How to make millions from bras and pants

Polly VernonSunday September 10, 2006

The Observer
Elle Macpherson has body issues. Not of the 'I hate my arse' variety, you understand. Elle is 42 years old, but her body is as glorious today as it was when she first began regularly gracing the cover of American body-fascist bible Swimwear Illustrated, more than two decades ago. She's a long-legged, lithehipped, muscular approximation of perfection, clad in tight-fitting black denim and leather. She carries her stupendous cleavage like a weapon. No. Elle's body issues are rather more notional.

For 20 years, Elle's body has been known as The Body. In 1986 Time magazine referred to it thus, and the world accepted it unquestioningly. But last month, Heidi Klum - the 5ft 9in, blonde-streaked flibbertigibbet of a 33-year-old German clothes horse, who has carved herself a substantial profile in the swimsuit-modelling market formerly dominated by Elle herself - made a flagrant and unapologetic bid to co-opt The Body moniker. Klum appeared in an advert for a Victoria's Secret bra, which first aired in early August insisting: 'They call me The Body - and now I have a bra named after me.' Elle's public, and her people, were horrified. 'We saw that, and we were like, oh my God!' Elle's spokesperson, Melissa Edwards, responded. 'We were initially flabbergasted ... we have numerous press clippings in the office referring to her as The Body.' Elle - who has produced a skincare range called 'Elle Macpherson The Body' and a fitness video entitled The Body Workout in past years - is tight-lipped on the issue.
It seems, on the face of it, to be the kind of daft row that only a couple of supermodels could ever get embroiled in. But there's maybe more to it than that. Heidi Klum is messing with Elle's brand, and no one can be allowed to do that.

No celebrity, male or female, has ever converted into a business force as successfully as Elle. She has an estimated personal worth of £35 million. Never mind Heidi Klum and her one piffling bra. Or Kate Moss with her endless ad contracts and her ineffable cachet. Or Linda Evangelista, Elle's contemporary on the 1990s supermodel scene and the woman who once boasted: 'I wouldn't get out of bed for less than $10,000 a day.' Elle blows them all away financially. Her licensing deal with New Zealand lingerie company Bendon, which produces her own-brand underwear, Elle Macpherson Intimates, is worth £40 million in Britain alone (it also sells in Australia, where it's the biggest-selling underwear brand, and the US, where it's increasing both its market share and its profile rapidly, despite the fact that it was only launched last year). The bestselling calendars and fitness video that she produces through Elle Macpherson Inc - the company she formed in 1994 after leaving Ford, her model agency - are worth tens of millions more.

She is officially one of Australia's richest women, and she was the only model to make the top 100 wealthiest women in 2006's Sunday Times Rich List. In July this year, Elle accepted an appointment as executive director on the board of Hot Tuna surfwear, thus guaranteeing herself substantial creative input and an estimated £2.5m in share options. And so it goes on. Elle makes money. Lots of it.

I'm not sure how, though. We're sitting, Elle and me, on an ornate chaise longue in a quiet corner of a vast warehouse located deep in the heart of New York's Long Island. Around us, the advertising shoot that will showcase the latest offerings from Elle Macpherson Intimates crawls along. On set, an improbably nubile young thing dressed in Elle-conceived scraps of washable silk drapes herself over a Halloween-theme fridge (edited highlights of the contents: pickle jars of eyeballs, takeaway cartons of intestines, etcetera) and moves her hips according to instructions delivered by acclaimed fashion photographer Regan Cameron. Elle herself no longer models in the campaigns. She did at first because 'it was cheaper'. Which demonstrates an unquestionably sound business instinct. But it's about the only solid evidence of one that I can find in the first instance.

Before I meet Elle, I am instructed by various powers not to ask about her personal life. About the recent-ish break-up of her nine-year relationship with Arpad 'Arki' Busson, the financier father of her sons Flynn (who is eight) and Aurelius Cy (three); about her brush with postnatal depression; or about the bust-up with Klum. And so instead, we're talking money. Elle is attempting to deconstruct her business style for me, and I am attempting to reconcile what I know about her place in the business world with her flaky, naive manner. 'I consider myself to be an "entrepreneur", you know?' she's saying. Elle has an odd way of talking; it's halting, precious - she speaks as if English is her second language, although she was born and raised in suburban Sydney. Her inflections are French, the legacy of her eight-year marriage to French photographer Gilles Bensimon, and of her relationship with Busson. She gets words wrong, she makes others up - she says she is 'passioned by business', for instance, and also that she has made 'lots of mit-sakes' - and it all lends her a cutesy, girlish, uncertain quality that is at odds with her business profile. She also speaks a clichéd, breathless kind of business rhetoric: 'I think outside the box,' she says with absolute sincerity. 'And I dare to dream, I dare to take risks. I believe that risk is the currency of the gods. You know. I don't like to think I'm a "businesswoman". "Businesswoman" conjures up this image of hard-ass, pencil-skirt-wearing control freak, and I'm not that.'

What is she, then, I ask. 'I am very passioned by what I do. I make decisions according to my heart. Business for me is very heartfelt. I go with my heart and my instincts and my intuition. And my passions and my love and my joy, and then what happens is, because there's a sense of integrity behind what I do, that often translates into dollars and cents. People recognise that, and people buy, I believe, integrity, and people buy honesty.' She thinks, moreover, that her lingerie 'empowers women ...' that it contributes to the universe because ' ...the nurturing power of femininity is extremely important to the universe ...' She thinks she could have been anything she wanted. 'A barrister - which is kind of like a performing lawyer, which is kind of what I do anyway,' or an architect, or a property developer, but what she chose to do - ultimately - was 'help other women!' How? With lingerie? 'Yes!'

Elle, in interview, strikes me as less of a moneymaking machine than an aspiring beauty-pageant winner, or maybe the devoted groupie of a motivational speaker. Elle in action, however, is a different matter. I watch her attack Regan Cameron's shoot. I watch her style and art direct and criticise and rearrange, I watch her admonish some staff members and team-build others; I watch her fire off endless, endless questions at Stuart Cameron, the manager with whom she has worked for more than 20 years; and I remember a recent quote from Mary-Ellen Field, the very senior consultant who advises Elle on her licensing deals, who claimed that Elle 'reads every document. She even sends them back with comments in the margin, and if she doesn't understand anything she asks you. She's extremely disciplined. You don't look like that unless you are.' And I get more of an idea of how she operates, and why it works for her.
'I'm not a control freak,' she tells me - again. But I'm not at all convinced.


Elle's private life is markedly less well managed, however. She's been (allegedly) involved in a series of jolly, gossip-column-worthy entanglements - with everyone from Tim Jeffries (Green Shields Stamp heir and serial romancer of the professionally gorgeous), to footballer Sol Campbell, to Hollywood's naughtiest superstar, Colin Farrell. But she's also endured painful rejection at the hands of Gilles Bensimon - a divorce that devastated her, she has said. 'I felt as if the rug had been pulled from under me.' And in June 2005 came the split from Arki Busson, after a nine-year relationship. She also developed postnatal depression after the 2003 birth of Aurelius Cy, her younger son, and that she spent some time in a clinic in Arizona receiving treatment for it. 'I have zero shame about it,' she has said, in the past. But nothing to say on the subject? 'No.'


She really doesn't want to address her personal life in any fashion. She says she doesn't see why she should, on the grounds that 'I don't seek press unless it's for my business, I don't ever really do self-gratifying or gratuitous press', which isn't actually any grounds at all. She may as well say: 'I don't like answering difficult questions that don't directly promote my commercial interests.' So when I approach the sticky territory of her non-business existence, Elle becomes flagrantly brittle and invokes the logistics of being a mother as a distracting, defensive tactic. 'I work one week and I have one week with my children. And when I'm with my children, I never work. That's just ... my rule. They are absolutely my priority. And then my children go to their father for one week and I work.'


Does she feel like a single mother, I wonder, with all the baggage that entails? She laughs, uncomfortably. She waits a while, in case I move on. I don't. She sighs. 'Ah - hum ...' she says, eventually. 'I'm a ... single parent. With two children. I'm a single parent. Yeah. My, uh ...' [Elle tries, and fails, to say the word 'ex'] ' ...the father of my children is very committed to ... you know ... we're both committed to co-parenting the children ... but ...' She trails off , and we return to the infinitely cosier territory of achieving a decent bra fit. Elle's party trick is a one-glance assessment of a stranger's bra size. I ask her to 'do' me, which she does, correctly.
The rigours of co-parenting and also life as a leading light on the business stage notwithstanding, Elle is shamelessly active on the international party scene. She's a regular fixture in the beach-club capitals of the world: St Tropez, St Barthes, upmarket Ibiza, Costa Smeralda. She knows Tory leader David Cameron. No self-respecting society-mag party page is complete without a pap snap of Elle, a terribly nice frock dangling from her glorious frame. She made number 11 on Tatler magazine's annual Hot 100 most desirable guest list - not as high as Busson, who made the top 10, but still ... Does she consider herself to be jet set? She pauses. 'I think, um, I'm quite open-minded about travel, put it that way.' She laughs. 'Uh. . I consider myself to be. .' Jet set? '. . Incredibly privileged. I have the capacity to travel, and I do. I take advantage of it. Er. And I mix in many different circles, and that's a huge gift in my life, to be able to grow and learn from all different walks of life. But, do I require a fast-paced, rich life? No! Am I happiest when I'm surfing on the beaches in Australia? I just took my sons on a surf safari, you know, camping? That's me at my best. Just a week in Western Australia with my two boys. And we built fires and we slept in tents and we surfed, and it was just ... But yes. I'm incredibly privileged, and I'm the first to say it.'

I wonder if there are limits on riches like Elle's. Does she ever have to reel herself in from a particular extravagance, for example. She responds airily, evasively. 'Oh, I'm not going to go into my finances and the way I run my life. But I try to be responsible. Responsible, and at the same time passionate. So if something moves me, I'll do it. But I don't do things for show. I'm not particularly extravagant for the sake of it. I'm extravagant, yes, in the way that some times I cringe and think, oh gosh, I shouldn't have flown first class here ... but other than that, nothing is for show, I try to be as discreet as I possibly can.' But she is, I imagine, phenomenally wealthy? 'Ha! I wish! I'm incredibly fortunate in that I have a job that I love, and that I'm still working after 25 years in an industry that says, basically, you're only valuable as long as you're young.' Is money important? 'No. Money's a by-product. That's all.'


Elle will not go as far as to admit that she has any regrets. She'll admit to mistakes: 'Lots! Yeah! Every day!' But then she says: 'But I don't believe there are any mik-stakes.' [sic] 'There are learnings. So I make learnings. Along the way. Hah!' She says that she isn't concerned with ageing, even though much of her professional existence has been dependent on her looks. She says she spends hardly any time on her appearance these days. I'm not sure. Her look is studied and high maintenance - the accessories, the hair, the jeans, the artfully scuffed biker boots. She's a smidgen over-tanned in the flesh, a cartoonish boy-pleasing variation on gorgeous that owes at least something to the signature look of Pamela Anderson. But still, she talks a convincing pitch on the not caring. 'Well, you know what, if I didn't age, where would I be? Dead, wouldn't I? I don't care. Fortunately, the people who are around me don't judge me by the way I look, but you know, I am a 42-year-old mother-of-two, so ...'
On which, does she anticipate a midlife crisis of any description? 'Well, I have had some crisises [sic] in my life already, you know!'

More than your fair share? Elle laughs. 'No,' she says. 'Not necessarily. Hah! You know, I'm sure I'll have more ... some more learnings along the way.'

· Elle Macpherson's lingerie starts from £26 for bras and £11 for knickers. For stockists, telephone 020 7478 0280 or go to www.ellemacphersonintimates.com