[Clément Chabernaud]【采访】Model of the moment

OK, I’ll admit it: I’m a little disappointed. I was expecting Clément Chabernaud — aka the male model of the moment, the French star of Gucci, H&M and Matchless London (alongside Kate Moss) campaigns — to be a little more… smouldering. In pictures, he’s all angular cheekbones, startling blue eyes and dirty blond hair. Instead, here he is, in the Corner Room restaurant at Bethnal Green’s Town Hall Hotel, yawning and stretching and smiling sheepishly, and looking a bit like a foreign exchange student. He’s wearing black Adidas trainers, green cotton trousers, a navy anorak, an earring and — yes — a bumbag slung across his chest. Getting up to peruse the breakfast buffet, he pours himself a glass of milk, downs it and refills it, before loading up his plate with three pastries, ham, cheese and several slices of toast. Sitting down, he grins and offers me a bite. Does he diet? I ask, looking at the feast in front of him and then his waif-like frame. Exercise? He shakes his head. ‘It’s the genes. The family, they are all like that.’ He wiggles his little finger.
I ask if he’s seen the dozens of fan websites set up in his honour (among them one called ‘Clément doing normal things better than you’ and another, ‘Fuck Yeah Clément Chabernaud’). He has. ‘But I don’t know where it’s from,’ he says, looking puzzled. ‘It’s strange… But it’s nice because I can keep up, and my mum, too, on what I did and where I was, and keep a schedule,’ he says in a gentle Parisian accent.
That Chabernaud and his mother need to rely on fan Tumblrs to track his schedule gives you some idea how in-demand he is. He’s walked for everyone from Giorgio Armani to Dolce & Gabbana, Hugo Boss and Yves Saint Laurent. Lately, you may have seen him starring in a short film for Gucci alongside Kate Moss; it shows the pair racing around Rome’s Tiburtina train station.
In the days before we meet, he’s been to Paris, Stockholm, Amsterdam and New York. Next he’s off to Barcelona. It sounds exhausting, I say. He shrugs: ‘I’m 25 years old; it’s not the time to be tired.’ This is how it is with Chabernaud. If, on camera, he has a fierceness to him, in person he’s laid-back, seemingly nonplussed by his own success. Working with Moss was ‘nice’. Seeing himself in magazines and on billboards is ‘funny… I know that I can be standing next to it and people will not see that I am on the billboard… It’s quite different between the picture and the reality.’ Why? ‘The hair and the make-up, the lights — the everything. The Photoshop.’

Born in Paris, he lived in Hong Kong, Casablanca and Seoul as a child; his parents, both teachers, had posts at French schools. Chabernaud had assumed that he, too, would become a teacher, but when he was 16, a friend was being photographed for a French magazine and asked him to go along. They skateboarded for a few hours, while photographers snapped them. Afterwards, Chabernaud thought modelling could be a good way to earn some extra money while he studied and began approaching agencies. By 17, he had become the face of Jil Sander. By 20, he’d appeared in shows for Dior Homme, Hermès and Yves Saint Laurent, and featured on the pages of i-D and Vogue Hommes.
He doesn’t seem overly preoccupied with fashion. He cites the late French singer Serge Gainsbourg and his own 86-year-old grandmother Bernadette as his style icons. ‘She has the best style ever... She takes care of her way of dressing.’ His own style is confortable. When I ask if he admires any designers in particular, he demurs: ‘They are all different. I have stuff from each of them.’

Many of his close friends hail from outside the industry. He’s still in touch with his old schoolmates, most of whom are studying in Paris, or working in the restaurant industry and in informatique (IT). Having dated the Spanish model Alejandra Alonso for several years (the pair appeared on the Desigual catwalk together last year), he’s now single. When he’s in Paris, he lives with his parents in the 19th arrondissement. When he isn’t, he stays in hotels or friends’ apartments. In fact, travel is the best thing about the job. The only downside is the uncertainty: ‘You don’t know where you’re going, how long… Sometimes you feel good about it, and other times you feel like, “I won’t be able to organise for the future.”’
In London, he likes to go out in Hackney: ‘It’s pretty nice in the evening with the mood and the people you cross in the street. [I like] how it looks: the mix of both old houses and new houses.’ He also admires the British sense of humour. ‘I don’t watch TV but I love movies… I love Monty Python, you know? Life of Brian, the Holy Grail. It’s so funny.’

http://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/esmagazine/model-of-the-moment-clment-chabernaud-9812135.html?origin=internalSearch 原文网址

采访中提到老西和女友Alejandra Alonso分手了。心情好复杂呀。