Sleazenation

a

Georgina Cooper

1992. A flat in the cherry orchard council estate, Charlton, South London. Eagerly, Mrs Cooper cuts out the modelling competition advert from the tabloid paper. It sounds really good - the winner gets a contract with top agency premier. Perhaps Georgina, her 13-year-old daughter might want to try this?

After all, she cares little for her schooling - preferring hardcore house, gin, fags, her mountain bike - and has few prudent career plans up the sleeves of her rave top. But there are 15,000 other hopefuls simultaneously hunting out a flattering snap; the chances of winning are slender as the average cat-walking waif. And yet… yet…

photography: Corinne Day

1999. A smart hairdressing salon in central London. SN awaits our interviewee, famous model Georgina Cooper, who shall arrive any time now with her sister-in-law and mum. Georgina has been working her arse off recently; featured in both British and American Vogue (the latter, a mother and daughter-type feature with style icon Lauren Hutton) and shooting the new advertising campaign for The Gap - photographed by Richard Avedon, no less. Add to this a profusion of other high-profile campaigns under her belt (Hamnett, Istante, Sisley for example) plus regular runway strutting for the likes of Chalayan, Armani, Prada, Gucci and Versace, and, you get the picture: she's a busy G.

Today is leisure time, though. Time for a treat. So the trio are headed up West for the sort of top notch pamperings not often found in 'Cutz' and the like.

It's a little world in its own right, this place of hair. Fresh-faced primpers, dressed in black, glide around with an impressive economy of limb motion. In each mirror are reflected young, or pretending-to-be-young, unisex beauties. Their mobile phones keep shrilling; talk is mainly of fancy travel and/or media ventures: "Well, call Sue and ask her to find out if Darren can arrange something for Paris..." yelps one such nincompoop (probably talking to the speaking clock, really). Coffee percolates somewhere nearby and business, patently, is bristling. Snip-snip-snip... go special scissors. Psssss-psssss... hiss expensive lacquers. Hmmmmmm... moan good quality hair dryers.

Downstairs, very in-demand hair artiste Nichola Clarke (who does Georgina's do's) mixes her tints and potions with concentration and a spoon. She bears the remnants of a tan, having just spent 6 weeks as guardian of Leonardo DiCaprio's locks, while he filmed The Beach in Thailand. Nice work etc, but Nichola is not one to crow or harp on. Sporting a so-what? blob of hair gel on her T-shirt, Miss Clarke seems unaware that many teenage girls would greenly scratch out her eyes for such close proximity to the Hollywood prince who moistens their undercarriages...

SUDDENLY! The door bursts open, and a blond man canters forth. Temporarily dazzled by shafts of light glinting onto chrome hair dryers, SN thinks it is Leo himself - calling in for some streaks maybe? But it is actually harum-scarum flaxen-flicked Paul, a booker from the Premier modelling agency.

"Hi, I'm Paul from Premier," breathlessly confirms the Rod Hull-when-young lookalike, "Georgina's coming in NOW!"

Fucking hell. Moments later, a very tall, pale and beautiful young woman (mum and sister-in-law in tow) breezes in, sans ceremony: "Alright?" she grins - revealing the legendary gap between her teeth, and chucking her bag down. Juddering instructions are made, and coats extracted by a client liaison officer (or something) as other patrons gaze on nosily. Nichola whisks mum and sister-in-law away, and Georgina comfies herself alongside SN on the sofa.

We shall get to the glitz and gristle of modelling soon enough, impatient fashion slags. Georgina has been ill. What was it like having pleurisy, Georgina?

photography: Corinne Day

"Eurgh, it's a nightmare!" she comedy-grimaces - in strong South London twang. "I had a car accident in Milan a while ago, and from that season onwards [fashion, as opposed to weather-wise] I've constantly had something wrong with me. This season it was viral pleurisy! It feels like you're going to have a heart attack because the linings of your lungs are rubbing against each other. There's two linings and one fills up with mucus and swells up and rubs against the other [warming to the alarming theme] and that can actually collapse the lung. It feels like your heart hurts and it makes you breathless. I got pneumonia the season before that, and it didn't clear up, so that's why I got pleurisy. My left lung is completely scarred now so I've had to stop smoking." This is regaled neither self-pityingly, nor as a laughable London-esque "I'm dead fucked-up and trendy, me" pose. Georgina, it swiftly becomes apparent, says what she thinks, not what she thinks she should say. She's always been a bit of a tinker, like that: "I hated school," she recalls sensibly, "I never wanted to be there. I wasn't awkward towards my family, but I hated other people who weren't my family telling me what to do. A teacher'd be like, ‘Take your coat off Georgina,' and I'd be going 'Fuck you, who are you? I'm cold!' Now I'd love to go back and see all my teachers and apologise. Some of the stuff I did was really bad. I was pissed at 11 once when I'd only been at the school for three weeks. Me and a mate drank all this gin and I had to have my stomach pumped in hospital." (Which, ironically, is the sort of caper now more typically associated with big-time models than kids). "These days, I'm not really bothered about drinking, apart from the odd Jack Daniels," she adds, "I've got it out of my system."

As a child, did Georgina yearn-and-pine-and-dream-and-scweam-and-scweam until she was sick, because she wanted to be a Top Model? Did she want to be famous full stop?

"I knew my mum was going to send my picture to that competition," she explains, "and I was like [deadpan] 'yeah, whatever'. I didn't think anything would come of it..." So, no starry eyes then? "Nah, I just wanted to enjoy myself and be with my mates at that point. I'd go out and tell my mum I was staying at me mate's house and really I'd be out and at a club, like the Labyrinth in Dalston [fearsome gurn-fest of yore]. I love all that hard-core, old skool stuff." (Georgina's not being all 'back in the day' - the invite for her forthcoming 21st birthday bash at Cloud 9 states: 'BE BRAVE AND COME TO MY RAVE'). She continues, "I didn't know what / wanted as a career, but I thought I might get into nursing or veterinary work - and I'd still like to do that in the future." (Georgina and her adored Staffordshire bull terrier, Charlie, are familiar sights on the mutt-walking circuit of Welling, where she now resides.)

Only fourteen years old, and she won a contract with Premier. There were tears of excitement... disbelief... confusion... And then? For two or so barren years, few wanted to hire a pubescent girl with a toothy gap in her gob.

"People wouldn't try me - no-one seemed interested in using someone different," recalls Georgina, none-too-botheredly. "At that young age my body hadn't properly developed; I had this little waist, but then these legs that were straight."

It took the visionary eyes of photographer Corrine Day (who first championed Kate Moss, several years previously, and took the shots presented on these very pages) to spot the potential. "Corrine worked with me, we did loads of stuff together when nobody would even test me. She liked the fact that my body was changing and developing. And from then on everyone started to work with me - it's true that it happens like that..."

Georgina Cooper is, in reality, not the best ambassador for her industry. Why? Because, thankfully, she deigns not to spiel its standard gushy spiel, or airbrush away the dubious realities of being paid to be gawped at/envied. Unlike various of her contemporaries, she has hung onto her real personality, not traded it in for a wanky persona. And, certainly she had no trouble getting her head through the door today. But has this massive success never ricocheted off the ego-o-meter? Never turned her frou-frou?

"No, Never." She insists. "It's difficult during the shows because you're constantly around people who're like, 'Dahling! Sweetie!’ But with me, I travel with another model or with my booker and we just have a laugh about things and keep ourselves down on the ground. We'll just take the piss, like if we've just had a conversation with someone, we'll be going after 'What the fuck was that about?' [Laughs]. There are a lot of luvvie-luvvie people, some of them are genuinely just like that. They've been brought up that way and they don't know any different. Others are just all made up - a quarter of fashion is made up."

photography: Corinne Day

True. It always seems that the people at the centre of fashion - the innovative designers, photographers, stylists, art directors and so on - are relatively sane; unaffected by the pomp and ceremony surrounding them. You are unlikely to spot them swanking by the bar in the latest naff watering hole. "You can really see the difference in people who work in fashion, but go home to a normal life afterwards, from those who live it twenty-four-seven," confirms Georgina. "The conversations are totally different - about people, about life, war. They [the other type] don't see the reality of things at all, it's ridiculous sometimes."

Nowadays, she has sufficient confidence to lambast the worst aspects of the modelling world. Georgina's first forays, however, saw her less self-assured. “Bitchiness does happen, yes," she remembers. "I wasn't exactly welcomed into all this. I was frightened, doing my first shows, and I was really panicking. Kate Moss was friendly straight away and said 'Calm down! They won't give you any money for getting ulcers! Take it in your stride!' She was really nice."

But, while Georgina might happily point out the negative aspects of her profession, she fully appreciates the differences she can make by slogging away at it.

"My family cycle has been a poor cycle for generations and I'm going to be the one to change that," she promises, "I want to make it a secure family, rather than a family that's constantly struggling for food and water! We're going into the year 2000, so it's got to happen: A new start for the Cooper family."

For as long as possible, Georgina avoided working abroad, not nakedly ambitious enough to stray too far from said family and friends: "I used to hate going away. I don't hate it as much now, but l've realised that I cannot have a career in modelling and stay in England. I tried as hard as I could to stay - I stayed until I was 17, and at that point I had to go. Now, my mates are always like, ‘Where've you been on holiday this time?' and I'm like, 'I haven't been on fucking holiday, I've been working!' At the end of the day, though, how many people get the chance to go to all these different places in their lifetime? It's just, when you're 17 and doing it, it's not nice. You're around other foreign girls, all trying to get what you're trying to get. It's so lonely, and that's where drugs can become involved because they're not secure in themselves...”

(Please note: Models talking about drugs can induce seizures in their bookers/agents/Press Officers etc. At this point SN notice our trusty Premier representative, Paul, tweaking his flick nervously. Keep your hair on.)

Seeing as you broached the subject, has anyone ever accused you, Georgina, of being a heroin chic? "Not to my face, but I've heard rumours, though, about me," she begins. "Even people I thought were friends have said stuff about me. Like, in... March 1998, I think, I left Paris from the shows at the weekend to go home to my older brother's wedding. But a model told a friend of mine that I'd been flown out of Paris by air ambulance because I was anorexic, right? And she said I was on drugs! [Sounds incredulous] I just couldn't believe it, because six months before, that actual girl who said it was on fucking heroin herself and had been for years! And she had the cheek to slag me for something that hadn't even happened, you know?" So did you twat her one, then? Did you? "The next season I was going to confront her. [Laughing now] I went up to her and shouted 'Oi!" and grabbed her, and she turned round and goes 'I'm pregnant!' I was like 'Shit!' - so that stopped me in my tracks..."

Hmmmm... HmmmMMMMMMM.. Suddenly, we are interrupted by the increasing volume of Nichola Clarke's hairdryer. SN senses a subtle, secret coiffure code in effect, urging us to get a frigging move on, as it's time for Georgina's do.

HmmmMMMMMM... there she blows again. So, sadly, there's no more time to talk with the Georgina - whose brother'll smack her, if she ever camply calls him 'dahling'. Or the Georgina who gets pestered, by geezers more than girls, for tittle-tattle about supermodels.

HmmmMMMMMMM! Or the Georgina who doesn't know what to wear to her own party, because if she goes "Too fashiony" her mates'll take the piss.

HmmMMMMMMMMM!! Or the Georgina whose favourite designer is Antonio Berardi - because "He's blindin'...”

HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM!!! (It's getting very hot in here, now. Nichola fair brandishes that hairdryer, weapon-like).

HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM!!!! Or the Georgina whose parents are "Proud and overwhelmed by what's happening to me."

HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM!!!!!