Erin O'Connor: 'I discovered I have ADHD in my 40s'

When ‘Sybil’ joins the Zoom call that has been set up for my interview with Erin O’Connor, I’m a little bemused. Who is this, admittedly rather fabulous-sounding, imposter? As the screen flickers into life, it becomes apparent that Sybil is, in fact, Erin herself – laying on a bed in her London home with a sumptuous inky velvet upholstered headboard, wearing a relaxed white shirt and cut-off denim shorts. (Rather than any showbiz stealthiness, it's a lack of tech know-how that has resulted in the alias – Erin laughs that it’s her Zoom name and she doesn’t know how to change it.)

It’s not just Erin O’Connor, the supermodel who became legendary in the 1990s and 2000s for bringing to life the visions of designers like Alexander McQueen and Karl Lagerfeld, as well as launching initiatives to make the fashion industry safer and more diverse, who I’m speaking to today, but also a mum to two boys – the clue being the giant stuffed toy that nestles beside Erin for most of our chat.

‘I’ve spent a lot of time in goal over the last year,’ says Erin of life in lockdown with Albert, seven, and Eddie, two, her sons with her long-term partner, Irish businessman Stephen Gibson. ‘And I’ve learned to enjoy getting water-bombed in all weathers.’ So when it came to the photo shoot you see in these pages, a little flower-bed clamouring was small fry. ‘When you see the pictures, it’s just me sort of rolling around in the grass all day, which is now my natural habitat,’ laughs Erin.

During lockdown, she savoured the structure that caring for ‘two little halflings’ gave her. She agonised over attempting to find the same sausages Albert loved eating for his school dinners, watched as a sculpture of her head became the focal point of target practice and revelled in observing the ‘extended nose-picking and long toilet breaks’ of her eldest’s Zoom school classes and ‘geeking out’ by throwing herself into learning again. It’s an experience that has had more profound consequences for her, though.

‘I’ve discovered that I’m ADHD, which is new,’ Erin confides. ‘In retrospect, it’s very helpful to be able to piece it together and understand certain things in my personality and growing up. I’m actually currently resitting my maths GCSE. It just means a lot to me personally, now that I understand how my brain wants to function and store information. I’ve been able to understand how I can become a more straightforward learner.’

What with ‘Sybil’ and this effortless interplay of mum and model life, it’s clear that the 43-year-old remains the creative chameleon who took the the fashion world by storm after being discovered in 1995 at The Clothes Show Live. Born in 1978 in Walsall to mum Veronica, a nursery school teacher, and dad Cahal, a furnace builder, who are originally from Northern Ireland, it was a dramatic short haircut by Guido Palau that transformed her from West Midlands teen into a new kind of British supermodel.

‘I was spotted when I was just 17 years old. I was a carbon-copy cliché of a very tall [6ft 1in], introverted teenager with zero confidence,’ remembers Erin. The Clothes Show was for her, like so many girls at the time, a ‘religion’. ‘Me and my two sisters used to clamber around the TV on a Sunday afternoon, just before dinner and after church to watch Caryn Franklin, who was a goddess to us, and Jeff Banks giving brilliant exposure to fashion on a budget. They were the pioneers of that – I don’t think we’ve ever had anything as good since.’

Having idolised Franklin, the music-mad teen (she lists Justine Frischmann of Elastica, Tori Amos, Shakespears Sister and Annie Lennox as her fashion inspirations at the time) was ‘absolutely thrilled’ when the model scout Fiona Ellis spotted her at the NEC in Birmingham. ‘I remember wearing wet, clammy jeans [that] day, because we didn’t own a tumble dryer yet,’ she says, ‘I’d never seen single pictures of myself before other than on an annual school photo. It was odd and liberating.’

She acknowledges that she was, ‘in essence, a gift to the fashion industry’ thanks to being ‘achingly straightforward with a penchant for people-pleasing, I was ready to be moulded and morphed’. By 1997, Erin was modelling for Versace, Calvin Klein, Prada and more, but she formed a particularly close bond with Dior’s John Galliano, Chanel’s Karl Lagerfeld, Alexander McQueen, Jean Paul Gaultier and, later, Giles Deacon.

One of her first assignments was with Dior, the label whose fairytale-inspired autumn/winter 2021 collection she wears on the cover of this issue. She recalls being ‘catapulted into John Galliano’s vision’ and transformed into ‘a silent-movie star on the marble steps of the Paris Opera House’. There followed turns as a patient in an asylum dressed in a gown made of razor-clam shells for McQueen, inhabiting a modern Cleopatra for another Dior show and becoming a haute version of a matryoshka doll for Jean Paul Gaultier.

For all these designers, Erin has been called a muse, but it’s a term which she is now determined to reframe. ‘It was an absolute gift to work with them because it was always very much a collaborative affair. We needed each other to make things work, I always felt there was a respectful appreciation,’ she insists. ‘The role of a muse can be a bit blurred at times, it can feel quite passive.’ She adds that it has been ‘very frustrating’ at times when she’s felt the role she played wasn’t properly recognised by others.

Erin’s ability to embrace these fantastical ideas was almost a form of self-preservation at a time when she was battling shyness and anxiety. ‘My real terror for years wasn’t wearing massive platforms, wigs and corsets or having my eyebrows bleached,’ she says, ‘it was, in fact, being too close to myself.’

She spent lockdown reflecting on her experiences in those early days. ‘I think it’s better that I wasn’t equipped with the breadth of knowledge and experience I have now, because I don’t know if I’d ever have left my front door with the weight of expectation at points. Certainly, naivety can make you quite brave because you’re willing to go into something where you don’t necessarily appreciate the importance of the outcome.’

And despite this CV of heady high-fashion moments, it is having her face appear on a Royal Mail stamp in 2001 and starring in campaigns for Marks & Spencer that Erin picks out as equally important career highlights. You can take the girl out of Walsall...

It was ‘passionate overthinking’ that spurred her into action when she realised that there were darker aspects to the fashion industry and its relationship with the public. ‘At the beginning of the size zero debate, I was initially singled out, but I welcomed the debate as I knew from the offset that it was completely necessary,’ she remembers. ‘I realised that if I had caused any harm to people because of my image in the media, then I wanted to do something about it.’

It was a notion that led her to found the Model Sanctuary in 2007, a place for models to take time out during Fashion Week and get expert advice from nutritionists, life coaches and other experts. And in 2009, she joined her teenage heroine Caryn Franklin and fashion consultant Debra Bourne in establishing All Walks Beyond the Catwalk, an organisation that promoted size, age and racial diversity long before they became the buzz topics they are now.

Erin’s work in this area led to her being awarded an MBE in the Queen’s 2017 birthday honours for her services to fashion and charity. ‘It was very moving and humbling to have my folks in the same room as the Queen and that we all got to have a trip to Buckingham Palace,’ she says. ‘To be acknowledged for the things that had at times unnerved me, that had taken a lot of work, restraint and cooperation with an industry that I felt we could work on, and an industry that ultimately I love.’ Her boys call her honour ‘Mama’s good girl badge’.

Today, Erin is more selective about the projects she takes on. ‘I’m not overly invested in being passive or the recipient of someone else’s creativity any more. I’ve reached a point where standing in the corner in a dress, however spectacular, isn’t entirely stimulating.’ But she is enjoying working at a time when models of her age and beyond are more in demand than ever.

‘Modelling is fleeting, so you can never really plan for the future. I was always aware and wary of that,’ she explains. ‘You don’t drop off a cliff after the age of 25, you continue to grow, and have a better understanding of who you are and how you want to express yourself so actually, what’s strange is that it wasn’t happening before. Inadvertently, I’m very happy to champion that just by doing my job.’

In our shoot, Erin’s hair is black and the same short crop she’s now had for years (‘as a kid, I never thought I would want to cut my hair off but I feel far more feminine with short hair’), but it’s been going grey since she was 13 and it’s a look she’s been happy to embrace on and off. ‘I love my grey hair. When I got pregnant with Eddie I was 40, I did what felt natural to me which was to ban chemicals, just to ensure that my pregnancy stayed healthy,’ she says. She’s relaxed about trying different looks now, depending on work and mood, and has been three shades – including pink – already this year.

She keeps her beauty regime simple. Like any mother of young children, her ‘ideal’ would be ‘more sleep’, but in its absence she recommends ADC beauty cream, which is ‘plant-based, cruelty-free and packed with active ingredients so you don’t need to get bogged down by an elaborate routine. Slap it on. Go to bed.’ Her favoured form of fitness is dancing around with her boys, music blaring.

As for style, Erin describes herself as ‘a hot liberated mess of colour- clashing textiles and retro Adidas trainers’, but she loves to dress up in Dior, especially the designs of the maison’s current creative director, Maria Grazia Chiuri. ‘It’s the definition of luxury… Everything I see on the catwalk is something I would wish to wear and she’s very thoughtful in the way she designs clothing. There’s a lot of tactility and sensuality. It’s a very powerful stance on what it is to be a woman today.’

She has ‘boxes and boxes of clothes’ in her attic, which she has loved and worn rather than treated like museum pieces. A pair of Miu Miu stilettos have been ‘danced in around the world’, a Molly Goddard dress is being saved for her goddaughter, who ‘looks so much better in it than me’ and a leopard-print Dior coat makes a brilliant knight’s cloak for her boys.

There seems to be a real sense of balance in Erin’s life now. Besides studying for her GCSE and processing her diagnosis, her immediate plans include hiking up Knocklayde mountain in County Antrim and helping a friend harvest her blueberry crop. She also plans to ‘agonise less over the things I can’t control’.

She might have effortlessly morphed from Salvador Dalí to Marie Antoinette on catwalks past, but – Sybil, the Zoom alter ego aside – Erin O’Connor is now well and truly herself.