Janice Breen Burns
June 8, 2007
Catherine McNeil in New York.
Aussie teen heartbreaker is the cover girl of Paris Vogue.
AUSTRALIAN model Catherine McNeil lives with her gran in New York. A typical teen, just turned 18, with not a lot to say, but millions of people are hanging on her every word. Working with top fashion photographer Mario Testino to shoot the spread and cover for this month’s Paris Vogue “has been amazing”. The French editor, Carine Roitfeld, an off-beat maverick everyone in fashion loves to hate but wants to know, who styled the shoot, “was incredible”. Mixing with top models backstage at Karl Lagerfeld’s recent Fendi fashion show was “pretty impressive”.
When the banality occasionally breaks in McNeil’s typical teenaged answers to a list of emailed questions, it’s hard not to get excited: What’s the best thing about your life now?: “Travelling to places I only ever dreamed.”
And the worst?: “Being alone.” That smidge of naked humanity in her last answer will endear McNeil, a Brisbane schoolgirl one minute, hot global model the next, to a fresh flood of hopeful teen fans (“She sounded so sad … she’s so normal”). Every snippet of news about McNeil and fellow Australian Gemma Ward, the world’s most booked model, triggers chatter on vogue.com, myspace.com and nine.msn. Why is not hard to figure.
McNeil says she loves New York but prefers Paris, is just back from Rome, but off to – who knows? – next week. She says it’s all “surreal” and a bit of a shock, and wants aspiring models to “enjoy your youth, don’t try and rush the process, stay disciplined and focused”. The attitude is so typically teenage, but the material so thrillingly not.
McNeil is every modern teen girl’s dream. In 2003, at 13, she won the Girlfriend magazine model search, one of dozens of competitions that lure streams of hopeful teens to entry checkpoints around the country. The “model search” phenomenon has boosted a culture of competitive narcissism among teenaged girls that many believe contributes to the spiralling incidence of eating disorders and other problems associated with negative body image. But, the competitions – mounted to sell magazines, beauty products, fashion and shopping malls – multiply. (Tip for parents: embrace your teen with special tenderness when she returns, rejected, from a typical “model search” cattle call.)
The phenomenon does, however, have its one-in-a-million winners. McNeil is one of several launched on to international catwalks by Girlfriend and one of few to legitimately claim the title “top model”. After winning the competition at 13, she flew to New York to meet lieutenants from the prestigious Next model agency, then flew right back home to mum and her grandparents outside Brisbane in order to finish school and stretch up to her full catwalk potential. In the years before the dream properly began, McNeil travelled to Sydney for the odd modelling job, then more, and more, until at almost 18, she was summoned by Next to base her full-time career in New York. Her grandmother came along as guardian and companion.
So, what’s she got that 99.9 per cent of girls haven’t? McNeil is feline-green-eyed-pretty with, as one commentator aptly put it, “pillow lips”. She dyes her naturally blonde hair to a glossy, poker-straight auburn. And as you might expect, she is slim to the edge of thinness, despite being described by another reporter as fitting a more “athletic” or “womanly” fashion aesthetic. She is about 180 centimetres tall and favours sky-scraper heels even in her off-catwalk moments, which contributes an even more thinning illusion to her narrow size eight torso.
The whole Catherine McNeil package adds up to X, the one-in-a-million factor that has less to do with beauty, and more with a girl’s chameleon ability to absorb and project the “look” imposed by a stylist. In the past few months, she has been cast for the covers of Paris Vogue and V magazine, appeared in Vogue Australia, Harpers Bazaar, Marie Claire, Madison, Follow, Russh and Britain’s Grazia. She has worked the catwalks of Milan and Paris for Fendi, Missoni, Versace, Pucci, Etra, Max Mara, Anna Molinari, Alessandro Dell’Acqua, and Roberto Cavalli, and stars in Dolce and Gabbana, Versace, Donna Karan and Hugo Boss campaigns, to be launched soon. By all accounts, McNeil’s future is resolved though once, not so long ago, she had her heart set on a career as a motorcycle mechanic.
Funny how things turn out for the .01 percent of ordinary girls.
So, what’s she got that 99.9 per cent of girls haven’t? McNeil is feline-green-eyed-pretty with, as one commentator aptly put it, “pillow lips”. She dyes her naturally blonde hair to a glossy, poker-straight auburn. And as you might expect, she is slim to the edge of thinness, despite being described by another reporter as fitting a more “athletic” or “womanly” fashion aesthetic. She is about 180 centimetres tall and favours sky-scraper heels even in her off-catwalk moments, which contributes an even more thinning illusion to her narrow size eight torso.
The whole Catherine McNeil package adds up to X, the one-in-a-million factor that has less to do with beauty, and more with a girl’s chameleon ability to absorb and project the “look” imposed by a stylist. In the past few months, she has been cast for the covers of Paris Vogue and V magazine, appeared in Vogue Australia, Harpers Bazaar, Marie Claire, Madison, Follow, Russh and Britain’s Grazia. She has worked the catwalks of Milan and Paris for Fendi, Missoni, Versace, Pucci, Etra, Max Mara, Anna Molinari, Alessandro Dell’Acqua, and Roberto Cavalli, and stars in Dolce and Gabbana, Versace, Donna Karan and Hugo Boss campaigns, to be launched soon. By all accounts, McNeil’s future is resolved though once, not so long ago, she had her heart set on a career as a motorcycle mechanic.
Funny how things turn out for the .01 percent of ordinary girls.
