Jenna’s Model Life

News yesterday that Karen Elson switched London agencies from Models 1 to Independent got me thinking. Elson has always been one of my favourite contemporary models — she and Shalom Harlow are pretty much neck-and-neck. I could never settle on an absolute because they’re so different I almost don’t register any competition: superficially you could say they have a similar freaky, tough aesthetic (my favourite Harlow editorial is one for Vogue Paris where she dresses in black silk dresses, combat boots, and studded leather belts, her pin-straight hair flying, and Elson became known in 1997 when Steven Meisel shaved her eyebrows and put her on the cover of Vogue Italia). But whereas Elson, in her best photos, radiates a kind of edgy, almost damaged beauty (Helena Bonham Carter in Fight Club), Harlow, one senses, is all steel. And while there’s charm in consistency and uncomplicated strength, that whiff of danger that Elson carries is, on certain days, enough to sway me to her side.

I have a soft spot for models who are not beautiful so much as aesthetically compelling. Witness that first Vogue Italia cover:

The trademark Titian hair is dyed (another Meisel modification). But this girl is real: She grew up in public housing in Manchester, spent her first year in fashion bouncing from market to market, not always with representation, and not always in work, flubbed her first trip to Milan because her hips were judged too big for shows (oh, how I identify!), walked for Marc Jacobs while pregnant, and married Jack White in a canoe in the Amazon River. A shaman officiated.

Here she is for Louis Vuitton.

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I think this was a Dior ad.

Mert Alas and Marcus Piggot shot Elson in an editorial I sigh over in Pop, issue 10. I love the dismembered mannequins and the acid-bright colours, the whole awful, plastic, doll-parts gorgeousness of it all.

Wow.

Elson also made a short film with Zooey Deschanel and Sarah Sophie Flicker called “Lay Down Lean.” Shot in a whimsical herky-jerky style, it illustrates an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem.

You may remember her from the video for the White Stripes’ “Blue Orchid”, where she totters around in outrageous white fetish heels, a wild-eyed cross between a deranged ballerina, a twisted-up marionette, and Miss Havisham.

And her musical contributions don’t end there. She is currently a performer and creative director of the Citizens Band, a New York-based political cabaret troupe. The New Yorker likes her voice.

And, after hearing this cover of Glenn Danzig’s “Devil’s Plaything,” which Elson sings with Melissa Auf Der Maur, so do I.