Instagram model Lucky Blue Smith has announced that he is penning his first book, “charting his whirlwind journey”, which will include advice on “the pressures modern-day teens are facing”. Presumably he won’t be agony uncle-ing on how to best deal with the crushing disappointment that you aren’t born with a blue steel gaze and millions of Instagram followers.
The biggest question is, of course, what the tome will be called: Lucky Man? Blond Ambition? Blue (Da Be Dee)? Of course, we’re hoping for the latter. But he wouldn’t be the first model-turned-author.
Sophie Dahl
Grandaughter of Roald, Dahl became one of the first plus-size models in the middle of the heroin-chic 90s. She famously posed naked for an Yves Saint Laurent Opium advert, which was later banned. A second life as an author provided mixed results: Dahl’s debut, The Man with the Dancing Eyes, an illustrated short story possibly inspired by her relationship with Mick Jagger, was described as “whimsical” and “fairy-tale like”. Perhaps more presciently, her prose was summed up with the side-eyed epithet: “beautiful illustrations”. Ahem. She later reinvented herself as a celebrity chef.
Naomi Campbell
Brand Campbell enjoyed a big year in 1994. Her debut novel, Swan, was released in a PR double-whammy alongside her album, Babywoman. Written, she said, to get back at journalists who had got her wrong in the press, she called the tale a “cute story”. This meta narrative story involved a golden bowl of supermodels involved in all manner of Jackie Collins-ish plotting (murder, blackmail). Campbell recklessly admitted that she “just did not have the time to sit down and write a book”, which, at the time, was seen as a violation of some sort of moral code bestowed on all authors by Michiko Kakutani, instead of a standard element of celebrity memoiring. Campbell was on much steadier ground with her next literary endeavour, Naomi, a coffee-table career retrospective.
Tyra Banks
Banks was the first black model to be on the cover of GQ. She was also the first model to write a young adult fantasy/sci-fi novel about a character called Tookie de la Creme (surely her Ru Paul’s Drag Race name?). Tookie wins a place at an elite boarding school, Modelland, where she gets a chance to join the most elite supermodel team in the world, the Intoxibellas. “I am pretty certain this is literally the worst book I have ever read,” one Amazon reviewer said. To that reader we say: it’s the first in a trilogy of books.
Abbey Clancey
Victor of Britain’s Next Top Model and Peter Crouch’s heart, Clancy put her name to a Mills & Boon novel earlier this year. Following the Katie Price template, Remember My Name features a protagonist who is a thinly veiled version of herself. But though Jessica is a singer not an aspiring model trying to make it big, she is, like Clancy, from Liverpool. “I’m not saying I wrote it all myself,” the author announced in a spot of self-defeating pre-publicity.
