Sisters Lizzy and Georgia May Jagger are sitting side by side in a swanky suite in Selfridges’ personal shopping area, laughing uproariously, words tumbling over themselves as they describe a recent holiday, along with their sons aged five and one respectively, chez their father — aka Rolling Stone Sir Mick — at his Mustique estate.
“Dad’s whole family were there and this year our mum actually came as well,” says Lizzy, 42. “Our brother has a three-year-old daughter and we have a nine-year-old brother — so there’s a good little-kid gang to keep us busy. It was so nice to see them all running around. The nine-year-old’s this sibling-cousin, he’s very sweet with the younger ones, he wants to teach them.” Georgia May, 34, chimes in: “He’s very generous, like, ‘Look! Let me show you this.’”
Jagger family tree
Time to rewind and recap the complex family tree of rock ’n’ roll’s unofficial royal family. At the top and centre is Sir Mick, now 82. The “mum” referred to is Mick’s former partner of 22 years, Texan supermodel Jerry Hall, 69. There are eight children of whom the eldest is Karis, 55 (the sisters confer before deciding on this age, with Georgia May declaring with a nervous giggle, “I wouldn’t like to guess how old Karis is”), from a fling with actress and model Marsha Hunt. The youngest — the kind-hearted nine-year-old — is Deveraux, Mick’s son with his current partner, former ballerina Melanie Hamrick, 38.
Lizzy — or Elizabeth Scarlett to give her full name — and Georgia May are Jagger’s two daughters with Hall. Both are a fabulous conglomeration of their parents’ extraordinary genes. Lizzy — vibing 1970s Marrakesh in a vintage band T-shirt concealed beneath a black Afghan jacket, faded jeans and silver sneakers — is an auburn-haired replica of her mother. In contrast, Georgia May’s more a blonde mini-Mick, channelling nouvelle vague in black top, cigarette trousers and ballet flats.
Style
Georgia May wears:
- De La Vali Nila Mini Dress, £450, delavali.com;
- Gina Forest Green Faux Croc Couture Boots, POa, gina.com (189 Sloane street, sw1);
- Free People We The Free Farley Vegan Bomber Jacket, £188, freepeople.com
Lizzy wears:
- Free People Moon Petals Jacket, £648, freepeople.com;
- Rixo Devina gown in pearl, £595, rixolondon.com
Both have impressive modelling careers. Lizzy has strutted the catwalk for Vivienne Westwood and Tommy Hilfiger and represented brands such as Redken, while Georgia May has walked for everyone from Balmain to Louis Vuitton and been the face of — among many others — Rimmel London.
They have other ventures, too: Lizzy, who until recently was living in the US, has long been a vocal activist for the ratification of ERA — the proposed equal rights amendment to the constitution prohibiting sex discrimination. Georgia May has an organic skincare line May Botanicals (Lizzy loyally raves about its products) and has invested in hair salon and products line Bleach London.
So many people here are living off their ancestors’ money. But the Jaggers are not aristocrats. We’re entertainers.
Of course, they’re nepo babies, but there’s no question they’re also beautifully well-brought-up and well-adjusted. Impeccably well-spoken and polite (Lizzy checks if I want a glass of water), they’re also huge fun, laughing non-stop and utterly without airs. Despite her more guarded public profile, Lizzy’s the slightly more outspoken of the two, with Georgia May occasionally giving her a sisterly prod when she thinks she’s on the verge of oversharing. They’re here in their new joint role as global brand ambassadors of Jo Malone London’s English Pear collection.
More on which later, but first back to the Jagger family tree — because you can’t really have a conversation without understanding it, when virtually every sentence the sisters utter refers somehow to their clan. They have two half-sisters, two half-brothers and two full brothers: 40-year-old actor James — or Jimmy as he’s known — and Gabriel, 28, who runs a media production company. Then there’s Mick’s eight grandchildren to date, aged between 33 and one, as well as three great-grandchildren of between 11 and six.
Dad’s great. He’s had a child at home for 55 years and he’s like, ‘Amazing! Grandchildren!’ I think they’re his fountain of youth
Despite being an octogenarian, Mick appears to thrive as patriarch. “Dad’s great,” exclaims Lizzy. “He’s had a child at home for 55 years and he’s like, ‘Amazing! Grandchildren!’ I think they’re his fountain of youth. On Sunday, my little brother and my son decided to wrestle and Dad was wrestling with them. Me and his partner Mel were like, ‘Stop, you guys! Play some games.’ So then they were playing the floor is lava [necessitating jumping from chair to chair], all of them running around.”
What about Hall who, after parting ways with Mick in 1999, became the fourth wife of Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch, whom she divorced in 2022? She’s now back in Richmond where she raised her brood and is an “obsessed” grandmother. “She loves it so much, she’s very much into activities, she keeps the kids busy, she gets art projects going and has them collecting her chicken eggs and is like, ‘Who’s going to help me plant the new seeds?’” Lizzy says. Hall, she adds, is “an avid gardener”.
“Even in the dead of winter when there’s not much going on, she’ll show you what’s in the greenhouse,” affirms Georgia May. Lizzy giggles, “She’s got a good veg patch: ‘The leeks are doing well!’” “She had sacks and sacks of Jerusalem artichokes, and she kept giving them to people that didn’t ask for them,” says Georgia May. “Straight from the ground, they need a lot of scrubbing!” Both fall about in fond laughter.
She [Jerry Hall] loves it so much, she keeps the kids busy, she has them collecting her chicken eggs
Are the sisters, both recently resettled in London after some years living in Los Angeles, equally green fingered? “Only really to make our gardens look nice,” says Lizzy. “I grow cherry tomatoes against a wall, but I’m a fair-weather gardener, not all year round,” says Georgia May. “I recently started getting a lot of figs on my fig tree, but I didn’t plant it, so whether that’s gardening or not is debatable. But I did made a tart, so I’m like, ‘It is!’”
We’re talking gardening in the context of sweet peas — which Hall loves to pick from her flowerbed and place in “little bouquets” around her house and because it’s one of the two scents that make up Jo Malone London’s new English Pear & Sweet Pea fragrance, which joins English Pear & Freesia in the brand’s long-running English Pear collection. The sisters shot the scents’ campaign in an idyllic pear orchard at Petersham Nurseries, close to their childhood home. “It was a really nice experience, we climbed the hill and watched the sun come up,” says Lizzy. “Even though we were making an ad, we were having the chance to spend time together chit-chatting.”
For Georgia May, the shoot was a big deal, her first after giving birth to Dean, her son with her boyfriend US skateboarder Cambryan Sedlick. “I was five-and-a-half months postpartum, I hadn’t been out of the house in so long,” she recalls. Dean’s now 17 months old and Georgia May — who returned to the UK because she wanted him to be born here — is a doting mother.
“I feel the time’s gone both very slowly and very quickly. He’s just started talking and he’s becoming like a whole other person versus a little baby. He’s speaking to me in full sentences, I can’t fully understand what he’s saying yet, but it feels like at any moment he will… it’s been amazing.”
Lizzy, meanwhile, is a seasoned mum to Eugene, her son with her husband, US film producer Christopher Behlau, from whom she recently split. “It’s been a real life journey, having your first child. You find out so much about yourself, your life changes and you change into motherhood. There’s a lot of articles our mother has been sending us recently saying that you only find your new identity as a mother by the time your child’s five. That’s when you recover physically and mentally. I was like, ‘Oh, wow, it’s kind of true,’ because it’s in the last year, when he’s now going to school and clubs and making friends that you have more time to yourself and I’m like, ‘OK, what do I want to do now?’”
A spritz of perfume, you’re like, ‘Ah! I don’t smell of baby vomit anymore’
As mothers, their make-up’s become less about glam, more about simply looking awake — “loads of blush!” says Georgia May. “And I’ve got very good at five-minute make-up.” “Small luxuries really make your day for you,” says Lizzy. “A spritz of perfume, you’re like, ‘Ah! I don’t smell of baby vomit anymore.’ Sorry! That was a terrible example.”
The Jo Malone London tag is very apt. Even though the sisters are half-American thanks to their Texan mother, they grew up in the capital and there’s a very British wryness to their humour. During their LA years they still watched Bake Off and hunted down cheese and onion crisps. To Georgia May, Englishness is all about “festivals, we love going to Glastonbury and concerts together, being out in the countryside”. To Lizzy, “It’s being out in dreamy nature, it’s a nostalgic feeling from childhood, like a scene from Alice in Wonderland, sitting under a tree reading a book.”
She’s set up house in her old stomping ground of bucolic Richmond, close to Hall. Georgia May is in north London. “In LA we lived just two minutes from each other, we could walk to each other and were very near Karis too,” Georgia May says. “But I can still get over to Lizzy — I went there for her birthday the other week on the Overground.”
Why did she abandon her home turf? “I’ve been in north London 12 years, I wanted a change. It’s close to central London and east London, just far from west London.” “I recently read an article saying that people who live in Richmond and Barnes and Sheen areas have the best quality of life of everyone in London,” Lizzy tells her.
“The article was targeted to you, it was the algorithm,” Georgia May points out. “I do find myself quite close to your area in the evening when I’m going out to see a band play,” Lizzy concedes.
The Jaggers by numbers
55: The number of years that Sir Mick has had a child at home
2: How many minutes the sisters lived apart from one another when in LA
7.5: The age gap between the siblings, meaning that when Georgia May was born Lizzy could pretend Georgia was “her baby”
8: The number of children father Sir Mick Jagger has, making Lizzy and Georgia May part of one of rock’s most expansive family trees
5: How many minutes Georgia May gets to spend on her make-up now she is a mother
1: Gap. Georgia May’s celebrated tooth gap helped usher in a newer, cooler, less airbrushed beauty ideal in the 2010s
Lizzy relocated because she wanted Eugene to have a British education. “They don’t start reading in America until a year later and he was desperate to learn. I was like, ‘I’m going to have to teach you myself.’” Now, he’s at the same private co-ed school in Richmond that both girls attended.
“I haven’t been back since I left, I really want to go!” Georgia May shrieks. “You can come any day for pick-up,” Lizzy tells her, continuing, “He’s going on his first school trip today. It’s very exciting. I think my son was destined to go to school here, because since he started talking, he’s had the loveliest little Victorian-boy British accent.”
My two daughters have been squabbling for nearly two decades, only slightly calming down now they’re young adults, so I’m envious of these sisters’ harmonious relationship. “It’s all about the age gap,” Lizzy explains sagely. “Seven-and-a-half years, so when I was really little, Lizzy was pretending I was her baby,” adds Georgia May.
“I was just over playing with baby dolls, and then a real baby came along!”
Hall used to love dressing them identically. “I was five and you were about 12 and we both had these huge collars and matching ruched smocked dresses.” “I loved it!” Lizzy exclaims. “I kind of want to do it again.”
“I’m down for it like in the way when the Olsen [twins] were older and wore hats in the same fabric, but a slightly different style and colour. But completely matching? That’s a bit creepy,” Georgia May says.
After Lizzy left home and started modelling, she’d take her younger sister shopping. “I was just like, ‘I want to be like you!’” Georgia May recalls. “She took me to Kurt Geiger and bought me six pairs of shoes.”
“I took her to Liberty’s once and was like, ‘Get anything you want!’ She was like, ‘I just want these three things.’ I was like, ‘Aah, you’re so polite.’ My goal was to help Georgia to avoid all the awful teenage moments that I’d had, especially fashion mistakes. I was like, ‘What is your style?’ Because I remember being a teenager and wearing a trend and then really regretting it when you see a photo.”
Both Lizzy and Jimmy competed to inculcate their little sister into their music tastes. “Jimmy got me lots of The Clash, Misfits, the Cramps, Pixies and you got me loads of soul music…” “Erykah Badu, Fiona Apple, The Ronettes,” Lizzy recalls. Which did she prefer? “Both! So now I’m not a very good DJ.”
Their father may seem immortal, but the sisters appear equally indefatigable. As rock royalty scions, are people ever surprised they work hard for a living? “No!” says Georgia May, just as Lizzy says thoughtfully, “Yes, especially in Britain. So many people here are living off their ancestors’ money. But the Jaggers are not aristocrats. We’re entertainers.”
