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Street Hospital in London following a life-threatening E coli infection. Her parents spent three weeks camping out on the ward; her father was filming Sweeney Todd at the time and referred to it, looking back, as “the darkest period in my life”. Yet four months after that New York show, she was fronting Chanel’s eyewear campaign, and in February last year had her first magazine cover, for the SS16 issue of Love. When it comes to her own style, she says, “I love Jane Birkin, I love Brigitte Bardot…” She pauses. “But I don’t try to dress like anybody. I think the best thing to do is wear what you’re comfortable in. When I’m at home, I’ll wear a T-shirt or a tank top and jeans and sneakers every single day. But I also love statement stuff and the more out-there pieces that you don’t see all the time. I love a lot of jewellery, especially rings, as you can tell” – every knuckle is gem-encrusted – “and hoop earrings. I wear hoops every day.” It’s not unironic that the tagline for No 5 L’Eau is: ‘You know me and you don’t.’ Unlike her peers, Lily-Rose seems to keep a mantle of relative
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privacy. She doesn’t do Twitter, Snapchat or Facebook, although there is, of course, an Instagram feed with 2.3 million followers, but it’s closely curated, not full of selfies and overshares. We know her favourite movie is The Wizard Of Oz, that she’s friends with the Victoria’s Secret model Stella Maxwell, and has known Karl Lagerfeld since she was eight. She supported Bernie Sanders in the US presidential election (or at least the teen equivalent of political activism – reposting screenshots of his speech). Apart from the West Coast-to-Left Bank lifestyle, Lily-Rose is pretty much your average 17-year-old: every sentence peppered with “like”, Beyoncé songs soundtracking her nights out (“Her older stuff especially, like Baby Boy”). There was a bit of a hoo-ha when she supposedly came out as sexually fluid on Instagram in August 2015, but she clarified her comments later – she’s just not into labels. She has been linked to the 25-year-old British model Ash Stymest for the past year, though the topic is off limits. (What teenage girl would want to talk about her love life with a stranger?) Possibly best of all, for her 16th birthday she threw an alternative French Revolution-themed “Sour Sixteen” party, complete with guillotine, swords and a dungeon. The birthday girl wore a pout and a garland of onions around her neck. And she is nothing if not on-brand. “I’m never not wearing No 5,” she says, in her LA drawl. “I put it on as soon as I get out of the shower.” The house perfumer, Olivier Polge, has taken apart the 80-plus ingredients of the original formulation to emphasise its greener top notes – lemon, mandarin, orange – and tone down the powdery vanilla base. It’s meant for generous spritzing: “I spray it in my hair because I heard it sticks better, and I spray it on my neck, on my wrists and on my clothes a little bit, too.” As is tradition, there was an epic video to accompany the launch (remember Baz Luhrmann’s No 5 film with Nicole Kidman?). This one was made by Johan Renck, the Swedish director behind Bowie’s 10-minute Blackstar video. “Johan was so much fun to work with,” she says. “He was super-nice and welcoming. We talked about what to do to a certain degree,