Stella Tennant: A Model Timekeeper

My first watch was a Swatch, which was appropriate for a teenager in the 1980s. It was one of those transparent ones: you could see all the workings of it. The first thing I did was swap the horrible plastic strap for a very nice velvet ribbon, and I wore it for years.

After that, I spent years without a watch. My dad never wore a watch. The Tennants I know are all late. We’re late by nature. And as I don’t like to be controlled by the time, I felt that I was liberating myself and proclaiming my independence. So, it is ironic that I have been chosen as the face of the new Chanel watch.

As I have grown older, however, I have learned that self-determination is largely an illusion and that time, even though it is a man-made invention, can be rather useful, so I got back into wearing a watch and these days I feel naked without a timepiece on my wrist.

Checking the time becomes such a habit. It’s rude to be late and it is hopeless to arrive at the bank when it’s closed, so you need to know the time. And the less time you have left, the more you want to do with it, so learning to manage your time is an important part of growing up.

I learnt that when my career as a model took off. I didn’t wear a watch at the beginning, but at one point I simply had to, and so the Hermès Cape Cod watch with the double strap that I still wear every day became a part of me.

This Chanel watch is different; it’s as much a piece of jewellery and an accessory as it is a thing that tells the time. And it is interestingly designed. It looks like a domino and the closure is on the face of it. It looks like the absolutely classic Coco Chanel handbag as it has that special opening that flicks up. Best of all, it has a very nice little edging of diamonds. It is an elegant evening watch.

Of course, when I was modelling very intensively I didn’t know whether it was morning or evening, or what day of the week it was, for that matter. It seems magic now when I look back at it: I don’t know how I did it, especially as we didn’t have mobile phones. I don’t know how I ever found my driver or how we decided where we were going to meet.

The thing I remember most was zipping around Paris on the back of a motorbike to save time, which I rather liked as it was the only fresh air I enjoyed all week. Well, comparatively fresh—back in those days it was very smoky backstage. The driver knew where he was going so that was my downtime between shows, or racing from a fitting to hair and make-up.

Time behaves strangely when you’re a model and it was all a bit peculiar for me. Waking up in the morning and taking Concorde to New York—you’d be there almost before you’d left. And then after a full day in New York, you might stay the night or get an overnight flight back to Europe. The crazy schedule of fashion devours a model’s time pitilessly. It is quite brutal. During the show season, you are doing fittings until very late at night and get up very early in the morning because you have to have so much hair and make-up to fit in to make you look presentable for a show.

I think my record for the busiest season was 70 or 80 shows in a month between Milan, Paris, New York and London: 25 in New York, 25 in Milan, 25 in Paris and maybe four or five in London. Looking back, it’s all just a bit of a blur. I suppose that’s the other thing about time, you experience it entirely subjectively and it really depends on what you’re doing.

We bought a lovely 18th-century house in Scotland and moved here 14 years ago. That was the first time I slowed down as I wasn’t travelling and modelling full time like I had been. The thing that I missed when I was working at full tilt was not having a sense of time—because you move to different time zones and different seasons, or you’re working in a studio where there are flashlights and no daylight. I find all of those things rather disturbing to your natural rhythms and I like being settled, with more of a routine: planting my bulbs and knowing that I will see them in the spring.

My garden in Scotland has helped me understand time in a completely different way. I connected with the seasons and the whole first year was exhilarating for us because we were discovering the place. When the snowdrops came up, it was incredibly exciting because we didn’t know they were there. We didn’t know what was lurking in the ground or what would come out during the year.

I find the great thrill of moving into a place which hasn’t been fiddled with for a long time is that it gradually reveals its secrets. When we started clearing out the garden, there was a lot of overgrown shrubbery. We had great fun with chainsaws and bonfires, and then finally we decided to clear a clump of holly, bramble and honeysuckle and, underneath it all, we came across a lovely sundial. It’s very plain; it has a slate disk with a bronze gnomon which casts the shadow over Roman numerals. It stands on a fine stone column and is now the centre of the garden. Everything radiates out from it, and I love it—my idea of a real holiday is telling the time via the sundial.

I like that you have to adjust it every now and again. Up in the north, the sun rises very early in the morning in the summer and very late in the winter, so it needs to be adjusted. You don’t just read the time of day on a particular day; it also somehow relates to the changing of the seasons. It’s a more profound connection with the notion of time—and I like that.

Inside we have a few grandfather clocks that came with the house. They never work, but to be fair I never wind them, so they just stand there quietly. In the kitchen, we have an old Paris Métro clock, and that does work. It is two feet in diameter—a little bigger than is strictly necessary for timing eggs, but it demonstrates how important time is in the kitchen: if we don’t call everyone in to feed three times a day, then things get out of kilter.

I tend to take my watch off in the kitchen. It is not where you will find me wearing my Chanel watch... but you never know. I don’t wear diamonds at breakfast in general, however, there are exceptions… sometimes you need an extra lift on a Monday morning.

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