Tatler September 2019 tatler.comYou read about peals of laughter,but you don’t often hear them.Unless you’re talking to Olympia Campbell, Tatler cover model, champion chortler and card-
carrying intellectual – the 23-year-old has just finished her master’s in human sciences and evolution
and is soon to start a PhD at UCL, though she’s going to mix and match the library’s arid hours
with the frothier shores of her other career: as a model whose star is on the rise.
Because Campbell is brains, beauty and humour personified. She’s walked for brands like
Erdem, Simone Rocha and Burberry; appeared, clasped in an embrace with her older sister Edie,
on the cover of Vogue Italia; worked with Balmain, Chanel, Fendi and Louis Vuitton; and graced
campaigns for Marc Jacobs, Lanvin and Proenza Schouler. But, just days before we meet, she’s
also posted a waggish, bikini-clad Instagram of her reading the New Statesman on a sunkissed
beach, while her equally bikini-clad university pal, Luciann Blake, scans The Economist – ‘that
was a “sexy girls can be clever too!” spoof,’ she says, her laugh uproarious and her voice as
well-spoken as you’d expect from a Godolphin/City of London-educated girl.
And the roar of raucous mirth that greets my telling her that i-D had once headlined a piece
on her ‘The Brit Babe’ tells its own tale. ‘The Brit Babe!’ she squeals in between whooping yelps
of laughter. ‘I’ll take that! That’s funny.’ Funny? ‘Definitely. That’s the thing: because I like to
talk about feminism, politics and science, people say, “She’s so serious”, but I can certainly crack
a joke about being a babe. No,’ she adds, almost shrieking with mirth, ‘if you ask my friends, I’m
probably the least serious.’
Well, yes and no.
Her PhD, she says, will take four years, she’ll be fully funded (‘it’s actually a job; you get paid
to do it’) and she’ll be ‘working in a team that’s looking at the evolution of harmful cultural
practices.’ Which are? ‘Witchcraft accusations, gender-based violence and honour-based violence,
specifically honour-based killings. We’re looking at how these behaviours get established.’
Which is not, you may think, a barrel of pealing laughs.
Yet so unserious is she that, though she likes ‘the practical side’ of clothes, she wishes people
were ‘more eccentric in the way they dress’. Only the other day, she and her friend Kiki set off
for a garden party in Chiswick with Olympia in ‘a bright green slip with a lace front, old granny
mules and a big hat’ and Kiki in ‘an Adidas tracksuit, a denim bustier and Gucci loafers. Her
look was stronger,’ she says. And then she – well, you can guess what kind of laugh she gives.
The day we meet she’s in a Marc Jacobs polo shirt, bedizened with flowers designed by her
sister Edie – ‘it’s one of her early Itchy Scratchy Patchy things’ – and dark blue and white striped
men’s trousers from Zara. Around her neck is a ‘little Tiffany’ thing given to her for her 18th birth-
day by her father, financier Roddy Campbell, and another chain made up of crosses she bought
in Panama for ‘about £2’; attached to it is a golden heart, given to her by an ex-boyfriend.
And she’s still wearing it? ‘Well, it’s so... nice.’ Cue huge, embarrassed laugh.
Olympia hasn’t got a boyfriend at the moment, and there’s not, she says, even any courting
going on. She’s living with her mother, the architect Sophie Hicks, and her mother’s long-standing
partner, Tom Stuttaford, in a hyper-cool, hyper-modern, two-storey glass and concrete house in
Earl’s Court, built and designed by Sophie. ‘I get on with my mum and Tom so well,’ she says,
‘so it’s not tense. But it’s really a two-person house, I’d say. And there’s a connecting door
between our rooms.’ She sighs. ‘That connecting door’s a bit of a... I’m getting maybe a bit too
old to live with my parents.’ ]09-19WELLCoverstory.indd 74 11/07/2019 09:18
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