Tributes have already begun pouring in for the model who became a defining face of ’90s fashion, and beyond.
Stella Tennant, the Iconic British Model, Has Died at 50
Stella Tennant, the iconic British model famed for her statuesque beauty and inimitable personal style, has passed away at the age of 50.
While Tennant was first known for her signature tousled pixie haircut, androgynous features, and commanding six-foot-tall presence—as well as her longstanding creative relationships with fashion legends from Steven Meisel to Karl Lagerfeld—her passion for sculpture, environmental causes, and her home country of Scotland were what eventually became closest to her heart.
The news of Tennant’s untimely death was confirmed earlier today in a statement released by her family—including her husband, the French photographer David Lasnet, and her four children, Marcel, Cecily, Jasmine, and Iris—who asked for their privacy to be respected. “It is with great sadness we announce the sudden death of Stella Tennant on 22 December 2020,” the statement read. “Stella was a wonderful woman and an inspiration to us all. She will be greatly missed. Arrangements for a memorial service will be announced at a later date.”
Tennant was born in 1970 as the youngest of three to the Hon. Tobias Tennant and his wife Lady Emma—daughter of the 11th Duke of Devonshire and his wife Deborah, the youngest of the famous high-society Mitford sisters. Despite her aristocratic pedigree, Tennant’s upbringing was decidedly more down to earth; she grew up on a 1,500-acre sheep farm in the Scottish Borders. It was a region she continued to feel closely connected to throughout her jet-setting modeling career, and one she would call home again upon purchasing a Berwickshire farmhouse in the early-aughts.
Tennant displayed a natural creative instinct from a young age, attending the British boarding school Marlborough College before going on to complete a degree in sculpture at the Winchester College of Art. Her career as a model began when she caught the eye of fashion writer Plum Sykes, with whom she appeared in the now-iconic Steven Meisel shoot for British Vogue’s December 1993 issue, “Anglo-Saxon Attitude,” which captured a nascent London scene of well-heeled women whose eccentric take on style offered a British counterpart to the U.S. grunge movement. A famous anecdote saw Tennant show up to the shoot with a nose ring, much to the surprise of the Vogue editors—it was her refusal to remove it that endeared her to Meisel, who invited her to model for him the next day in a Paris shoot for Vogue Italia.
This story originally appeared on: Vogue - Author:Liam Hess
