The other thing that has Stone fretting is her body, an irony given how many photographers and designers see in her a refreshing aesthetic shift away from the prepubescent boy figure that has lately dominated fashion. Bruce Weber, who has worked with Stone several times since her Givenchy re-debut, says, “To me, Lara is part Marlon Brando, part Thelonious Monk and part Robert Mitchum. She’s big, bad and beautiful.”
“She had this sexual awareness,” the photographers Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott recall via e-mail of meeting Stone two years ago, on a shoot for this magazine. “Normally when we are shooting, we are looking to create a character, and the great thing about Lara is that she is naturally already such a strong character herself [that] she inspires us to take a better picture.” But Stone has struggled with the role of healthy poster girl (she is, it should be noted, a very lithe five feet ten). “A lot of people say it’s nice to see someone who won’t break in half when you touch them,” she says with a sigh, rolling a pack of cigarettes around in her hands. “But I am still a woman and a person, and if you’re compared and confronted with your colleagues, and they’re all half your size, you think, F---, I’m really fat! And then on other days, I’m like, Oh, I’m not that bad.” Coming to terms with her charmingly gapped front teeth has been an easier journey, however, despite the suggestion from a certain editor in chief that she might get them fixed. “She was just wondering what we were going to do about my teeth,” Stone says, laughing, “and I thought she was talking about the fact that they are so yellow, so I told her I would quit smoking, which I still haven’t done.” Now, Stone adds, “I quite like them. It makes me different.”
In many of Stone’s photographs and in her runway work—about which she has anxiety too, though mostly because her size-7 feet make walking in the size-8 and -9 samples more of a clomp than a strut—the notable quality is a lack of emotion: Unlike her contemporaries, such as Sasha Pivovarova, who often has the look of a lost nymph in the forest, or even Gisele, who has become her own universally recognized brand, Stone works like a blank canvas, a grown-up who is content to let her collaborators paint their fantasies upon her. It is a role that seems to suit her just fine. Asked if she likes fashion, Stone glances up, shows a flash of those famous teeth, and says, “I like my job.”
