Karen Elson may be the coolest model of all. In a business that is supposedly taboo-breaking yet often deeply traditional (beauty, to paraphrase Keats, is all you need to know), the Mancunian has defied all the orthodoxies.

First, she doesn’t look like anyone else in the profession, and never has. Secondly, she works with fewer photographers than any other model at her level. Thirdly, give or take last year’s marriage to Jack White, of the White Stripes (maybe the coolest band of all), she is relentlessly low-key, rarely gives interviews, etc. You won’t see her in Heat, or with a tan and sporting the latest Fendi bag (she’s a vintage queen).

And fourthly, after ten years she is still at the top of her particular tree — not bad for a model who was so oddball that even her agency didn’t know what to make of her.

And fifthly, not withstanding the black wig she wears in pictures shot for Pop magazine, she doesn’t really undertake that chameleon act on which models pride themselves. Elson is a dyed-in-the-basin whey-faced Titian — the kind of beauty that plays better in Italian Vogue than in a Next catalogue; the kind that could have gone either way but must have been hard to pinpoint when she was growing up.

When we speak she is in New York, where she has lived for nine years, having her hair dunked in the strongest red formula yet, a defiant statement that is somehow at odds with her transatlantic twang (I’d expected something more grittily northern English).

She’s six, or seven, or maybe eight months pregnant (she ascribes this vagueness to the vagaries of American obstetrics, a theory that is about as convincing as Elvis’s last sighting on Mars. It’s more likely a by-product of her quest to remain private).

“When I started out I sometimes spoke out about things that, in retrospect, I shouldn’t have done. They still come back to haunt me. Sure, modelling can make you insecure — but so does being young. As a 27-year-old woman I feel I’m so far from it now. I’m all happy and pregnant.”

Given how easily models become defined and trapped by a single image, it is interesting watching Elson’s attempts to draw the line between her public face — the arresting campaigns over the years for everyone from Dolce & Gabbana and Chanel to Versace and Gaultier — and the low-key home life.

She has been a favourite, and not just of the avant-garde, for years against the odds. She doesn’t slot neatly into the normal US Vogue parameters of American beauty and even held her own in a Pirelli calendar, where her unabashed creaminess shone out next to Moss and Bündchen.

She has survived and transcended every trend (Brazilian überbabes included) without compromising her individuality — an achievement that is due partly to her good fortune in being adopted and mentored by Steven Meisel (“my agent sent me to see him and we just clicked. I didn’t even know who he was. It’s a hilarious misconception that he’s this big scary photographer”) early in her career, but also to her good judgment.

“Judgment?” she laughs. “It’s down to my agent, Louis. He makes sure I don’t do too much work. It’s so hard to stop yourself doing too much when it’s there, especially when you feel that you might not be offered anything again, and there have been moments when I really thought that.”

“There are only a handful of photographers that Karen feels comfortable with,” says Katy Grand, editor-in-chief of Pop magazine. “When beautiful women say how ugly they were when they were younger, you roll your eyes. But Karen really was gangly and a lot of people didn’t understand her look to begin with.

“Some photographers still don’t know how to capture her properly, and her attitude is that it’s better to be really selective than to take every big-money job going. That’s probably one of the keys to her longevity — and the fact that she’s a dream to work with.”

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