Amy Alexander
April 23, 2007

Beauty’s new face … 17-year-old Catherine McNeil, who says: “That kind of stuff doesn’t happen to me.”

Queensland teenager Catherine McNeil is sending the modelling world into a frenzy.

How the modelling world loves a Helen of Troy story. Every few years a new girl comes along that tout le monde goes crazy about and her face goes on to launch 1000 ships (or advertising campaigns). This year’s anointed beauty is Catherine McNeil, a shy 17-year-old from Logan, south of Brisbane, unknown a year ago and now taking the fashion world by storm.

There’s definitely something about Catherine. The fashion media has been tripping over trying to define her star quality. Guy Trebay of The New York Times devoted a column to dissecting this newcomer’s appeal. He described her “pillowed lips, her Amazonian legs, her sultry adult face” and declared that she was “beautiful in a way people used to be”. Style.com crowned her one of its top 10 models of the season, noting she looks like “the top girls of the ’90s”. Stephen Lee, McNeil’s agent at Next, says: “Catherine has changed the face of beauty in no uncertain terms, bringing beauty back to the man and woman on the street but also inspiring the fashion elite.”

I met McNeil recently at the Next offices in New York’s SoHo. Like many beautiful people you read about, she’s both more and less than the hype surrounding her. She’s dressed all in black (“I only ever wear black,” she confides later) from her stretchy minidress to the tips of her towering gold-heeled shoes. She doesn’t get up to greet me, but says a shy “hi” and slumps back onto the couch while the photographer sets up. When she does eventually stand up, she looks all of her 180 cm frame.

One reason I’ve heard for why McNeil is causing such a stir is that she goes against the ultra-skinny look that has dominated the catwalks for so long. Well, don’t believe everything you read. While certainly not emaciated, she’s hardly curvy – her long legs are colt-like and her torso is just as streamlined as any other of the era’s supermodels. Her face, however, is unusually beautiful. She is, as the Times pointed out, a beauty in the old-fashioned sense: luminescent skin, almond-shaped green eyes, a perfectly shaped pouty mouth and long, glossy auburn hair.

When I pull out my voice recorder, she looks at it askance. “Oh, you’re going to record?” she asks, lisping heavily. It turns out she just got her tongue pierced and the length of the metal bar is causing her some speech problems. The moment is endearing – she goes in a second from sophisticated siren to teenager.

http://www.theage.com.au/news/fashion/model-citizens/2007/04/18/1176696881541.html