Glasto, men and L'Wren: the rise and rise of Mick Jagger's designer girlfriend

Designer L’Wren Scott is the host of tonight’s Serpentine party, then she’s off to Glastonbury with Mick. Jane Mulkerrins on the rise and rise of the woman with the 42-inch legs
Jane Mulkerrins27 June 2013

L’Wren Scott claims she is steering clear of weather forecasts this week. “I don’t even want to look. There are other people in my life worrying enough about the weather, in places like Glastonbury and Hyde Park,” says the 46-year-old fashion designer, with a wry smile. “But the great thing about Londoners is that come rain or shine they are not going to let it stop them having a good time,” adds the American-born Scott.

But if her boyfriend of 12 years, Mick Jagger, is fretfully glued to the five-day forecast ahead of The Rolling Stones’ upcoming al fresco gigs (on Sunday in Somerset, and July 6 in London), as the host of [this evening’s] Serpentine Gallery summer party she’s not taking any chances either. “I have ordered 1,000 very chic umbrellas… just in case,” she laughs.

The glamorous annual fundraiser for the gallery also marks the opening of its summer pavilion, this year a cloudlike structure made of lightweight, semi-transparent poles, designed by Sou Fujimoto, one of Japan’s hottest young architects. “I’ve discovered so many incredible artists I’d never otherwise have heard of — some of whom are now friends — simply by wandering into the Serpentine on a Sunday,” says Scott.

How many more of the city’s other galleries does she make it to? “A good amount … if I’m by myself. It’s harder to drag some others around with me discreetly,” she smiles.

A confirmed party-thrower in her private life too, Scott doesn’t mind admitting she’s a little nervous about tonight. “I’m obviously obsessing about every detail: the live music [a secret], the DJs [2ManyDJs], the lighting [London-based art and designer practice, United Visual Artists]. I want it to feel like a party that I would be happy to be at myself.”

The one aspect you might expect a designer to have sorted — her own outfit — she claims not to have given a moment’s thought to yet. “I don’t really plan ahead like that, I decide at the last minute,” Scott insists. The footwear, at least, will receive some forethought. “I’m more worried about my shoes than my dress. There’s going to be a lot of dancing,” she grins, excitedly.

Less than a week before the bash, I meet Scott in Chelsea — the New York City neighbourhood, rather than the London one in which she and 69-year-old Jagger live, in a £10 million, 17th-century mansion. It’s a pavement-crackingly hot afternoon, but Scott, a former model and stylist, is unfeasibly crisp and cool as she glides into the hotel lobby, 6ft 3in of long-limbed elegance.

I have clambered atop my most vertiginous wedges for the occasion, while Scott, as a kindness to us hobbits, is sporting flats (albeit Chanel) on the end of her 42in legs. Her perfectly co-ordinated frock is one of her own designs, a form-fitting black-and-white affair, sexy but demure. When she tackles a plate of fish tacos she manages to look graceful even while eating with her hands, and gives me an eyeful of an enormous diamond ring.

The night before she was fronting another cultural event, at the Neue Gallery in Manhattan, giving a talk about the influence of the Austrian painter Gustav Klimt on her autumn/winter 2013 collection, which she unveiled in February at London Fashion Week.

“I’m not an expert on Klimt, lecturing isn’t something I do,” she shakes her head. “But I am an art lover, and I like anything that is a challenge — I just like to see if I can do it.”

Scott was born Luann Bambrough and grew up in the small town of Roy in Utah, the adopted daughter of Mormon parents. “It was a beautiful place: very outdoorsy. Every holiday was on some mountain or some lake,” she says.

“But all it really has is the physical beauty. My parents took me to every exhibition and museum they could, but I felt starved of fashion and culture and art.”

As a teenager, she was keen to apply to fashion school. “But my parents wouldn’t pay for that — they didn’t regard that as an education,” she says, without bitterness. As it happened she was spotted on the ski slopes near Sundance by the photographer Bruce Weber, who cast her in one of his epic Western shoots. He suggested she had a future in modelling. “So I bought a one-way ticket to Paris and left,” she says, matter-of-factly. “At that age, you don’t think about it; you don’t have any fear,” she shrugs. “I think I was more terrified at the idea of not leaving.”

So what of her parents, whom she only informed of her departure on arrival in the French capital? “I’m sure they were furious, and terrified — any parent would be,” she concedes.

In Paris she adopted the name L’Wren Scott, immersed herself in art and architecture, history and travel, while making a living modelling for Thierry Mugler and Chanel, among others, and the photographers Guy Bourdin and David Bailey. Her epic pins were the hands of the clock in the latter’s famous Pretty Polly campaign.

She is amusingly dismissive of her previous profession, though. “I was a model for a very brief period … well, in my mind, anyway,” she laughs, self-deprecatingly. “But I wasn’t good at being objectified. I was always a very behind-the-scenes person.”

After nine years in Paris she moved to Los Angeles, where she worked as a stylist for celebrities including Nicole Kidman, Sarah Jessica Parker and Julianne Moore, and designed costumes for films.

Though she still spends time in Paris and New York, London has been her main home for the past decade or so. “I don’t ever feel like I pitched a tent or took it down though; London has always been a sort of second home to me,” she says.

She launched her own high-end fashion line in 2006, beginning with an array of black dresses, including her now-famous Headmistress dress, worn by Madonna, Angelina Jolie and Penélope Cruz among others. “There was nothing with a waistline, nothing was flattering and feminine,” she says.

High-profile fans of her ladylike, luxurious designs, which sell for up to £2,500 now include Uma Thurman, Jennifer Lopez, Michelle Obama and Jagger’s ex, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy.

Scott met Jagger in 2001, two years after his marriage to Jerry Hall was annulled. And while the notoriously fast-living performer’s private life has, at times, been an apparent maelstrom of extramarital affairs, he would seem, publicly at least, to have finally settled down. Scott is reputedly nicknamed The Loin Tamer.

She certainly makes their life together sound blissfully bucolic, spending weekends working on her vegetable patch “in France” (a 16th- century château in the Loire).

But with her business, which requires considerable travelling, and his tours, seven children, four grandchildren and a handful of houses, how do they make it work? “We sit down and diarise,” she says. “You have to have the kids’ holidays, people’s birthdays, all of that, programmed into your schedule. And I do try to prioritise. I might choose being with my family over going to some glamorous event, because that’s more important to me.”

This weekend will be a happy combination of the two as the Jagger clan decamps to Somerset. It’s Scott’s first Glastonbury and she’s excited. “I’ve been decorating my yurt already, and I have a very chic pair of wellies,” she nods. She was never really a band sort of girl before she met Mick. “I loved Motown, and blues, and classical music, but never rock ’n’ roll,” she admits.

“I get made fun of a lot.Mick used to tell me for years that this one particular song was Gimme Shelter, and I’d say: ‘Oh, I love that song’, and it wasn’t that at all,” she sighs. “But I know them all much better now.”

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