This Year's Model

Having avoided the Fade Street phenomenon and its offshoots like the plague, and literally cringing every time I see yet another tangoed Irish model in LIFE magazine, standing on Grafton St. in the freezing cold to mark the release of a wannabe celeb’s fragrance ‘Eau De Desperation’, I wasn’t sure what to expect from up and coming television presenter Daniella Moyles. She did, after all, make her name on the modelling scene.

But meeting the glamorous 23 year-old in the suitably glamorous Morrison Hotel, I am more than pleasantly surprised. Apart from being obviously beautiful, she’s smart, funny and self-deprecating, and seems genuinely intrigued at the prospect of getting to talk about something other than her love-life, and her friendship with Georgia Salpa. So when the ambitious Bulletin TV presenter and psychology student tells me she’s just arrived in from a press call that involved her standing around in a pink Spandex pit-girl outfit, I want to grab her and ask her why does she do it? Well, it seems Moyles has been pondering the same question.
“Oh, please don’t say I’m a model,” she requests. “Say I’m a TV presenter. I’d never turn my nose up at modelling, but I’ve always had a thorn in my side about it to be honest. I suppose it’s because I’ve never seen myself as a model, I kind of fell into it (laughs).
“It definitely wasn’t a life ambition,” she adds, “it just became a fun way to supplement your income. But let’s face it, over here, there is an absolute cringe factor attached to modelling. There really is. Young ones in bandeau dresses with bleach blonde hair holding whatever – it’s just not very credible. And I always had an issue with being a face that didn’t speak. I mean, there’d be all this stuff about you in the papers but not one iota about what you thought was going on in the world. You’re just a press call face, promoting whatever.”
For this Naas-born fashion lover, the odd nature of Irish modelling – with its emphasis on flashing young flesh over focusing on style – is a pain in the ass, literally and metaphorically. Moyles equally laments both the lack of awareness about Irish designers, and the misconceptions young women have about the Irish modelling scene.
“The press call thing is something that’s unique to Ireland,” she sighs. “To me, a model is someone who’s doing Burberry, Versace or Vogue, whereas in Ireland I don’t know what we are. We’re like glorified promotion girls. I don’t mean that in an offensive way, that’s just how I feel. Most models work their asses off, but there is a huge difference between fashion modelling and the life of an Irish model, and you’re not told that going in. That’s why there are so many of these crazy girls going into modelling with no idea of what they’ll actually end up doing.
“You’re not educated into modelling. Certainly I wasn’t. Andrea Roche is trying to change that. Andrea is a manager, she looks after me, she doesn’t look after a book full of girls. It’s so much more personal and she helps me with career decisions as opposed to just picking up a phone and going, ‘Yeah, Daniella will be there at four’. But no-one else ever educates you or gives you any kind of advice. My first ever press call was with Katy French, standing in a gold bikini with the number ‘3’ on our arse. I was 17, and no-one told me anything. I didn’t even know why I was standing there.”
While bikinis and spandex are par for the course, Moyles says she’s always had a limit as to how far she would go in terms of disrobing.
“I would never do glamour. That page three stuff? It’s not modelling. There’s a skill to modelling, to be able to make clothes the way the client wants them to look: it’s not something that everyone can do, despite what people think over here.”
But press call girls aren’t modelling clothes either, unless pink spandex is making a comeback, which I pray to Freddie Mercury it’s not. So really, how big is the divide between page three and the social pages?
“Honestly, I don’t think they’re a world apart. Basically, there’s a very thin line of fabric between being a glamour model and being a page three girl!” she quips. “In some ways, that layer of fabric does make a world of difference. There’s a huge difference between opening the paper and seeing a girl in a bikini – and opening it to see a girl with her breast in your face. But in other ways, they’re not a huge world apart, and that’s where the issue lies. For me, when I started I had no issue doing them, thought they were great money. But now that I’ve got a bit older and have moved away from them, I’ve grown a little bit more uncomfortable with it. I’m not ashamed of having done them, but it’d take a lot of money to get me to do a bikini call now. I’m 23 and, for me personally, that’s getting too old for them.”
If, for Moyles anyway, being 23 is too “old” for bikini shots – surely any younger is too young?
“Well, the girls who are going into it choose it and are obviously comfortable with it.”
But then, so was she when she was 17. For a generation constantly told to be careful of putting scantily-clad or salacious photos online lest Mark Zuckerberg personally sends them to your future employer, being immortalised in the press half-naked seems to be an oddly acceptable form of public sexualisation.
“It’s fucking weird,” Moyles agrees, but she’s reluctant to condemn it outright. “I don’t know. It’s difficult I guess, because I see both sides of it. For some girls, that’s the pinnacle of their career. I can’t relate to it, but that’s what they want to be doing – and who are we to say that they shouldn’t? On the other hand, I hear the arguments against it and I get it. I don’t really know where I stand on it to be honest, because I’ve done it. I’ve done it – and can also cringe at it.”
Whatever way Daniella eventually resolves that inner debate, there’s no doubting that her modelling career brought her to public attention. Add in her genuine talent for presenting Bulletin TV, and she now has that invaluable modern asset: a public profile. She appears to brush off the idea, but she’s not unaware of the lengths to which some people will go, to get attention.
When I mention that one of her peers is understood to be shopping around for a sham relationship to boost her profile, she begs me to name names. I honestly can’t tell whether she wants some juicy gossip – or knows exactly who I’m referring to and doesn’t want to be disloyal. Does it surprise her?
“No, I’d believe that. I mean, I’d never do it, obviously, but I’m not surprised that others would. People want to be known, to be a ‘somebody’. But that’s just an extreme version of what everybody’s doing really. Just look at Twitter: it’s a little microblog of self-aggrandising self-projection really isn’t it? Everybody just puts up what they want you to see. Some people’s Twitter is just a joke, you know that, em, ‘overuse of stealth promotion’ to put it nicely!”
Does she do that?
“Oh, of course!” she jokes. “No, I don’t. I mean I use it for work but those people who put up pictures of them going, ‘Oh look at this pic of me looking hot in my new dress, lolz’? Scarlet for them! Or people who use Twitter as a diary, going, ‘In the Morrison for cocktails with the girlz.’ I hate that!”
Not that she is entirely averse to a bit of it herself. On her own Twitter profile, tweets to Fade Street stars, television presenters and models like Georgia Salpa and Rosanna Davidson abound, and there’s even a few “Pre-work drinks with @whoever, who is looking like a BABE tonight!” tweets. Given that they’re all mates, surely they could just text? Or are there socialites out there for whom that is too under-the-radar a notion?
Daniela looks at me despairingly. “Socialite? I’m not known as a socialite, am I?”
She is not amused at the thought.
“That makes me want to die. ‘Socialite’. Oh God. I don’t know, what does that even mean? It’s a term only applied to girls most of the time, really isn’t it? Guys don’t get it, even if they’re in the media and in the same clubs (What about Callum Best? – Sub Ed). It’s just used to put girls down really. I mean, if ‘socialite’ just means I’m sociable, then yeah. It’s part of my job hostessing at PINK. But it’s certainly not part of my mentality, to be seen with people, to move in the ‘right’ circles, whatever that means.
“I’ve worked really hard to get where I am,” she adds, “to be a television presenter, and not just by hanging around in clubs. And it’s the press, too. They don’t ever mention when I go to Grogan’s with the girls, but on the other hand sometimes I’d open the paper and it’ll say, ‘Seen in Buck’s were Rozanna Purcell and Lousie Johnston and Daniella Moyles’ – and we weren’t there.”
The presenter looks flummoxed for a moment, before shrugging.
“But I think if you start letting it get to you like that, letting yourself think about it too much, that’s when you’ve lost it. I have to go where I want to go and believe no-one gives a shit – and not give a shit if they do. Because the second I think any different is the second I need to tell myself to cop the fuck on. I’m just me, I’ll go to Coppers if I want to go to Coppers, or Krystle if I want to go to Krystle. Because at the end of the day, not going because I care what people think is as bad as going because I care what people think.”
So she definitely doesn’t care at all what people think?
“No.”
She grins. Apart from being smart, funny and self-deprecating, the Bulletin TV star has bottle.
“Just don’t make me sound like a fucking eejit,” she says. “And don’t call me a socialite (laughs).”
It’s a deal...