Irina Lazareanu

Model and musician Irina Lazareanu talks exclusively to BAZAAR. By Emma Sloley. Photographed by Raegan Glazner.

“I can relate to her,” Irina Lazareanu says, flicking the ash from her first cigarette of the day and inclining her head towards a framed photograph on the wall of Johnny Cash and June Carter. The candid 1960s image shows the legendary musical couple lying in a field, Cash gazing out of frame with a thousand-yard stare, Carter tenderly leaning her head on his chest. The connection is clear: Lazareanu is comparing the tempestuous and ultimately redemptive relationship of the Cashes, marred by Johnny’s drug addiction and saved by June’s loyalty, with her own on-off affair with wild British singer Pete Doherty. “I understand when you love someone who is addicted and you’re trying to protect them,” she says by way of explanation.
“I remember one time standing outside his [Pete’s] house with a baseball bat, threatening to smash the dealer’s car if they didn’t leave.”

To the uninitiated, Lazareanu might come across as a long-suffering, drama-prone figure in the Marianne Faithfull mode, but she’s a lot more than just a foil for the troubled man in her life. This 25-year-old’s time is now. Her striking heart-shaped face, sad doe eyes and heavy fringe are her most familiar calling cards, ubiquitous in the past few years both on the European and New York catwalks and in career-making campaigns for Chanel and Balenciaga. She’s also a talented singer and songwriter — her first single, Strange Places, recorded with friend Sean Lennon, makes its debut in December, with a four-track EP called Some Place Along The Way to follow in mid-2008.

Sitting in her light-filled apartment in New York’s arty Soho neighbourhood, it’s not difficult to see Lazareanu’s appeal for purveyors of the zeitgeist such as Karl Lagerfeld, one of the first designers to cast her. She’s the cool girl in school everyone was dying to smoke behind the sheds with; the oddball beauty who — like models Stella Tennant and Karen Elson before her — has parlayed an unusual face into a brilliant career.

The Romania-born, Canada-raised Lazareanu moved to London at age 13, where she studied dance for several years and was drawn into a circle of friends that included Baby-shambles singer Pete Doherty (whom she calls Peter) and Kate Moss. As she tells it, the scene resembled a modern-day Bloomsbury Group; “reading Emily Dickinson and Oscar Wilde and wearing flowers in my hair. We’d write on walls and think we were changing the world.”

After many years writing, performing and touring as an unofficial member of Babyshambles, this album is a new beginning for Lazareanu, a way to define herself as something more than a rock-star girlfriend. “It was scary to be in the studio without Pete and the boys,” she says, “I’m used to playing with them in London. It’s hard to fly on your own wings and find your confidence.”

Lack of confidence doesn’t really seem to jibe the girl sitting here today. She’s dressed in skin-tight grey jeans, a slouchy striped top and a Doherty-esque black hat crushed over her famous fringe, smoking, eating chocolates and looking like some pixie/punk/Jane Birkin hybrid. The effect is both quirky and completely fabulous. “I try to make things my own,” she says of her style. “I wear a lot of things backwards, I layer things on and somehow it works. I like breaking the rules and doing the opposite … not on purpose to make a stand or be different. I just do them because that day that’s what I feel like wearing.” She rates Givenchy’s Riccardo Tisci, YSL’s Stefano Pilati and Christopher Bailey of Burberry as designers she loves, both for their clothes and “because they’re all just such nice people”.

Lazareanu’s big modelling break was walking in Lagerfeld’s 2004 Chanel couture show, “in a long dress that I was too short for”, followed by a French Vogue cover, guest-edited by her friend Moss. “When I was in London I’d model just to make extra money,” Irina explains. “Because I was so different-looking I never really thought about doing it full-time. I had it in my head what a model was supposed to be. Very tall blonde girls, like Gemma and Daria.”

But it wasn’t long before her career took off. “My first show season, it was crazy,” she says. “I think I did 97 shows, it was some kind of a record. People always said to me, ‘Oh you’ll never do a show’.” She exhales with a cheeky laugh. “But I’m still there, walking those runways.

”It hasn’t all been an easy ride. “It’s been a lot for me to handle recently,” she says with a sigh. “Especially with the press and being hounded and not having a life anymore. The past few months have been absolute hell. My every move reported, lies fabricated every day. I think I’ve been pregnant five times in the past year. I don’t know how to deal with all that.” The reason she’s being hounded is, of course, thanks to her on-off relationship with Doherty, who was, until recently, romantically involved — some even say engaged — to Moss.

Lazareanu and Doherty were also briefly engaged earlier this year, if the fashion press is to be believed (although she won’t comment on this), a turn of events that supposedly caused a great rift between her and Moss. “They made out there was a war between us,” is all Irina will say about the Moss rumours. “Which is absolutely not the case.” As if to illustrate, she shows off several photos from the fridge of herself and Moss laughing together on the back of an elephant in Indonesia; them mugging in a photo booth; Moss’s daughter Lila Grace.

It’s clear Irina is keen to move on from all the unpleasantness, and her music seems to act as the salve when all the bedlam gets too much. “For me, when I write, I try to talk about things all humans relate to. Sometimes literature or music has that amazing possibility to connect everybody. That’s how I wrote my album … every song is like a chapter in a book.”

Her musical inspirations lie in the folk/protest tradition of the 1960s. “I feel like a broken record,” she laughs, “But Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, Leonard Cohen. All those people really influenced me. It was a time lyrically when the music really spoke out about things a lot more,” She declares she’d love to work with Cohen, the master of the melancholy lyric. “I think I would die. He changed my life. I met him one time through his daughter. I told him, ‘You’re the reason I started writing,’ and he said ‘Oh, I’m sorry’.”

The fact that her music is taking centre stage isn’t to say that modelling has been sidelined. Lazareanu is hot property right now and she’s smart enough to know that the window for opportunities in that world can be fleeting (unless of course you’re Ms Moss, but that’s another story). As well as playing muse to Lagerfeld and Balenciaga’s Nicolas Ghesquière, she hints at a major, long-term contract, although she can’t yet divulge what it is. “Music definitely feels like something that I take very seriously, I was a musician first,” she says. “But I really love the modelling too, and there are some jobs I can’t say no to.”

As for where she might be in five years time, her prediction is the antithesis of rock’n’roll. “Maybe have a bit of a quieter life. Maybe have a baby. Just normal things,” she muses, taking one last chocolate before pushing it and her cigarettes away. “Like anybody else.”

- Emma Sloley