Bridget Jones meets the Devil Wears Prada, How Not to be a Supermodel is a hilarious roller coaster ride through a decade of the improbable scenarios and shocking events experienced by Ruth as she started her modelling career in the noughties.
A delve into your journey through one of the world's most fascinating industries, you offer a glimpse into the high glamour (?) juddering reality of a by-gone era.
The juddering reality part, yes. It was an era rife with unattainable beauty standards, horrendous body image issues and deeply rooted misogynistic viewpoints. It was a life without smart phones and filters. The book focuses on what really went on behind the glitz and glamour, if indeed there was any.
Set in the noughties. What was so different about then?
Well for a starters, it was pre smart phone and email, an age of innocence really. You just couldnât access the vast amounts of information we can now. The world felt smaller and as a model you werenât a public facing figure. I guess the book takes you straight back to that time, and itâs nostalgic really. It was a time when you could be incognito and remain private. For good or bad, 95% off that time has been allowed to be forgotten.
So, you were going to be a lawyerâŚ
Yes, the book opens with me dropping out of law school, entering a modelling competition and embarking on my journey to âsupermodeldomâ. But if you take the modelling part out of it you could say itâs a love letter to myself.
Itâs been described as Bridgit Jones meets Devil Wears Prada, which do you most identity with?
I am a catastrophe magnet. Disaster will always find meâŚor do I find it? Thereâs an element of Bridgit running though me â in a Devil Wears Prada setting.
A catalogue of clanging errors, itâs the opposite of an instruction manual â your book is essentially a lesson in how not to reach the top.
You can safely say, no-one knows more than me about how not to become a supermodel. Even when good things happened, like being gifted a ruinously expensive red shearling coat as payment for walking in the Ghost show. I mean how incredible, until it wasnât ( I would subsequently learn that the dye hadnât been fixed properly). Off I went to a casting in Paris, one of those big, life changing amount of money type castings that really matter. It was one of those balmy, rainy Paris days. And I was hot. So, I ran into Gallery Lafayette for a quick make-up check on route only to discover that everything from my face down was red. Really red. My cream jumper, trousers, boots, arms, even my hands⌠And the story should end there really. But it didnât. I went to my friendâs apartment (who didnât want his mum to know I was going there) and managed to dye her bathroom redâŚand on route to the casting, having been forced to ditch my now red boots, I lost a flip flop. Is it worth adding that I didnât get the job? Things like that would happen to me all the time.
How did you come up with the idea for the book?
In 2008 I went back to uni and studied literature and creative writing. I was always writing stuff. When I was a model, I toyed with writing a model handbook, you know, on how to make it big. Two decades of chaos later and I looked at again, through very different eyes, and thought what was I thinking? I hadnât exactly proven to be an authority on making it big. So, I decided to write about my disasters, and here we are.
But you were very successful as a model.
Yes, I was, for a time, and I made a lot of money. I worked with best photographers, I was meeting great people and travelling the world. But life is never one thing or the other. I was travelling alone. Sometimes too dangerous places. It could be lonely. Thereâs always a flip side.
You describe this as âa book for anyone who dreams big and aims high but never quite reaches their goalâ - When you were modelling what was the goal?
I thought I was going to be the next Kate Moss. I had no insight into what a jobbing modelâs life was actually like. I just went into it thinking everybody that does this job becomes that. A supermodel.
How different do you think your modelling career would have been if you were starting out now?
Totally different. I mean that day in Paris. I would have booked a hotel room near the casting. Spent two hours getting ready and then pre-booked a taxi to the casting. That job would have been mine. Ruth the businesswomen would have invested in her career and treated it is a business. At the time it felt like a passive job. 21-year-old me with my 43-year-old brain would have made that work.
How has social media changed the modelling industry?
In some ways itâs made it tougher. In the noughties the criticism was coming from the people booking you, now itâs coming from the millions of people following you online. But social media does allow you to present people with a more rounded view of who you are. Albeit at a cost to your privacy.
The most shocking thing that happened?
Iâm not giving away any more spoilers. But it was all normal then. Smoking, dieting, Britney Spears shaving off her hair and attacking photographers with her umbrella. It was The News of The World era. We breathed in scandal. And it was the era of fast fashion, and all about keeping up. Fashion was all about buy, buy buy. The magazine industry was thriving on the premise that people would buy what they told them too. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy.
What would Ruth the writer tell Ruth the model?
I wouldnât have listened. One big regret is that I travelled a lot but didnât really travel. I could have made much more of it and seem so much more. I was on my own and just saw it as down time, and most of the time all I wanted to do was get back home.
The glamour of a by-gone era... is that why you gave up modelling?
It just tailed out really. I was doing well. I was making good money. But then I got married in 2008 and need to refresh things. I felt like I had gone as far as I could as a model. I was 28 and I wanted a baby, and deep down I just wanted to write. Thankfully my husband was on hand to remind me that I needed a job. So, I started the blog, A Model Recommends which was the perfect outlet for me, at exactly the right time. And that started me off on a whole new career.
Letâs talk about weight, an issue that you talk about very frankly in your book.
I was scrutinised for how much I weighed. Everyone had to be thin, it was black and white back them. The industry was tough on girls. Some nutrional advice would have been really, really helpful. But there simply wasnât any. I did however establish quite early on that I canât be hungry. So, I had to work out pretty quickly how to stay on top of my weight, without becoming obsessed.
Has Bridgit been laid to rest?
Well, I can see when itâs happening now, and I try to push through. But I donât like to be beaten. So, the other day when I couldnât decide if my, visibly too small, vintage Bulgari ring would fit on my middle fingerâŚwhat did I do? Yes, ice and olive oil were involved.
