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Alexa Chung: 'I'm probably not the best role model'
Alexa Chung talks about life with Arctic Monkey Alex Turner, the cuteness of David Cameron and the vagaries of fame
Sometimes, it's hard to be a style icon. Alexa Chung, the 26-year-old television presenter and sartorial muse for cool teenage girls, has just moved back from America and her east London home is crammed full of unpacked boxes. "We got back to England about two weeks ago, that's why I'm wearing such crazy clothes," Chung explains, looking down at her outfit and giving a small shake of the head. "I go out wearing **** outfits constantly and then people sort of eye you up: 'That's Alexa Chung… oh.'" She assumes an expression of barely concealed disgust. "I'm, like, 'Erm, I can see your judging eyes.'"
Today, when we meet in a chilly television studio in west London, she is wearing a white T-shirt and oversize black trousers, cut off at the ankle and held up by a pair of elastic braces that cross over her chest like an abseiling safety harness. Worn by anyone else, these trousers would look like fishermen's waders. Worn by Chung, they give her the air of a beautiful, kohl-eyed waif in a Charlie Chaplin silent movie. "I wanted to look like I was in the circus," she explains. "I think I've succeeded."
Perhaps the clothes are a subconscious expression of how it feels to be back at the centre of other people's attention. Since returning from New York, where she fronted a daily MTV chat-show for six months, Chung's celebrity status seems to have gone up a notch. She is constantly trailed by paparazzi and no longer feels comfortable taking public transport. "I'm just really conscious that people are staring at me. I get called chicken legs a lot, that's the main one," she says. By people in the street? "Yeah," she says. "It's all right. Well, no, it did do my head in a bit. It depends on the day.
"I've come to terms with the fact that if you're on TV lots of people like you and lots of people hate you and once you're OK with that, you apply it to everything. It's like being at school. I didn't expect everyone to like me and they certainly didn't, so I don't see why it should differ just because I got older and started being on TV."
Chung has had to develop a thicker skin of late. She went to New York last summer in a blaze of glory to present It's on With Alexa Chung, a daily show broadcast live from Times Square for MTV, but the series was cancelled after two series, partly because the slick American television executives did not quite understand Chung's quirky British predilection for saying exactly what she thought and partly because her irreverent humour was lost in translation.
"My friend was telling me how he was doing this best man's speech in New York to a crowd of Americans and there was only about 20 Brits there and how he like fell on his arse doing a joke about a 'fanny pack'," Chung says. "And I was, like, 'Imagine doing that, but every day for six months' and that's sort of how I felt."
Now, she has returned to the UK to front MTV's flagship rock show Gonzo, taking over from Radio 1 DJ Zane Lowe. "I'll be interviewing new bands and established musicians, asking them Really Important Questions," she says with an arched eyebrow. "And obviously we'll be incorporating Twitter because that's what you have to do these days."
She is not that keen on social networking sites. "I have a love/hate relationship with them. I hate feeling left out, so I'm obsessed with seeing what everyone else is up to," Chung admits, but then someone started making death threats on her Twitter page while she was in New York, which understandably put her off the whole thing. "It basically got really nasty and they were like, 'We're going to stab you.'" She shivers and her slender limbs realign themselves like a series of calligraphic strokes. "It was genuinely horrible."
For some reason, Chung seems to attract a ludicrous amount of bile on the internet. Partly, one imagines, it is because she is strikingly beautiful and yet simultaneously unafraid of expressing her own opinion, a combination that leaves her open to accusations of condescension even though, in person, she is extremely nice, warm and witty. But it is also to do with the fact that her boyfriend is Arctic Monkeys frontman Alex Turner, whose female fanbase seems almost pathologically protective – a Facebook group imaginatively entitled "WE HATE Alexa Chung with Alex Turner!!!" has 320 members.
How does her boyfriend react when people write horrible things about her on the internet? "He's really good at just levelling me out and saying, 'You do realise just how ridiculous that is?' And then I go, 'Yeah, good point.'"
Born into "the most middle-class [background] you could imagine", Chung is one of four siblings and comes from the Hampshire village of Privett, where she was raised by her father, Phil, a retired graphic designer who is three-quarters Chinese, and her mother, Gill, a housewife. She had a successful spell as a teenage model (she was scouted three times before signing to Storm at the age of 16) and left school with three A-levels (two As and a B ) and an offer to study English at King's College London, but was too busy to take it up.
Chung first burst on to our screens in 2006 as the sarcastic co-presenter of Channel 4's teen music show, Popworld. She once famously corrected the grammar of Brendon Urie, frontman of rock band Panic! At the Disco, mid-interview. "I thought, 'You know what? You're such a bunch of idiots' and I guess I just didn't hide it," she says. So what does she consider to be the most aggravating grammatical error? "I don't like it when people don't know the difference between their, they're, there," she replies, a touch sheepishly.
From Popworld, Chung went on to sign a £100,000 deal with Channel 4 to become a regular presenter on T4, its weekend youth strand, appearing on various cultish teen programmes including Freshly Squeezed and Vanity Lair. Along the way, Chung found herself tagged with the label of "it girl". Frequently seen at fashion shows surrounded by her cool celebrity friends (Pixie Geldof, Agyness Deyn, Daisy Lowe) and parading her own brand of tomboyish sartorial chic, Chung has become something of a trendsetter.
Her influence extends beyond her target audience. Last year, Vogue named her its best-dressed woman and when high-end fashion label Mulberry designed an "Alexa" handbag, it rapidly became its bestselling accessory. Dolly Jones, the editor of Vogue.com who has worked with the presenter in the past, says that the key to her impact "is that she's genuine. You get the impression she's doing what she likes, rather than simply playing up to the camera".
There's also a knowing quality to Chung that ensures she never takes herself too seriously. Being vain or thinking about oneself too much, she says, "just seems really self-indulgent". As a result of the rock star boyfriend and the fact that she used to be a model, Chung has inevitably been touted as "the new Kate Moss". And yet, unlike Moss, who seemed in many ways to define the excesses of the economic boom with her drug scandals and her wild partying, Chung belongs to a less brash generation that has grown up surrounded by the excesses of reality television and that appears more aware of fame's intrinsic absurdity.
"Yeah, it's [fame] ridiculous. It's just so silly and it makes people behave in such a weird way," she says. "I'm not 100% nice all the time, so I find it quite hard to be really pleasant. Please don't turn this into a big moany diatribe, but sometimes you've just got really ****ing bad period pain or I just had root canal on Friday and someone's like, 'Can I have a picture?' 'Do you know what? No. Why would you want that?'"
Is it surreal to be seen as a role model for adolescent girls? "Yeah, and I don't do anything particularly do-goody either, which I feel bad about. I'm not preaching about things you should do, I'm not political or anything. I'm probably not the best role model."
But she refuses to strip down to her underwear for men's magazines, which has earned her a degree of kudos among women of her own age. "I've always been more keen on gaining respect from women [than men]. I feel like some women do get away with doing these sexy shoots and looking like they're being really empowered. For me, I'd feel really uncomfortable in that situation and a bit like I was being taken advantage of." She describes herself as a feminist "in that I like to be treated equally and not thought of as being a bit silly and I'm into equal opportunities". Beyond that, she does not venture.
She is similarly vague on politics. When I ask her what she thinks of the Miliband brothers, she deliberately makes the question as superficial as possible. "Well, errr, I think David's cuter," she grins. "It's that salt-and-epper hair. That's the extent of what I know about them, really."
She presses on in this vein and says there is even something "vaguely cute" about David Cameron, at which point I recoil in horror. "Do you not think?" she asks, genuinely surprised. No, I say, he looks like a boiled egg. "No he doesn't!" she shrieks. "He's sort of a bit bumbling. Clegg's a bit more ratty."
Can she really be this disengaged politically? I don't imagine so. She's too clever not to care. Maybe, bruised by her US experience, she does not want to ruffle any executive feathers at MTV but it is a shame to discover that Chung's famed outspokenness will only go so far.
Still, she says she's getting tired of living her life in the public eye. "Sometimes I feel like I'm having a quarter-life crisis," she admits. "I'm 27 in November. I started presenting when I was 22 and it was quite funny and now it's my real job and I'm nearing 30 and I didn't plan for it to be a real job forever. Also that whole fame thing. It's like, '****, am I not going to be able to get out of it now?' Because no matter how old I get, is there always going to be someone saying, 'Oh, she was that girl'? It's a bit depressing. I might move countries. I might have to flee for a bit."
She thinks she might eventually go to university or pursue photography more seriously. "Yeah, that's the plan," she says, munching on a half-eaten Twix as her face is powdered for the photographs. Chung stands perfectly still for the make-up artist, pushing her head forward slightly to make it easier. She suddenly looks vulnerable in this pose, child-like and fragile, with her big trousers and unbrushed hair and her obvious willingness to please.
And then she cracks a joke, the silence is snapped, and the circus carries on around her.
Gonzo With Alexa Chung begins on MTV Rocks at 7pm on Friday 15 October
Elizabeth Day
guardian.co.uk
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