Simon, take the dog out, here are the poo bags,’” she chuckles.
Despite her neuroses, in her early career, Le Bon (who never witnessed any #MeToo misbehaviour) was unscarred by her profession’s brutal ethos. “Modelling is not a clever place for many people to be. But I quickly developed a thick skin and a really professional code where it was just about the job, it wasn’t about me. Very rarely did rejection affect me. And I was exceptionally lucky because I was successful.”
Yet as she entered her forties, both she and Simon had to come to terms with no longer being the hottest creatures on the block. “We did everything the wrong way round – we were extremely successful very, very young and then it was a question of how do you maintain it?”
Duran Duran can still pack arenas with the nostalgia crowd, but her bookings became less frequent. “People weren’t beating the door down and by carrying on infinitely longer than I’d ever imagined a model to carry on, I put myself in quite a dangerous place psychologically. We’re harsh enough on ourselves without feeling like we’re judged on our age, our weight, how we look in general and whether we can do our job properly – that’s a pretty poor place to be emotionally. It made me realise how vulnerable a lot of people are who do this job. I’d said it previously but I didn’t really understand it. It doesn’t matter how gorgeous you are, if you can’t take the knocks it will chew you up. I have a lot more compassion now as to what insecurity is.”
She was especially floored by the menopause around her 50th birthday. “I was a sweaty, bloated, depressed woman who couldn’t understand why she couldn’t remember anything.” Now Le Bon’s learning to set less store by her professional identity. “It’s a dangerous thing. The other day somebody asked me very, very innocently: ‘Oh, so what are you working on right now?’ I went into a complete tailspin and was in a dark place for weeks afterwards. It was ridiculous – she was just making chit-chat – but it really unbalanced me. That made me sit up and think about what’s important to me, what identity is, and am I judging myself by other people’s standards, or am I judging myself by my standards?”
Generally she’s “angry” at the way today’s models are obliged to constantly promote themselves on social media. “So much is asked of them. I want to turn around to companies and say, ‘Are you going to pay me double because I’m doing a marketing job now as well?’ And how do you ever switch off now when every two minutes you’re thinking, ‘Oh, that would make a good picture.’
What I loved about my job was I wanted a simple life and I really got away with absolute murder. There were exceptionally long, tiring days and I sacrificed a lot, but when the working day ended I didn’t have to think about work until the next day. The idea now that we all have to be entrepreneurs, working all the time, drives me potty. We’re sending out entirely wrong messages to young people about what success in life really is. I know it sounds like a tired cliché and we all have to pay the bills, and that it’s ripe coming from somebody who can pay the bills, but money really isn’t where the good stuff comes from in life.”
Le Bon discusses all these issues with her offspring. “They feel quite lucky to have left school when social media was in its infancy.” She was relaxed when Amber started modelling, appearing in the likes of the Victoria’s Secret show and in campaigns for Moschino and Dolce and Gabbana – “she’s tough enough. But [my daughters] have also learned the hard way not to read the comments [beneath social media posts] because they can destroy you. Simon never reads any of it. In the past, horrendous things have been written about him and had he not been a strong person, in a loving relationship, that could have been the end of him. There’s so much fear, hostility and pain going on in the world, we don’t have to add to it.”
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