Aristocratic Scots supermodel Jean Campbell has disclosed that the money earned from her modelling debut at the age of five was enough to buy her first horse.
Lady Jean – whose parents are Colin Campbell, seventh Earl of Cawdor, and Lady Isabella Campbell, a former editor of British Vogue – has had a lifelong love of all things equestrian.
Brought up on the Cawdor Estate in Nairn, she has appeared in campaigns for Burberry and Louis Vuitton and can command huge fees for her modelling work.
Now she has revealed that her first fee for a shoot alongside her brother for Mini Boden made enough to purchase a pony.
Lady Jean, 28, explained: ‘So, Mini Boden did a shoot in Scotland and me and my brother were in the shoot and they very kindly said, “Would you like clothes or would you like to be paid?”
‘And so that was our first modelling journey. I think I enjoyed the process of playing dress up. I loved playing dress up. As I said, I loved fantasy and characters and imagining all of those things.
‘And that’s something that I really loved actually about entering the fashion industry when I did in a serious way at 16.’
She added: ‘I think we were probably five and six. So Boden, I guess they were sort of scouting around and wanted to do a shoot on the hill.
Lady Jean said a shoot she did with her brother when they were children was used to buy a ‘naughty’ pony that was brought over from Ireland
‘And so my brother and I were in the shoot and we said, we’d like to be paid. And so my granny actually found a really naughty pony with the money that we had been given.’
Lady Jean said the pony, which was called Spot, was brought over from Ireland for her and added: ‘I think the pony was probably quite cheap. Yeah, it was Limerick pony. And he was really naughty.’
The model also added that she no longer rides due to the chronic pain she faces on a daily basis as a result of a skiing accident when she was twelve.
She said: ‘Sadly, I’m not really able to… I can ride, but with everything that kind of came about with my hips and the pain condition and everything else, I have to be quite careful with the kind of sports that I do. So I can’t run or have any impact through my hips, pelvis, whatever.’
The aristocrat, who told Giles Brandreth’s podcast that she has always loved the great outdoors, also said that she and her blue blooded siblings had to sleep four to a room when they first moved from Scotland to London.
She said: ‘We moved to London when I was seven. My dad was working in London, and so we moved to London. We moved into a flat in London, and I went to school there.
‘And then I went to boarding school when I was 10. I do remember the first day. So I woke up at three in the morning.
‘And we all shared a room at that point, all four of us shared a room. And I woke my siblings up and we all got dressed into our uniform at three in the morning.
‘Ready to go, because obviously we didn’t know the time. And going up and waiting for my parents and saying, “Okay, we’re ready.” And they told us to go back to bed.’