Yasmin Le Bon wears her beauty with the quiet nonchalance that only a supermodel can. She’s always been one of the warmer, more down-to-earth models in the firmament, which is why she’s such a good fit for George at Asda, whose campaign she’s fronting for a second year, alongside her eldest daughter, Amber.
‘Any opportunity to work together is lovely,’ says Yasmin, who is sat beside her daughter sharing a pot of tea when we meet at a London hotel. ‘We’re lucky, as it doesn’t always work that way with family. But we understand each other really well.’
Despite her decades-long modelling career, pop star husband (her 41-year marriage to Duran Duran frontman Simon Le Bon is one of the longest and strongest in showbusiness) and every other trapping of success and fame, when it comes shopping, Yasmin, 60, is as savvy and careful as any other woman, and equally dismayed at the spiralling cost of clothes.
‘Some things I still get excited about, like beautiful craftsmanship. But there is so much out there that upsets me, because I feel that people are being taken for a ride – people who work really hard saving up a lot of money. I don't think it's right,’ she says. ‘Value is important, no matter how much money you have.’
Her daughter nods. ‘Whatever I buy really needs to work, and work hard,’ says Amber, 36, who gave birth to her first child, a boy (‘he’s a pretty chilled baby’) in January. ‘When we do keep stuff, we keep it forever,’ she adds. ‘I've got T-shirts that I used to wear when I was 11, that are over 20 years old. I know because they've still got my name tape sewn in from when I was at school!’
‘I'm not flippant about any purchase whatsoever,’ Yasmin continues. ‘If it’s a big purchase, it's really got to feel like it's for life. I've got to feel the fabric and the finish, because I'm not about to spend a ton of money on something that I could buy instead from George. Everyone’s being careful. I think of you guys all the time,’ she says, turning to Amber. ‘I think of how hard it is for young people to get started. How on earth can you get ahead of yourselves? So, when George approached me, I felt like the time was right. The exclusivity of some fashion feels so wrong. The clothes in this collection are relevant and accessible. All fashion lovers deserve to have some joy in their lives. It sounds shallow, but it's not. It's how you lift yourself up out of that dark hole.’
The most expensive item in the 16-piece collection, a long waxed jacket, is £49.50, while the least expensive, a ribbed roll neck jumper, is £8. Yasmin is a fan of the denim, while Amber loves a particular pair of black boots, ‘They’re a hybrid of cowboy and riding boots. You'll get a lot of wear out of those.’
There’s a lot of clothes-sharing in the Le Bon household. When we meet, Yasmin is wearing a lilac and pink unicorn T-shirt that Amber was going to chuck away. ‘I wear my son-in-law’s T-shirts as well,’ says Yasmin. ‘And I pinched one of Daddy’s T-shirts,’ says Amber.
‘Name tapes are really useful,’ says Yasmin. ‘I started to get my own YLB ones, because it was getting really confusing with our clothes. Amber loves grey T-shirts and would pinch mine, so I put my name tapes on.’
Other than their shared love of grey T-shirts, Amber says their style is very different. ‘I'm probably more conventional. Mama likes to mix patterns and colours and I'm a bit more monochromatic. My brain is a tangle of coloured threads inside, so I need the outside to be calm.’
‘Whereas I quite love the chaos,’ says Yasmin. ‘I've definitely become more crackers over the years. I'm embracing it. I think it’s because when I was young, I used to have a real uniform.’
Which was? ‘Azzedine Alaïa! We were the Azzedine girls. He [Azzedine Alaïa] never used to show during the season, so we’d fly ourselves in and do five shows a day for five days. That's how he paid us, in clothes. We went to the store and literally filled a suitcase. All we wore was Azzedine, a bit of Comme des Garçons, a bit of Yohji [Yamamoto], some denim, and that was it.’
While she’s kept some treasured pieces, Yasmin has also given a sizeable amount away. ‘There's no way I could have kept everything. Some of it was tiny and it felt wrong to hold on. You want someone else to enjoy it. It needed to be out there and have a life.’
Amber chips in, ‘But there are some things she won't let go of – just in case there’s a granddaughter.’ Yasmin and Simon may have had three daughters (Amber, 35, Saffron, 33, and Talullah, 30) but, so far, all four of their grandchildren are boys. ‘We're doing a lot of voodoo at home at the moment,’ Yasmin jokes.
Home for Yasmin is Putney, south London, and while Amber lives in nearby Wandsworth, she still spends a lot of time at the family home. Saffron lives ‘at the end of the garden’, with her husband and children.
‘We cocoon and then nobody leaves,’ smiles Yasmin. ‘We have a laugh. We do everything together.’
‘And if we don’t, then we kind of want to be,’ says Amber. ‘We feel like we're missing out.’