WHEN KAREN ELSON sat down to write her new memoir, The Red Flame (Rizzoli), she wanted her book to be, she says, “a little bit different.” It would, of course, feature iconic images of the model-musician-activist, shot by virtually every master of late-20th-century fashion photography, but she also planned to pair these incredible pictures with an unsparingly honest text. “I wanted the narrative to give some humanity to the images,” she explains. “As a model, you’re often thought of as two-dimensional—you’re put on a pedestal. I wanted people to understand the depth of my experience—my very real experience, the hard stuff.” This hard stuff included her willingness to call out the harmful practices that have longed plagued the fashion business, as well as the need to fight for a more diverse, more inclusive, more ethical, more responsible industry.
Which means that the book is not just a riveting autobiography and a stunning visual retrospective: It’s also a righteous call to arms. Elson, now 41, is telling me all this over the phone from her home in Nashville, where she lives with her two young teenagers, Scarlett and Henry. Our Zoom isn’t working, and so, curious about her distinctive personal style, I ask her to describe what she is wearing. The answer is pure Elson: a vintage yellow flowered dress and tortoiseshell Warby Parker glasses; her scarlet bob is sporting what she calls “COVID bangs,” recently freshened up but still hopelessly curly in the Tennessee summer.
Elson’s bohemian aesthetic is as much her trademark as the elfin charm that made her a great model in every sense of that word—her ability to inhabit characters yet retain her essential personality has imbued even the most elegant, austere ensembles with her one-off, almost spooky glamour. In Elson’s storied career she has embodied everything from an 18th-century incroyable to a 1940s pinup to a soigné society madame to an extraterrestrial in sequins. But it was not always a smooth road: She writes, for example, that she was often not thin enough for the size 0 samples and was openly mocked and reviled, humiliated and tormented by an industry that could make a slender woman feel like an elephant. She still remembers the nasty eye rolls and the cruel words that stung, and she suffered decades of eating disorders attempting to conform to impossible standards. It took a lifetime, she says, but now she can almost laugh about it: “At shows, I am the girl wearing the coat!”
Her winsome proto-grunge ensembles were originally rooted in a lack of funds. Growing up in straitened circumstances in the north of England, Elson faced schoolmates who considered the world of high fashion a ridiculous dream. In the book, she recalls her first trip to Manhattan: “I vividly remember landing in New York…. I was wearing a ratty vintage coat and baby-doll dress with bright orange tights and Converse sneakers, looking like a bargain basement Technicolor Daisy Buchanan.” Elson was 18 and flat broke when she got her big break—Steven Meisel shot her for Vogue Italia. “I gave him everything I had,” she says. “We shot for two glorious hours. I had never felt more excited in my life. I left the studio to go back into the snow with only my single subway token, but I had never felt so joyful.”
Meisel had persuaded her to dye her hair a brilliant shade of red; Pat McGrath turned her ivory face into a spectacular canvas. She writes that she was dismissed in some quarters as looking like an otherworldly alien, “but I’d never felt more seen, more beautiful, and more wholly myself.… When the magazine came out—with me on the cover—my career skyrocketed, but I was also viewed by some as a circus sideshow freak.”
Elson’s unconventional fairy-tale punk-princess allure is perhaps one reason she is particularly sensitive to the ways in which outmoded standards of beauty have to change. And she is hopeful that the welcome shift in our current political discourse—a resurgent feminism; the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements—will allow young women working in the fashion industry today to feel empowered, to find their voices. In the past, asking too many questions, sticking up for yourself, might get you labeled as a troublemaker or even cost you jobs. “People love it when you are partying all night—and the crazier you are, the more they love it,” she says. “But be a good businesswoman? No.” Still, she remains optimistic. “I think, finally, the tables are turning. It’s really all about who gets a seat at the table. The spectrum of beauty is so varied in the normal world, and a willowy white woman is just one person on that spectrum.”
Elson is fighting not just for more room at the table but for a unified code of conduct—one that mandates a workplace that isn’t toxic, that does not tolerate sexually inappropriate behavior or permit problematic language on set. “Agencies need training, casting directors need training—we need training sessions before Fashion Week. We need to show people what a safe working environment looks like.”
Oddly enough, the way the COVID pandemic has forced us to reexamine what is really important has served to bolster Elson’s conviction that the fashion business can transform itself. “Everything that has happened recently has made people realize how unsustainable the industry was becoming—with so many collections, we were veering toward a collective burnout. We all felt like we were running too fast to appreciate our lives, and this tragedy has made us all slow down. Coming out of this, if we can hold on to our sense of decency and to a bigger sense of community, we can carry that care into how we approach our business.”