It doesn’t get more rock and roll – not at 10am on a Tuesday, anyway – than lounging on a Biedermeier sofa upholstered in orange velvet, drinking coffee made by Simon Le Bon, in the latter’s study, which is filled with guitar cases, a black lacquered upright Blüthner piano and a life-sized cardboard cutout of Nick Rhodes, co-founder and keyboardist of Duran Duran.
‘That’s very good for scaring off burglars,’ deadpans Yasmin Le Bon. ‘When we go out, we put Nick centre-front in the bay window.’
The Le Bons’ home of 28 years is probably the least pretentious-feeling celebrity pad I’ve ever visited. Large? Undoubtedly. Staff? Well, there’s Valerie, their long-term housekeeper who bustles around the kitchen, navigating the three dog baskets. And the dog walker who takes Willow (the English bull terrier who’s quite The Handful) because Yasmin’s back can no longer cope with her lead-tugging.
Their double-fronted south-west London villa, with its white, wisteria-smothered walls, has a carriage drive large enough for their two Land Rovers, an Audi hatchback, plus at least two more cars, but it is also categorically a home. Inside, mid 20th-century classics jostle with 19th-century ones and ginormous, triffid-like cheese plants. On the walls, contemporary artworks (Bert Irvin) live next to black-and-white photographs. In their lofty drawing room, which has become their 26-year-old youngest daughter Tallulah’s art studio, there’s nowhere to sit down because her latest piece will be constructed from 100 Perspex balls, which are occupying all the armchairs.
‘Now she just has to make an electric board,’ says Yasmin patiently. Patience, she says, is a quality she acquired an extra level of during the past 16 months. ‘From the youngest age I wanted to be another person – much more patient, tolerant and open-minded. My father was so unmaterialistic…’
She says this as if she falls short of his paradigm. Though even at the height of Le Bon mania in the ’80s and early ’90s – and as a couple they were huge – ‘Yasmin was always the first to help you carry the bags,’ Harriet Jagger, a stylist who frequently worked with her, once told me. ‘I couldn’t ever allow myself to be part of a privileged ghetto,’ says Yasmin. ‘I can’t let go of my father’s example.’
Through lockdown there were nine adults chez Le Bon: Yasmin and Simon, their three daughters, Amber, 31, Saffron, 29 (who lives in a cottage abutting Simon and Yasmin’s garden, with her partner Benjamin and two young sons, Taro, three, and Skye, one), and Tallulah, plus boyfriends and Yasmin’s niece, who works for the NHS and is having breakfast in the kitchen.
‘Check out the dead Christmas trees,’ laughs Yasmin, gesturing towards the two pots and their brown, drooping contents by the front door. ‘I’m a rubbish multitasker,’ she adds.
This would have niggled a few years ago. We’ve sat next to each other at many fashion dinners and I’ve heard her fretting about her lack of direction. Initially I assumed it was modesty. When you’re that beautiful and successful and a well-brought-up Brit – while her photographer father is Iranian, Yasmin grew up in Oxford – it’s practically de rigueur to undersell yourself.
It strikes me that she views her modelling career as, at best, a passive achievement. Sure, she worked day and night, but it all came quite easily. At 17, she was scouted in Oxford by a local agent. At 19, she took herself off to Models 1 in London, where she’s been ever since. Notwithstanding the close-knit family she’s nurtured, the 36-year marriage, and the 40-year career that’s still going strong (she recently appeared in a shoot for British Vogue and last year was in Fendi’s digital fashion show), part of her feels frustrated.
‘I wouldn’t call it a career,’ she says. ‘My work – and, in a way, Simon’s – went in the opposite direction to most people’s. We had incredible success when we were really young. After that it’s more a question of trying to maintain it’.
Does that sound as though the therapy she finally took up during a bout of depression a few years ago is working? ‘My daughters started getting quite upset about how much I put myself down. Initially I went to show a friend that therapy could be helpful. After about five minutes, the therapist said, “Never mind the friend, you need this…’’’
Yasmin is not against taking antidepressants, but ‘when I became a grandmother, and my father was dying, I didn’t want anything that would numb either the highs or lows’. While she still struggles with down days and at the moment, despite going on HRT, her sleep is all over the place, she’s coming to terms with what she used to see as failings.
‘Therapy can be really useful. I’m quite an insular person, like my mother, so it’s useful to talk.’ And she adds that it’s helped her accept her limitations: ‘Not everyone has to be an incredible entrepreneur or posting on social media 24/7, right?’
With or without social media, Yasmin has orchestrated a modelling career of extraordinary longevity, even launching her own clothing line for Wallis back in 2010. While she doesn’t praise Philip Green, whose Arcadia Group Wallis was part of (‘his biggest problem in business is that he doesn’t listen’) she acknowledges that the experience was a huge learning curve. ‘I’m really grateful as I learned the other side of the business.’
Amber, a model-slash-DJ, drifts downstairs in a baggy cardigan, big owlish specs and leggings. The permanently dressed-to-kill Kardashians this family are not. Yasmin has genuine style. ‘I used to do a lot of jumble-sale shopping before it was called thrift and I loved photography, so I guess you develop an eye.’ Today, she’s make-up free, her hair is long and she’s wearing a pair of skinny Made in Heaven jeans, a Gucci T-shirt celebrating The Lady Garden, a charity raising awareness about gynaecological cancers, the ‘Elton John-worthy’ socks Valerie gave her (the Le Bons are big on flamboyant socks) and a pair of fluffy lime slippers.
When she’s pulling out the stops, she exudes a loose, polished flair that flies from boho (she loves Isabel Marant and Preen) to rock chic, taking in androgynous tailoring. (She’ll be talking to me about her style – and how it has changed over the years – at Stella Live online on Friday 18 June.) She has donated mountains of clothing to charity but even so, the Le Bons are currently availing themselves of two storage facilities nearby.
Although she moans she’s not at her match weight at the moment (‘It was so much easier in my 20s and 30s, probably because I was constantly running after three small girls’), she works out regularly with small weights. She’s currently a UK 12 and happy to wear miniskirts. ‘Not with bare legs, though, not any more. Apart from that, there aren’t many rules. The only thing I can’t do now I’m 56 is granny chic. A Chanel jacket looks great on a 20-something, but you can’t do ironic granny style when you are a granny.’
During lockdown she did give up the fight against grey roots; now covered. ‘I would have kept the grey, but a job came through and they asked me to dye it brown.’ Although by her own admission she regularly has a sprinkling of Botox, that’s more or less it. Her two grandchildren, Skye and Taro, call their impossibly youthful-looking granny Zsa Zsa. ‘Like Gabor,’ says Yasmin. ‘They came up with it themselves. Isn’t it fabulous?’
She and Simon, 62, are hands-on grandparents. ‘And it’s exhausting. Oh, my God… boys,’ says Yasmin. She takes her hat off to Naomi Campbell, who recently announced she’d become a mother at 50. ‘If anyone can pull it off, she will.’ She hadn’t been in touch yet with Campbell when I asked. Yasmin is phone-phobic, and not exactly mad on Zoom. ‘To be honest, I’m not sure lockdown changed my life that much,’ she says. ‘It’s always been family and close friends first.’
Some of those friends have ended up staying for weeks on end. The Blüthner piano is a gift from John Taylor (bassist with Duran Duran) and his wife Gela Nash-Taylor (co-founder of Juicy Couture), who lived with them for several months.
‘Somehow Simon and I have created this home that no one wants to leave…’ she muses. ‘It’s the opposite of what you’re meant to do. But I just love having the children around.’ Even Amber, who bought a flat of her own, doesn’t actually live in it, preferring the family nest. ‘During the first lockdown we’d all have lunch every day in the garden,’ says Yasmin. ‘It was great. Though I’m sure the neighbours thought we were having parties…’
Who’d have thought that the impulsive marriage back in 1985 between the flamboyant pop star and the doe-eyed 21-year-old model he’d spotted on the cover of a magazine would prove to be a rock of ages? The bride wore Benetton because it was the only store open that morning, and received a £30 wedding ring that she has since tried repeatedly to lose, ‘but it always makes its way back to me’. She says her outfit was ‘fluffy and horrendous’ – but we know we can discount her take on her appearance. Although perhaps not on the venue, a register office in Oxford’s Westgate shopping centre, since demolished and rebuilt. ‘It was hideous!’ says the bride. The guest list included ‘anyone we’d bumped into the night before because we couldn’t organise anything’.
The important thing was there were no paparazzi, apart from a photographer from the local Oxford paper. ‘We briefly contemplated dodging him,’ says Yasmin, ‘and then we thought, if he can sell these, maybe it will help pay off his mortgage.’
Not long after, in a romantic gesture, Yasmin announced she was walking away from her mega-successful career, only to return nine months later. ‘I mean, what did I think I was going to do?’ It was lucky she had work to occupy her because Simon was indulging in his other love at the time: sailing the high seas in Drum, his yacht, which lost its keel in the 1985 Fastnet Race and capsized (‘the crew nearly died’). It was rebuilt, and the following year, undeterred, he sailed it Down Under for the Whitbread Round the World Yacht Race.
These were the days before mobile phones. There was only one ship-to-shore call every so often. So when the News of the World splashed with some fake news about Simon having an affair with a model in Australia, it wasn’t easy for Yasmin to have a word with her husband. ‘It was horrendous. I was staying with my parents and none of us knew how to deal with the press.’ Yasmin had a miscarriage and vowed never to work with a Murdoch publication again.
‘Problem is, at that time Murdoch owned Elle…’ She rolls her eyes. Yasmin was a quintessential Elle model – on the launch covers of both the British and American issues back when they were a very big deal indeed. Not just that, but she managed to breach the impasse between Elle and Vogue – starring on dozens of British and Italian Vogue covers.
Back then, it was still unusual for an editorial model to do catwalk. Her career is particularly interesting because she predated the supermodel era, which crystallised when Peter Lindberg shot five of them – Linda, Christy, Naomi, Cindy and Tatjiana Patitz – for British Vogue’s January 1990 cover. By then, Yasmin had been going seven years, and had had Amber. But she slotted right into the supermodel fold – and worked her Elton John-worthy socks off. ‘Because people knew I’d done dancing lessons, they always wanted me leaping across the studio – on to a concrete floor.’ To this day she has debilitating back problems, as the dogs can testify.
The arrival of Saffron in 1991 and Tallulah in 1994 barely slowed her down. Amber even appeared with her on the Chanel catwalk in 1991. Yasmin took the girls everywhere, including on tour with Duran Duran. ‘I was pretty strict. We had to be. I said, “Look, if you’re going to come to all these nice places, you have to behave.”’
Somehow, between slogging up and down those catwalks – ‘we would do five or six shows a day in Milan and you really had to work it, do the twirl’ – and having a family, she managed to hold her own, partying-wise, with the supers. ‘I was working hard and had the kids, so when I did go out I made sure I had a good time. I think [stories about] drugs in the modelling industry are exaggerated, though. We had to look good and get up early – there was hardly any retouching then so we couldn’t turn up looking terrible’.
She makes it sound like an ultra-glamorous Hogwarts – they’d stay at The Ritz in Paris (‘although I swear to God, I got the broom cupboard’). ‘Most of the parties were either in Naomi’s room – she’d always get left with the mess and the blame – or in the Sabbia Rosa lingerie shop on the Faubourg St Honoré. God, we loved that place.’
Even a broom cupboard was better than the pensione she lived in, on her own, when she first went to Milan at 19 (‘If you wanted to make decent money back then you had to go to Milan and New York’). She never experienced the city’s infamous sleazy underbelly, although she’s well aware it existed – and still does. Having talked to other supermodels about this, I think the predators preyed on the girls who hadn’t achieved as much success as the supers, and were therefore in less powerful positions. ‘Maybe,’ Yasmin says. ‘But I can pull this Blue Steel look – I do an excellent resting bitch face.’
She doesn’t regret one second of her modelling career – she’d been desperate to escape Oxford. ‘My parents were lovely, but I’d had my fill of teenage life. I didn’t flourish at school. I loved working and the fact that everyone seemed so much older than they were.’
It’s not hard to see why she wanted to recreate her family bedrock – of her parents and older sister, Nady – although she firmly believes that frequent absences are one of the reasons her marriage has lasted so long. ‘The hardest thing about marriage,’ she says, ‘isn’t the rows, it’s the indifference. Luckily Simon makes me laugh, a lot.’ That doesn’t mean being together for so long during lockdown was easy. ‘He really is mad sometimes. He likes to provoke, whereas I sometimes worry about the tone I used to say hello to someone 30 years ago.’
She jokes that she’s fantasised about killing him over the years. ‘A lot. He’s horrified by the many methods I’ve imagined.’
Clearly, they adore one another, foibles and all. Yasmin is already fretting about Duran Duran’s forthcoming tour later this year. ‘He loves it, but it’s knackering. They’re not songs you can just murmur in the background and he’s centre stage.’ Presumably he’ll still be at it when he’s 77, like Mick Jagger, not least because, according to Yasmin, over the years, Duran Duran signed ‘two of the worst deals in recording history’. ‘We have a great life and we’re comfortable, but we still have to work,’ she says.
But that’s a blessing too. ‘I’m so glad I hung on for dear life in this profession,’ she says, ‘because everyone needs to be represented. It’s ridiculous the amount of positive reaction I get from women my age who hardly ever get to see other 50-something grannies modelling.’ As long as they keep asking her, she’ll keep doing the modelling jobs.
And with that, this unlikely granny shoves on a pair of yellow Paddington bear wellies and walks me to the train station. Give it another year or so and she’ll be a national treasure.
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