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A week with male model David Gandy
Chiselled features and a torso to die for - Alex Clark meets the man who’s put the machismo back into modellingAlex Clark
David Gandy, one of the world’s most successful male models and the extremely handsome chap credited with helping men’s fashion turn away from the drainpipe shape and pale complexions that ruled supreme for several years and back to beefcake, is in the gym. I am watching him. Thus far, there have been multidirectional lunges and press-ups involving a large ball. I have done very little except perch on a stool and sip at some greenish water given to me by Gandy’s personal trainer, Nathalie, which, she explains, will help alkalinise my system (I think). I am, however, exhausted; watching a 6ft 2in, 15-stone man lift his own body weight while strapped into some kind of medieval stirrup contraption is enough to puff anyone out. “Do you want to have a go?” asks Nathalie, as her charge takes to a hideous-looking climbing machine. I do not. Even the warm-down involves lying on a bed of nails.

But, Gandy tells me afterwards, he reckons Nathalie was going pretty easy on him today, perhaps because I was there, and perhaps because he is not, at the moment, in one of the truly fearsome conditioning phases that precede a major advertising campaign and that see him virtually decamp to the gym, banish booze, bulk up on protein and cut down on carbs. Right now, in the midst of London Fashion Week, which happens to have coincided with him turning 30, he is letting loose a little, although the extent of that seems to be that he follows his healthy salmon lunch with a highly decorated cupcake. I promise not to nip back to the gym and tell Nathalie.

The (normally) rigorous routine shows. Gandy is an extraordinary shape, like an inverted pyramid on long, limber legs; he also has the kind of strong, chiselled features that make you think of firemen rescuing puppies from blazing buildings. Broad-shouldered, rippling of arm and tight of torso, it is little surprise that photographers often seem keen to persuade him out of clothes and into the scantiest of scanties; the breathless postings on numerous websites confirm that his fans are highly appreciative of such an approach. The “David” calendar, shot by Mariano Vivanco for Dolce & Gabbana in 2008, which poses its model in all manner of apparently quotidian situations – taking a shower, prone between rumpled sheets, eating a takeaway and, rather less obviously, adopting an attitude of prayer – is beyond suggestive. “Those shots were a little risqué,” concedes Gandy, before explaining that Vivanco had taken his very first head-shots and that they had subsequently become great friends. “It could have been embarrassing, but it was fun.”

Also fun – there were beautiful girls and speedboats, after all – was Mario Testino’s Capri shoot for Dolce’s Light Blue fragrance, the 2007 campaign that transformed Gandy’s career. Hitherto, he had been a highly employable commercial model, constantly hopping on and off planes to be photographed for catalogues and advertisements throughout the world. He was not, however, a particularly well-known name, and neither was he entirely satisfied with what he was doing. After Light Blue, he was the face of one of the world’s most prestigious fashion houses. Like all overnight success stories, though, there was more to it than met the eye.

For a start, Gandy might never have become a model had it not been for the good offices of a student housemate. “We were watching a television show,” he tells me, “and they were doing a modelling competition and she said, ‘You should go for that.’” He laughed it off. Only a month later, when the phone rang telling him he was down to the last 15 on This Morning (he hung up, assuming it was a wrong number), did his friend confess to having entered him secretly. When he won the competition, and with it a place on the immensely powerful Select Model Management’s books, he was told he’d been plucked off the “no” pile at the last minute. He was 21 and into computers, cricket and rugby, not clothes and cameras; he’d thought he might want to work with cars or animals. Subsequently, his university friends told him he was known around the campus as Model Dave. “I might have got a few more dates at the time if I’d known that girls were calling me that,” he says, a mite ruefully.

But, despite that initial triumph, Gandy had entered modelling at a tricky time. “It was when the androgynous, skinny Dior guys were in the industry,” he recalls. “I was laughed at when I used to walk into castings… people would go, ‘It’s the big guy!’” It was suggested to him (more tactfully, one imagines, than it might have been to a female counterpart) that he could lose a little of his bulk. But he stuck to his guns; if anything, he says, he wanted to have a bigger and better body. “It was the suits that mattered, not [the models],” he notes now, “which I don’t think appealed to anyone. It might have appealed to the fashion industry a little bit, but to Joe Public, I don’t think they could get what fashion was talking about.”

For three or four years, he worked steadily and successfully, but he was beginning to tire of the treadmill of economy air travel and endless shoots. After intense discussions with Select, he took the radical step of turning down all offers of commercial work and rebuilding brand Gandy; sophisticated, elegant, sensual – and undeniably big. Eventually came a Dolce & Gabbana shoot in Los Angeles with renowned photographer Steven Meisel (“I loved it. I thought, ‘This is what I want to do’”) and then, on the back of that, Light Blue. Goodbye economy, hello business class, and hello the covers of VMan (“The Making of a Supermodel”) and L’Optimum’s “Sixty Years of Cannes” special issue. Although Gandy doesn’t discuss money, it’s fair to assume that he earns a more than healthy living wage; and while he is keen to debunk the myth that models won’t get out of bed for less than £10,000, one imagines they don’t lease out their faces for peanuts.

So what is the life of a male supermodel like? Well, Gandy is at pains to point out in the week or so that I spend with him that what I’m seeing isn’t entirely typical; it isn’t always London Fashion Week (though, to my outsider’s eyes, it always seems to be Somewhere Fashion Week), and it isn’t always his 30th birthday. When he invites me to accompany him to a fitting at Dolce & Gabbana’s London store, he’s juggling his forthcoming runway appearance in Naomi Campbell’s Fashion For Relief show in aid of Haiti with attendances at the Elle Style Awards and the Harper’s Bazaar Love Ball, hosted by Natalia Vodianova for her charity. In between, he’s planning to pop back to his native Billericay to celebrate his birthday with his mates.

“David’s like our family, so I do bark at him,” says the lady at Dolce, as she ushers a slightly late Gandy towards the rail of suits, shirts, ties and scarves and rows of highly polished shoes that have been laid out for his arrival. But there seems to be more hugging than barking, even though the team is at full stretch dressing the likes of Kylie, James Blunt, Kasabian and Alesha Dixon for that night’s Brit Awards. The task today is to choose two outfits for Fashion For Relief, the only stricture being that the show’s creative director has stipulated a light palette for the catwalk, with no colour darker than grey. A period of consideration ensues, garments held up to the light, fabrics caressed, and then Gandy slips into a dressing room and emerges in a white suit, its jacket edged with black, white shirt and a thin white tie. Loafers and brogues go off and on; Gandy might be the only man I have ever met who uses a shoehorn. The effect, it must be admitted, is something else – suave, slightly edgy and thoroughly raffish. “Lovely,” I say, though nobody, quite rightly, has asked for my opinion; in any case, I later realise that the correct term of approbation is “stunning”.

The second outfit, a casual look, is more of a test for my limited understanding of high fashion. I’ve grasped – just – that jeans these days must be ripped; but I don’t get the clearly deliberate haven’t-tucked-your-long-johns-in effect created by the patterned lining that pokes out at waist, thigh, knee and ankle. But add a tight white waistcoat and a beautifully tailored grey jacket and the ensemble does, indeed, begin to look lovely. I mean stunning.

Gandy is clearly as interested in the clothes he models as he is in maintaining the body beneath them; although D&G doesn’t require him to wear its lines when he’s out and about, he frequently does because they fit him, he says, like a glove. He is slightly despairing of the capacity of the average man (and, to be blunt, the average British man) to throw outfits together and to wear suits that do nothing for their body shapes. He wonders whether he’s identified a gap in the market and, possibly, even a new iPhone app, “to help with the simplest things in the world, like how to match your shoes with your belt. I see guys who will have a great tux, but then come with a four-year-old bent-up shoe and spoil the whole thing. For someone to say, ‘Buy some decent shoes, or don’t wear that big buckled belt with that…’ You see people who think if they’ve got Hugo Boss, they’re going to look great – well, you’re not going to look great, because it doesn’t fit you. On the other hand, you can go to Marks & Spencer or to Zara and buy a suit for £200, pay a tailor £50 to lengthen it or shorten it, or take in the trousers, and that’s what makes a suit absolutely superb.”

The next time I meet Gandy, London Fashion Week is in full swing, and he has agreed to further my fashion education by taking me to see Antonio Berardi’s show of women’s clothing. Outside a warehouse in Bloomsbury, early on a freezing, drenched Monday morning, models in dressing gowns shiver underneath umbrellas during hasty fag breaks, their hair further protected by wads of cotton wool; fashionable types pick their way down the soggy gravel drive in implausibly fragile-looking shoes; a man in a turquoise feather parka looks, at least, warm. Gandy has spent the weekend in Essex, attending a Rat Pack-themed party thrown by a friend also reaching 30, complete with ice sculptures and girls jumping out of cakes. I bet he had the best suit there, I say, and he looks graciously sheepish; he loves the fact that few of his longstanding friends even know who Mario Testino is, and instead gleefully jump on pictures of him dressed outlandishly (most notably when he appeared in US Vogue as Superman: “It was like Christmas come early,” he grins). He also had a nice dinner cooked for him by his mum – “My bit of respite,” he says. He speaks often and lovingly of his family, the passion for cricket he shares with his father, the idea of taking his nephew to a children’s sleepover in the Natural History Museum. His mother accompanied him on to This Morning, and he was thrilled when his grandfather, not well at the time, was able to watch it. Not that any of them are fashion insiders: he also confides that his mother once rang him excitedly to tell him she’d seen him in a magazine. On inspection, it turned out not to be him at all. “There’s a side of me that adores having them know nothing about it,” he says.

Once inside, Gandy is in his element; noticeably, he has an ability to switch seamlessly into professional mode, composing his face and stance instantly when photographers approach him for a quick snap. He tells me he’s still not used to having his picture taken in that kind of context, but I’d say he’s adjusting to it pretty well. He is here simply because he is friends with both Berardi and the show’s creative director, but he clearly enjoys the opportunities to mingle with the fashion world’s great and good that his increased visibility has brought. When an organiser beckons him to the front row, he gallantly makes sure I’m invited, too. While we wait for the show to begin, he fills me in on the highlights of the Fashion For Relief show, which included him nicking Skin’s chair in the backstage mêlée and a guest appearance by Ronnie Corbett. (“All I wanted was for him to sit down in a leather chair and tell me a story. It would have been a dream.”)

The clothes, when they begin to loop around the room, are exquisite: dramatic but somehow austere, shades of milk, blood and fuchsia (as the press release has it) cut into sleek silhouettes that somehow combine theatricality with wearability (if you are slender enough). Several of them feature sheer black bodices that are worn, here if not in real life, with no undergarment, providing a flash of nipple that is somewhat incongruous at 10am. “We think we’re cold,” Gandy whispers to me.

I’m struck by how different the lives of male and female models must be; at this show, and no doubt most others at London Fashion Week, thinness is still very much the order of the day, and all the women wear stilettos so high that they are forced into an unnatural, tipped-back gait. When one of them stumbles on the final circuit, the audience reacts with a gasp of fellow-feeling and, as she removes her shoes, a rousing round of applause.

But Gandy has built his career on quite a different representation of the body, one in which the kind of muscle definition normally seen on a thoroughbred horse, together with impeccable grooming, conveys an image of supreme health, vitality and male beauty. That image also presents us very clearly with a particular view of masculinity, one that implies strength, vigour and potency. You don’t, of course, get to look like that without the gym regime, the protein shakes and the intricate attention of numerous couturiers, stylists and photographers, but Gandy’s stock-in-trade is also a kind of naturalness that sees him eschew make-up and airbrushing. Despite the evident artifice of the fashion industry, and despite his own preternaturally good looks, Gandy seems curiously unaffected by it all, as though he’s having a blast but can’t take it all too seriously. “There’s a bit of Zoolanderesque presumption about who you are,” he tells me, referring to the Ben Stiller film that featured a male model of mind-bending stupidity. “And in some ways I’m trying to break that trend. People think if you’re in modelling, you stay in modelling because you can’t do anything else. But I’m at the top of my league, I’m having a bit of influence on people for once, and I’m enjoying it. It’s opening up many doors, so I’d be pretty stupid to leave it.”

Interview with the Dolce & Gabbana supermodel David Gandy
Sunday, October 17, 2010


David Gandy is the world's best-known male supermodel - the face (and body) of Dolce & Gabbana. Yet, he tells John Preston, he's really 'just a normal guy from Essex' who doesn't have much luck with the ladies.

There can be very few men in history who have had a 50ft-high photograph of themselves wearing only a pair of underpants plastered over Times Square in New York.
When this happened to David Gandy three years ago, one might have expected him to jump on the first available flight and spend hours gazing, enraptured, at his enormous semi-naked self. In fact, he never even bothered to go and have a look.


'Some friends of mine who were over there sent me pictures on my phone,' he says. 'But if I had seen it I'm not sure how I would have felt. Probably nothing, to be honest. It's a persona. It's not really me.

In life I don't go around wearing just a pair of white pants - at least not on the number 14 bus down the Fulham Road.'

David Gandy, as will become clear, is an unusual male model. He is also a hugely successful one - the most successful in the world.

He is Dolce & Gabbana's catwalk star and the face of their fragrance and apparel campaigns. He writes a menswear blog for vogue.com and recently became the first male model ever to appear on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross .

Before we go on, I think I ought to record my wife's reactions when I showed her a photograph of David Gandy - not that this gives me any pleasure at all. 'Bloody hell!' she said, snatching the picture from my hand. 'He looks fantastic!'

There is, I fear, a lot of truth in this. Indeed, I've never come across a man before whose looks can reduce a room to muted awe.

But it's very hard to be anywhere near David Gandy and not find yourself staring at him. He's tall with wavy black hair, astonishingly blue eyes and features that somehow manage to be delicate but not at all effete.

He also has an effortless elegance, in the way he both moves and dresses - today he's wearing black trousers, a white T-shirt and a double-breasted blazer with a neatly folded spotted handkerchief in the top pocket.

The idea of male beauty has gone through some bewildering changes in the past 60 years. Suave brooders have given way to fresh-faced college types.

New Romantics have been succeeded by beefcakes, followed by Calvin Klein-wearing frat packers. By the late 1990s the catwalks were full of grungy, stick-thin approximations to manhood with bodies like coat hangers.

The skinny, androgynous ideal stayed indomitable through Hedi Slimane's neo-mod designs for Dior Homme all the way up to last season's menswear collection for Burberry. And then along came Gandy.

Very early on I went to a casting for Dior and they asked me to try on a suit. I couldn't even get one leg into the trousers, let alone put the jacket on. All the models were standing around going, 'Hey, who's the big guy?'

There was quite an unpleasant atmosphere there, quite intimidating. I remember thinking, 'Are these guys appealing?' They certainly weren't appealing to me.'

Gandy's rise represents a return to a more clear-cut era when men were unmistakably men. They played sports and didn't spend hours agonising about, or experimenting with, their sexuality.

'It wasn't as if I thought I had a particular look. But I'd played a lot of cricket and rugby at school and I think that helped. And I try to take good care of myself.'

To watch him settle himself on a sofa, put his dark glasses down on the coffee table and cross one taperingly long leg over the other, is to watch a man who appears to be brimming with self-confidence.

Except that Gandy isn't really like that. Beneath his immaculate exterior he's modest, even bashful, and says that the idea of being an object of desire makes him 'want to hide under a chair'.

'I'm not confident with women. I'm better than I was, but that's not saying much. As a child I was pretty shy, and I'm not sure you ever lose that. It's only in the past couple of years that I've been confident enough to go up and talk to a girl.'

Not that Gandy has much time to talk to anyone at the moment - he's far too busy working. 'At one stage I spent so much time on British Airways I was verging on being a steward.

But it is a very strange life - Palm Springs one day, New York the next. It's great, but it's certainly not the life I ever expected for myself.'

Nor is it a life anyone could have predicted for him. Growing up in Essex, Gandy had no interest in fashion or the way he looked. At school he was singled out for all the wrong reasons.

'I got bullied quite a lot - partly because I was quite fat for a while, and partly because of the way I sounded.'

Gandy went to a comprehensive in Billericay, but hearing him speak you'd think he was a bit of a toff. 'My parents didn't come from wealthy backgrounds,' he says. His father is a self-made entrepreneur. 'But they did attach a lot of importance to the way you sounded.'

Gandy's story is one of (fairly) modest beginnings and bizarre strokes of fortune. He was studying marketing at university when a friend suggested he go in for a nationwide modelling competition.

Gandy found the idea laughable and did nothing about it. Unbeknown to him, his friend went ahead and entered him.

He won, of course, although it later transpired the judges had plucked his name from the 'No' pile at the last moment. First prize was a contract with the model agency Select.

'I can't say I felt this instinctive aptitude for modelling. I just fell into it. That said, though, I always want to be the best at whatever I do.'

Gandy's new career was progressing solidly - until he decided to commit career suicide. I was doing a lot of catalogues and modelling for high-street stores. That was fine, but you don't get to work with the best people. I decided that if I was going to carry on doing this I needed to do something radical.'

In future, Gandy decided, he wasn't going to do any more catalogues. When his agent had picked herself up off the floor, she asked him what on earth he was talking about. 'We ended up having this huge argument.'

An anxious few months followed, but then in 2006 Gandy's master plan paid off. Dolce & Gabbana whisked him off to Los Angeles to be photographed by Steven Meisel. A year later his 50ft self was towering over Times Square.

Now everyone seems to know who he is. Yet while his looks may have brought him fame, he reckons they've also made people wary of him.

'Women tend not to approach me. I'm not sure if they find me intimidating, but I'm probably quite pensive and I don't necessarily look that approachable. Guys tend to be very wary. I think they expect me to believe my own hype and it's quite difficult to convince them that I don't.'

Men may be wary of Gandy, but perhaps they're just confused about what masculine ideal they should be aspiring to.

Looking at men's fashion over the past half-century it's hard to avoid the conclusion that this is a gender that's deeply unsure of itself, that doesn't know if it should be sporting designer stubble or reaching for the depilatory cream.

In his own distinctive way Gandy is the embodiment of traditional values - a man so full of testosterone it seems to be leaking out of his pores.

And while he's not one to beat his own 37in chest, Gandy hopes that his success might make men a bit less fretful, more at ease in their own skins.

'I do think that when you're advertising clothes, or a fragrance or whatever, it's important that whoever the advertisement is aimed at should be able to relate to the person in it.'

Right now, though, he's busy trying to make men more like women - at least in the way they choose clothes. He is about to launch an application for Apple, the Style Guide For Men, in which he offers fashion tips to men who want to dress well, but can't stand shopping.

'Partly it's things I've learnt over the years. For instance, women always look at a man's shoes first, yet most of the time men's shoes are in a pretty terrible state.

And most men I know want to look good, but they can't afford to spend £4,000 on a Tom Ford suit.

One of the things I'm doing is pointing out that you can buy a high-street suit and then, for really very little money, get a tailor to alter it so that it fits you perfectly.'

He's got other plans, too. He's hoping to talk to the marketing guru Mary Portas about a retail idea, and when he lies awake at night he wonders how he can boost the men's share of the fashion market from its lowly 28 per cent to about 50 per cent.

'Whoever can persuade men to shop for clothes is going make a hell of a lot of money.'

When he's in London Gandy lives in a flat in Fulham - alone. 'Yeah, my bachelor pad,' he says with a rueful laugh. 'The trouble is, I don't think it's fair to ask someone to put up with the sort of life I have.

When I'm in a relationship I like to dedicate myself to that person and I just don't have time for that at the moment.'

These days, of course, everyone wants to be like David Gandy. Indeed, there are so many models out there who resemble him that sometimes even he finds himself looking twice at a poster. He's very much the leader of the pack, but at 30 he has to work harder than ever to stay there.

'I do work hugely at my physical fitness. One day I'll do my chest, the next my arms - that sort of thing. As for food, I have to watch that, too.

When I'm doing a shoot for [the Dolce & Gabbana fragrance] Light Blue, I cut out all carbohydrates for a month beforehand, work out every day and drink protein shakes at God-knows-what hours of the day and night.'

Although his parents found his supermodel status weird at first, they're now his biggest fans. 'My mum keeps everything I do; my dad doesn't make a big thing of it.

But my mum told me they were on holiday once in Slovenia and these women were talking about being so transfixed by a Light Blue poster that they almost crashed their car. My dad leaned over and told them, 'That's my son."'

While Gandy has friends in the fashion world - he's particularly close to Mario Testino - his best chums are people he's known since childhood.

'A lot of them have no interest in fashion. We go out and have fun and never talk about clothes.' He grins and flicks fluff off his lapel. 'So you see,' he says, not at all convincingly, 'I'm just a normal guy from Essex.'