Erin Wasson, supermodel, is tanned the colour of burnt caramel and her body is
covered in tattoos. “This one here, that’s my Elvis tattoo,” she
says, pointing at her forearm. It reads: “Taking care of business.”
She laughs and lights a cigarette from the lighter she wears on a long silver
chain around her neck. There are loads of other tattoos: a string of little
“earrings” along Wasson’s left lobe, and sayings (“This heart
will start a riot in me”, and “Distant traveller” in Hawaiian). There was
one on her heel, but it didn’t last. “The underlayer of the epidermis is
different,” she explains, nodding her head seriously.
It’s the Elvis one, however, that resonates most with Wasson right now, as she
is, on a number of levels, taking care of business, or, rather, businesses.
There’s the modelling, of course, but now there’s quite a bit more as well:
Wasson is on her way to being the kind of one-namer who defies the usual
schedule for a model, a schedule that declares 30 the end of your employable
life.
Certainly, at 27, she has had quite a run. “I’ve been the It girl,” she
shrugs. “I’ve been really blessed.” Since her father submitted her photo to
a television modelling contest 10 years ago, she has opened shows for Gucci
and Chanel, and scored a lucrative cosmetics deal. She has already married
an artist, moved to a loft, divorced the artist. (There’s a tiny diamond
band on her ring finger, but of her current situation, she will say only
that “I have a lot of love in my life. That’s the important thing”.) If she
were ready to retire to a life of yoga, dive bars and bead work in the new
house she has just bought in Austin, Texas, nobody would bat an eyelash. But
Wasson is only getting warmed up. “I have a lot of things going on,” she
says. “I have to steer my own ship. I have to make it a well-oiled
machine.” She drags on her cigarette and narrows her eyes for emphasis. “You
know?”
“I’ve always been interested in any medium in which you can express yourself,”
she continues. Today, she’s on a break from a Maybelline shoot — she has
been a face of the cosmetics giant since 2002 — in a photo studio on
Manhattan’s West Side. Inside, Justin Timberlake’s SexyBack is blasting and a
crew of people wearing really good glasses and even better jeans are fussing
over lights and make-up and a rack of glamorous clothes. But Wasson prefers
it outside, on a terrace overlooking the Hudson River, where she can recline
in the sun, folding and unfolding her incredibly long, lean limbs.
There’s something of the surfer girl about her, never mind that she’s actually
from Texas. She speaks in an Orange County drawl, freely uses words like
“righteous”, and is given to rambling stoner monologues about
what the island of Maui does for her spirit. (For the record, it does quite
a lot.) “I’m a sun freak,” she says. “I need my environmental Prozac.”
The expansion of the Wasson brand began several years ago, when she bought an
East Village apartment that turned out to be two floors below the young
designer Alexander Wang. “I was in the elevator, and this guy is,
like, ‘Oh my God! What are you doing?’ And I’m, like, ‘I just moved in.’ And
he’s, like, ‘I’m on the fifth floor.’ And I’m, like, ‘Oh my God! I’m on the
third floor.’ So then we just sort of started hanging out, and he would see
the way I dress on a daily basis. Then he said, ‘Would you want to style my
show?’ I was like, ‘My God, are you serious?’” He was serious, and Wasson,
happily, did style his show.
She’d been on the other side long enough to know what to do, and her own sense
of style was perfectly honed, and right in line with Wang’s aesthetic, which
is culled from the skinny, groovy girls who hang around New York’s NoLita
and the Lower East Side: teeny little hot pants, perfectly worn-in T-shirts
and, sometimes, a pork-pie hat. She’ll wear sweatpants and high heels, a
tuxedo blazer that hangs longer than her denim cutdowns. It’s sexy tomboy
style, tough and urban, because Wasson, with her flat chest, narrow hips and
a half-pipe in her Los Angeles back yard, is the sexiest tomboy of all.
After two seasons with Wang, Wasson decided to strike out on her own — she was
itching to design. “I think it comes from modelling,” she says. “You know,
you put on a dress and say, ‘Who is this girl?’ Then you get on set and say,
‘Okay, how do I project this woman? Where has she been? Where’s she going?’
It was up to you to relate some sort of message in a stagnant image. With
clothing, and with designing, you’ve got 40 opportunities to project that.”
Through mutual friends, she met the CEO of the cult surf and skating label
RVCA. “We’re just on the same page,” she says of herself and the label, “so
it was, like, ‘Let’s do something cool.’ The thing about RVCA is that it’s a
tribe, at the end of the day. We’re such hippies to think that we’re
creating this universal tribe, but that is what it’s about.”
Wasson’s collection consists of floral minidresses, with a potential sweetness
roughed up by denim jackets, dripping chains and heavy boots, and T-shirts
with terribly slight, but terribly important, design touches such as an
extra-deep V neck or asymmetric sleeves. “I think I’ve always appreciated
the world of streetwear,” she says. “I was always into the girls that would
be running around in jeans and a T-shirt, just effortless, not listening to
fashion drums. If you think about surfers, they live on the beach, and I
really connect with the nonchalance. I always say the paddle-out’s a bitch,
but the ride’s amazing. It’s a good metaphor for life.”
All of this “nonchalance” is mixed with plenty of savvy: Barneys
did so well with the collection that it has asked Wasson to expand, and she
has, gladly. She will show the larger collection this autumn in conjunction
with Low Luv, the jewellery range she launched after working on accessories
at Alexander Wang.
“This season, my colour palette is based on my dog,” she says. “I have a pit
bull named Cream, and there’s something about the monochromaticness of the
pink around his nose and his coat. That’s kind of where I started with the
colour thing. And going back to that whole idea of being on this personal
journey, my life, and making so many changes in me, and figuring out where
I’m at and where I want to be.
“And, like, sunset. I think people ponder a lot of ideas at sunset. It’s,
like, the end of the day, when you sort of reflect on the moments you had.
It’s the end of something, and then, you know, sunrise is the beginning of
something.”
With that, Wasson stubs out her cigarette and heads inside. She may be a
righteous surfer chick, but this Texan model has clearly taken business to
heart.
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