At the beginning of the 90s, I had a dream to become a model. By the end of that decade, it was a reality. I had made it onto the cover of the UK’s bestselling weekly fashion and beauty magazine, The Sunday Times Style.
The final year of the 20th Century was a memorable one. I was living in London at the time. Tony Blair was in charge, Britpop ruled the radio and Cool Britannia was in full swing. As cool as London was, it couldn’t hold a candle to the bright lights of New York City, my home away from home. There was nowhere like New York in the 90s. After all, that’s where and when I met my future husband.
I was born in LA, cast into a chaotic first year of living between California, Las Vegas, and Utah. By 1981, my British mother and I landed in New York. It was there that she met and married her much younger third husband, an American fashion designer. He was a Bill Blass-type figure named Arthur Ringwalt Rupley IV, known as Robert.
She made Robert my Godfather when I was baptized at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in 1982. If their short-lived marriage had worked out, I would have been raised in New York. Instead, my mother moved us to the UK and filed for divorce. As my Godfather, I continued to see Robert regularly and he remained an important part of my life.
My career aspiration to become a model began in 1991 when I was 10 years old. I spent an unforgettable day at Robert’s Manhattan dress studio. Seamstresses busied themselves at their sewing machines as he pinned sequins, buttons, and bows onto mannequins in between fittings with famous clients.
Strewn across worktables, I saw elaborate sketches of long-limbed figures clad in artful creations while a television box replayed his latest fashion show in the background. I was mesmerized by the glamour of it all, one supermodel after another sashaying down the catwalk in his dazzling designs: Cindy, Naomi, Linda, Claudia… I had never seen so many beautiful women. “Who are they?”
“My models,” Robert said with nonchalance. I was gawky and self-conscious, but tall for my age. “You’ll be up there too when you get older. My number one model.”
My mother had other ideas. After we returned home to London, she took my first set of modeling pictures and signed me up with an acting agent. She had worked as a photojournalist, but at the time, she was volunteering at a charity shop and had access to all sorts of bizarre outfits and accessories from the donation bags. For the photoshoot, she played both photographer and stylist:
I was allowed out of boarding school to go to London and audition for parts in major films—Mary in The Secret Garden and the Childlike Empress in Neverending Story III. I was painfully shy and did not have the training, or the confidence, to act. As soon as the cameras started rolling, I froze. Besides, I wanted to be a model.
At the end of 1991, I vividly remember the headmistress calling us into her private drawing room to break the news that Freddie Mercury had died from AIDS. As she attempted to explain the epidemic sweeping across America, I was consumed by thoughts of my mother. Freddie Mercury was her favorite singer and friend. After she lent him her car in Marbella, he wrote the song Khashoggi’s Ship about her first husband’s yacht. I could not bear how upset she would be by this news.
In 1992, I was told Robert was being treated for cancer, and that I would get to see him once he was better. Over the next two years, we continued to speak on the phone, although he sounded sad and weak. I didn’t understand why I could not go to New York to visit him. I later found out that my mother was protecting me from the awful truth. Along with Halston, Keith Haring, Tina Chow, and thousands of others, there was no hope for Robert—at 33 years young, this huge talent with a skyrocketing career was extinguished by AIDS.
That day in his dress studio was the last time I ever saw him. I was 13 when he died and grief-stricken. All I had left of him was an oversized Snoopy sweatshirt, some photographs from his fashion shows, and one of his stunning creations of red silk and black lace, which fitted me perfectly. My dream of being Robert’s “number one model” faded into darkness.
I found relief from my despair in alcohol and cigarettes. At boarding school, my friends and I would traipse into the bushes multiple times a day to chain smoke. On Saturdays, we would take the bus into Windsor and blag our way into pubs to get obliterated. I liked the escape alcohol gave me. Now that my Godfather was gone, I was convinced that if I could only find my real father, whose identity was kept secret, everything would be OK. I was determined to find him.
In 1996, shortly after turning 16, I left school and started my ‘A’ Levels at a sixth-form college in London. One day, while sitting in a café on King’s Road with my mother, I was scouted. My mother and I were in the middle of an argument about my future, and I was crying with frustration. I saw a familiar face looking at me from across the room. The woman got up and approached our table. “I am sorry to interrupt,” she began, looking at my mother. At first, I thought she was one of her friends, but then she turned to me. “Have you ever thought about becoming a model?”
It was a surreal moment. I went from crying to laughing. She told me to call her and handed me a business card: FIONA ELLIS. MODELS1. That’s why she looked familiar: she was the famous Ellis! I was one of millions who would tune in to watch The Clothes Show on the BBC, a weekly TV show about fashion. I would often see Ellis, as she was known, searching for new faces.
Continuing my studies was a priority, so I did not seriously pursue modeling until the following year. My mother was famously beautiful, described by the photographer Norman Parkinson as “the most naturally beautiful woman I have ever photographed.” I dyed my blonde hair black to look more like her, and still plagued with my identity crisis, I blended in with the Middle Eastern members of my family. I shared a last name with my older siblings, their father was my mother’s first husband, Adnan Khashoggi.
At the beginning of 1998, the fashion photographer Bob Carlos Clarke introduced me to Sarah Doukas at Storm Models and she signed me up. I could not believe my luck. Storm was synonymous with British fashion’s most famous face: Kate Moss.
I had a wonderful booker at Storm, and was getting ready for my first London Fashion Week. I had been booked for several shows. If only Robert could see me up on the catwalk! It turned out that nobody saw me because a few days before fashion week, I was hit by a motorbike while crossing a road. Hospitalized with a fractured pelvis, I was out of work for months. It was a miracle that I wasn’t paralyzed or killed.
My first shoot after the accident was for Tatler magazine. My paternity was still unknown, so they wrote that I was the daughter of Adnan. I was always made aware that he was not my biological father, but he treated me as one of his own and I loved him.
A few months later, my booker left Storm, so I moved to IMG Models under the direction of superagent Jonathan Phang, who represented Britain’s newest supermodel, Jodie Kidd. As I was soon to find out, Jodie and I had more in common than sharing an agent. We were cousins.
Shortly after signing with IMG, another significant Jonathan entered my life. It’s a well-known story, which I will recap briefly. In September 1998, I met a girl called Victoria while out at L’Equipe Anglaise, a nightclub in London. We started chatting, and I discovered she was the daughter of Jonathan Aitken, an ex of my mother’s who I believed could potentially be my missing father (amongst other suspects). Victoria invited me to her 18th birthday party at her family home, a joint celebration she was having with her identical twin sister. I was also 18, and that was the night I met my father for the first time, though he had no idea of my existence.
Three months later, a DNA test confirmed that Jonathan was, indeed, my biological father. He was in the midst of a media maelstrom, and I was quickly swept into the narrative of a real-life melodrama: at the eleventh hour, a fallen politician on his way to prison discovers by fluke that he has a secret lovechild. To this day, I do not know how the press found out, but once the news of my existence was revealed, my life was forever changed.
Meanwhile, the usual career trajectory of a fashion model was intercepted by public scrutiny. I was no longer just Petrina the model. (Petrina is my full name). Now I was tabloid fodder as Jonathan Aitken’s “lovechild”. Fame of this kind did not work in my favor for modeling, or maybe it would have if I had only known how to handle it. I was 18 years old—barely an adult—and as my new grandmother Lady Penelope Aitken put it: “a lost child.”
The rest of 1999 was a blur. In June, sitting alongside my new family members at the Old Bailey, I witnessed my new father being sentenced to 18 months in prison for perjury. To escape my overwhelming feelings, I went out clubbing every night and smoked weed every day. I was hanging with the best of them, partying my way around the world like The Mad Hatter.
I blew a lot of opportunities and my modeling career fell by the wayside. I did not show up for castings or jobs. I was axed from another magazine cover after showing up five hours late from partying all night with Massive Attack, the trip hop band whose bestselling albums Blue Lines and Mezzanine were the soundtrack of 90s afterparties. I didn’t care about modeling. I was having far too much fun and would not trade those memories for anything.
On New Years Eve, I remember being in ‘the red room’ of the legendary nightclub Browns on Great Queen Street, dancing and singing along to Prince: “Say, say, 2000-00, party over Oops, out of time. So tonight I'm gonna party like it's 1999.”
And that’s exactly what I did and had done, pretty much every night that year, and every year that followed through the end of noughties.
From my first cover shoot in 1999 for The Sunday Times Style, fast forward a decade to 2009 (via a brief stint in New York as an Elite model in the early 2000s). Just before retiring from the high fashion world, I shot the cover and main feature of the Arab magazine Pashion. Ironically, having returned to my natural blonde hair, I did not look Middle Eastern anymore.
As a grand finale to my career, the creative director made a video of the Pashion shoot, a feast for the eyes of stunning haute couture and fine jewelry (accompanied by a great soundtrack):
Great title with a strong descriptive writer’s voice putting the reader right in the middle of the time and events. Fascinating read and amazing video at the end. Can’t wait to read more.