Behind Blue Eyes

More than a decade after he burst into our collective consciousness in that Dolce & Gabbana commercial, David Gandy is still arguably the world’s only international male supermodel.

- Theresa Harold

DAVID GANDY HAS a good life. I don’t mean when fronting fragrance ads in the Mediterranean or flying around the world to red carpet events. I mean when he’s home in West London, with his girlfriend and their rescue dog Dora.

The morning I meet him, he tells me with a grin about being woken up at 6am by Dora to go for a walk in the park. He reminds me — and bear with me here, because it’s going to sound so Freudian — of my dad. When drafting questions for the interview, all I had to do was hold an imaginary conversation with my old man (minus the multi-million dollar underwear campaign, granted).

I suppose what I’m saying is, David Gandy is an old-school English gent. He loves dogs, the countryside, classic cars, boats, Winston Churchill and James Herriot novels. In fact, he grew up wanting to be a vet thanks to those books set in a rural veterinary practice in North Yorkshire. The only thing that stopped him was a frank self-awareness of his academic abilities. “I think you have to know your limitations in life,” he says. “It would have been a real struggle for me to get the grades.”

So yes, modelling was never Gandy’s dream career. By now, we’re all familiar with his origin story: The televised modelling competition that his friend entered him for without asking. Needless to say, Gandy won and the rest is fashion history. When Dolce & Gabbana cast him as the face (OK, body) of their Light Blue fragrance in 2006, the male modelling industry was a pale and skinny production line of androgynous waifs. Gandy changed all that.