The stuff of dreams; Former Britain's Next Top Model winner Lucy Ratcliffe has swapped Tyneside for the glamour of Los Angeles. As her new clothes series gets under way, she talks to Liz Lamb about how the pressure to be thin and workload forced her to give up her modelling: The stuff of dreams.
MODEL Lucy Ratcliffe's beautiful face illuminates from photographs while her model-thin physique reveals not a single flaw.The 24-year-old's breathtaking body and good looks are what many teenage girls would aspire to, but behind her beauty, Lucy was hiding a secret unhappiness brought about by constant demands to be thinner and an unrelenting work schedule.
Though being crowned Britain's Next Top Model four years ago has given Lucy a golden ticket to a glittering star-studded life in LA, her gruelling experience as a model , should act as a stark warning to this year's contestants.
The pressure to lose weight was so great that at one point, when the model returned from the catwalks in Milan, she was so thin that her own mother barely recognised her.
"It nearly drove me crazy," she reveals.
"There's no distraction from the modelling world. It's all about you, you, you, 24 hours a day.
"I had to detox, watch my weight. It sounds over the top but there was always this pressure to be thin, to always be losing weight.
"When I was in Milan I lost a stone and a half, I was like a skeleton.
"My mum didn't recognise me.
"It's hard to be keep that up." Lucy, from North Tyneside, beat a staggering 10,000 wannabes to win the UK version of the successful American show in 2005, which sees aspiring models live together in a house and compete in a series of tasks in which one model is eliminated from the competition each week.
The new UK show is currently being shown on Living TV and includes another North East contestant, Jade McSorley, from Teesside, who suffers from anorexia.
Lucy, who was first discovered by Tyne Tees Models, knows only too well the pressures faced by many young women to lose weight. She says: "I actually put on a stone during the competition. "I'd never ever been aware of my weight. I'd grown up being tall and slim but in the house I was hit by all this stress. "The way I coped with it was by having a packet of biscuits. "They told me to lose weight and that was the beginning of the awareness of body image for me. "I wish I had just stayed in my nice little world, where I never had to think about dieting." After winning the competition the former barmaid was told to lose a stone and a half when she returned to
Tyneside for four months until the final stages of the competition had been screened on television. Lucy had been running the restaurant at the Magnesia Bank pub in North Shields with a friend and she went back to her old job until she was officially unveiled as Britain's Next Top Model. Her big prize at the end of the show was to appear on the cover of B, a women's magazine and model for leading cosmetics brand Ruby and Millie. She also landed a contract with Models 1 agency which launched the careers of Twiggy, Jerry Hall and Yasmin Le Bon. She managed to lose the weight sensibly over four months before packing her bags to live in a flat in London with eight other models and sleep in a bunk bed. For the then-19-year-old, who up until then had been living with her mum Jude, who runs a vintage clothes stall, in Whitley Bay, it was a whole new world. "The pressure they put on me made me cry," says the former Whitley Bay High School student. "They put me next to 14-year-old European girls who were a size two or a four and to know that you were supposed to look like that to get a job. It was really damaging and I have been affected by it. "You learn to eat like the other models. The fridge in the house was empty. "Some of the girls would just eat three rice cakes and a bit of tomato all day, others would make a bowl of soup and make it last a week. "I learned to eat like them but to sustain that weight and to eat like that just wasn't normal. "I went quite thin. I was being told go to the gym and there was this pressure to be extremely thin. "When you are starving yourself and not being able to lose weight and be like the others, it's a nightmare." The next four years was a whirlwind of dieting, travelling, and a 24-hours seven-days-a-week workload that saw Lucy travelling to Paris, Milan, America and Greece and gracing the pages of top glossy magazines including Red and Company as well as appearing at The Clothes Show Live. But the pressures took their toll and a year ago Lucy decided to give up modelling for good. "I spent 24 hours a day seven days a week modelling," she says. "I was doing so much work and earning a lot of money but I lost the drive to keep going every single day. "I stopped for a break and I didn't want to go back. "I didn't want that life anymore. It wasn't fulfilling." Lucy ended up being introduced to her now-boyfriend Amal Guessous, a designer who once dated Sharon Stone and is friends with Naomi Campbell, and who has his own fashion label A&G, as well as a new rock 'n' roll couture collection, which includes high-end leather pieces, cashmere tops and gold jewellery. The pair bonded over their mutual love of fashion and Amal invited her to visit him in LA. "I saw some of his stuff and I loved it," says Lucy. "When I met him I thought phwoar, he is a bit nice and we got talking and I started telling him some of my ideas for designs and he invited me over. "I ended up taking a flight to LA and living there." Lucy has since done some graphic designs for the fashion company as well as designing pieces for Amal's new collection, which is sold in LA, Paris and Tokyo, and soon to be sold at his first store in the UK, which will open in Knightsbridge, London. The fashion company has a long list of celebrity clients including Demi Moore, Paris Hilton, Sharon Stone, Johnny Rotten of The Sex Pistols and Mickey Rourke.
"It's been really exciting," says the ex-model. "I have been travelling back and forward from LA and my clothes have been worn by Samuel L Jackson, Cher and Paul Stanley from Kiss. "Cher actually wore one of my tops for her shows in Las Vegas. "We're opening the store in Knightsbridge, which will be the first time it's really been launched in the UK and I'd love it to sell in Harrods too. I had a meeting with Mohamed Al Fayed and he agreed to sell it on the fashion floor. "I could not believe it. It was the first proper deal that I have ever done in my life. It's amazing. Hopefully we are also going to get editorial in Vogue and Grazia fashion magazines too. "A lot of footballers wear the label already. Djibril Cisse sells it in his shop in Newcastle." Despite her glamorous lifestyle and fame, Lucy is still remarkably down-to-earth and often comes home to Whitley Bay to visit her family. Life on the other side of the Atlantic is a world away from her Tyneside roots as revealed in an email she sent me from LA.
It reads: "LA is in full celebrity swing at the moment. I've been here three days and already been sat next to Mick Jagger in a restaurant, Scarlett Johansson works out at my gym and Gwyneth Paltrow had flaming cheese at the Greek place we were at last night. "Still - there's no place like home and no food like a good old battered cod. Can't When I met him I thought phwoar, he is a bit nice and we got talking and I started telling him some of my ideas for designs wait to come home and eat carbs without feeling like a weirdo ." Though Lucy's experience of appearing on Britain's Next Top Model may not have always been pleasant, she is thankful for the opportunity and says it changed her forever. She says: "I used to be so timid and shy as a child but now I am not scared of anything. I go home and mum says you're not the quiet, nice little girl, you used to be, the girl who used to hide under the covers and not want to come out. "It terrifies me that people don't discover what they can do, what they are capable of. I could have had a baby at 18 and still be working in the restaurant. "There's this great quote from the Lion King that says you are more than what you have become. "Now I'm so happy. I like the person I am now." For more information on A&G and the rock 'n' roll couture label go to www.amalguessous.com
CAPTION(S):
MOVING ON Lucy with boyfriend Amal. Top right: Lucy as she appeared in Britain's Next Top Model. Second top: Lucy's and Amal's shop in Melrose Avenue, Los Ange le s and, below, her model shots showing of her amazing body .
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| Publication: | The Journal (Newcastle, England) |
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| Date: | May 9, 2009 |
| Words: | 1544 |
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