Selfe Portrait

The world’s oldest working fashion model, Daphne Selfe, celebrated her 90th birthday this year, but she shows no sign of slowing down. Caroline Leaper meets the grandmother, who is as stylish and in-demand as she was when she started her career in 1949.

- Caroline Leaper

I am supposed to be meeting Daphne Selfe at 1.30pm, after she has finished a photo shoot, but at 11.45, I get the call to come sooner. “That happens with me,” Daphne apologises as we sit down for what is now an early-bird lunch. On an average fashion shoot, you might expect a model to wear three looks in four hours, but Daphne has rattled through four in two. “Everyone goes home quicker. I know what I’m doing, I suppose. It’s not like shooting with some young girl.” As the world’s oldest working model, with a career spanning 69 years, she’s certainly got the experience.

Daphne Selfe was born on July 1, 1928. At 90, she’s gung-ho and full of energy, laughing loudly and gamely climbing on cabinets to get the shot. Watching her, you get a sense that she brooks no nonsense.

She no longer drives, but will happily go anywhere on the train from her home in Baldock, a market town in Hertfordshire, England. Her three children are in their 50s and 60s, her four grandchildren in their 20s. She is widowed, but does go on dates “occasionally”, to the theatre or cinema. With whom, however, is none of our business.

Her health is good, aside from the vasculitis in her feet, which prevents her from wearing heels. Her marbles are entirely intact, thanks for checking. She’s 1.6m tall, although shrinking a bit, if she’s honest. She’s undeniably, most definitely, beautiful, which explains why, back when she was 70, she made the (grand)mother of all modelling comebacks and launched herself as a stereotype-challenging, social-mediadominating supermodel for the new millennium. But more on that later.