Almost exactly a decade before her August 2024 cover shoot, Suki Waterhouse made a cameo in a 2014 edition of British Vogue’s teen supplement, Miss Vogue. “There’s something about Suki!” the profile declared, pointing to the then 22-year-old’s “brown belt in karate”, her “combat-boots-and-ballgown style”, and the “pleasantly shambolic” nature of her life in LA at the time (“she admits to a habit of falling asleep in her clothes, for instance, and then wearing them again the next day, for efficiency’s sake”).
Suki would make her debut on the cover of Vogue less than a year later, posing alongside Cara Delevingne and Georgia May Jagger for the April 2015 issue in a starfish-studded look from Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli’s spring/summer 2015 offering for Valentino. Over the course of the chaotic corresponding interview (“more a riotous girl gathering, squashed in the hair and make-up room” than anything else), readers learnt that Suki met Georgia May at school in Roehampton at the age of 14, with the pair “bonding on the netball court”, and that all three models traipsed to Worthy Farm together for Cara’s first Glasto experience. Their “best night out”, however, happened in London rather than Somerset: namely, Georgia May’s 21st birthday (“It was fancy dress, and Cara came as a whoopee cushion”), closely followed by Georgia May’s 22nd birthday in Las Vegas (“We stayed in a room with a bowling alley, we went to see Celine Dion, we bumped into Tyra Banks…”).
Suki’s most winningly left-field moment in the magazine, though, came in May 2017, when she appeared in a portfolio shot by Mary McCartney in recognition of the TV and streaming boom. “When did television get so vital?” read the accompanying feature. “Until relatively recently, the small screen was still the younger, cosier cousin of cinema and dwelled in another world entirely. Now, whole weeknights and weekends are lost to crime dramas and experimental comedies, and shows that resist genre and categorisation entirely.”
Among the stars photographed as evidence of TV’s ever-expanding “cultural cachet” in the UK? Jenna Coleman, then in the middle of her run in Victoria, who posed for Vogue in the Long Gallery of Syon House; Freida Pinto, on the verge of making her small-screen debut in Idris Elba’s Guerrilla; and Michelle Dockery, leaning against a Sante Fe-style bar in an Andreas Kronthaler for Vivienne Westwood dress and Jessie Western hat, having just wrapped filming on Netflix’s “feminist Western”, Godless (“I remember when I shot a gun – the adrenaline was crazy,” the erstwhile Lady Mary told Vogue of attending “cowboy camp”. “On Downton Abbey we had the shooting parties, but the women just stood back and wore a nice outfit and assisted the men.”)
As for Suki: by 2017, she had become as well known for her acting roles as her modelling gigs, signing on to appear in BBC One’s adaptation of Philippa Gregory’s The White Princess. Her co-star? A little-known Liverpudlian actor, Jodie Comer, whose most notable credit to date was a supporting role in Channel 4’s My Mad Fat Diary. Set during the reign of Henry VII, the period drama centred on the relationship between Elizabeth of York (Comer) and Henry VII (Jacob Collins-Levy), who were forced into a tempestuous marriage after the War of the Roses drew to a bloody close. Suki, meanwhile, played Elizabeth’s sister, Cecily, travelling everywhere from Salisbury Cathedral to Caerphilly Castle with Comer over the course of filming.
Vogue nodded to the nature of the production by shooting the girls against a mock Tudor ruin in the grounds of Capel Manor in North London on a frigid winter morning, Jodie in Sonia Rykiel, Suki once again in Valentino. Fortunately, neither star was phrased by having to crunch across the frosty gardens in dresses better suited to May than mid-January. They had, after all, just finished several months of running around chilly castles “in heavy period dresses” and “corsets” – and, as Suki teasingly pointed out, “after a few years of modelling, nothing really fazes you anymore”. As for Jodie, her mind was already on her next project, which would begin shooting in Tuscany that summer, and which she had high hopes for: Killing Eve.
