Launching a business at any time is quite the feat, but launching a business during a pandemic? Model Leomie Anderson isn’t mad, but she is exceptionally hard-working, and such a task requires that kind of stamina. Before the pandemic, the longest she’d been in her home city of London was four weeks, she tells me. In fact, she hadn’t spent a full year in the capital in the past 12 years, as she was so often travelling for work. With high-profile gigs ranging from Redken commercials to L’Officiel covers, she clearly isn’t afraid of grafting at the behest of brands or magazines, but like most of us grounded in the UK, it gave her time to focus on other things, such as the relaunch of her multifaceted brand LAPP.
Perhaps it’s unsurprising that she cites Rihanna, the first woman to launch a label from scratch and be backed by fashion monolith LVMH, as one of her business heroes. One of the reasons why she admires the singer so much is that people, initially at least, underestimated Rihanna, and she can see that with her own experience. “People see models, [and] they think that they know exactly the kind of person that you are, know how intelligent you are or what you’re interested in or the kind of life you live. But none of it is ever actually true,” she says.
