What Alexa Did Next

The model and muse on helming her own successful global brand.

- Laura Antonia Jordan

Being Alexa Chung must be strange. Because, for someone so famous, the question often volleyed around is: what does she actually do? Of course, Alexa ‘does’ quite a lot. She started modelling at 16, then became known to a wider audience at 22 as host of cult music show Pop World. Since then, she’s worn the hats of designer, writer, brand ambassador, businesswoman and, as is de rigueur for any Millennial poster girl, occasional DJ. She’s a renaissance woman for the Instagram generation.

For someone so ubiquitous, Alexa, 34, is oddly elusive and almost impossible to pinpoint, a curious mix of spiky guardedness and disarming frankness, who can switch from bombshell to goofball with a tilt of the head. As we talk, she ricochets in and out of different voices (a Zoolander-ish male model, an angry Instagram commenter) and jumps from topic to topic. She would have been a great actress – and, in a way, she has been.

What there is no doubt about is that Alexa is a style icon for women who are too cool to admit it. In an age when social media has flattened personal style, millions hang on her every hemline. It’s hard to think of anyone whose aesthetic has been so forensically examined (she must be sick of talking about Peter Pan collars and denim cutoffs by now). For all the Chungaholics out there, she arrives for the Grazia shoot wearing an old fluffy APC jacket, maroon Joseph trousers plus Superga hi-tops and a T-shirt of her own design.