How did Gemma Ward go from Australian schoolgirl to A-list cover girl so quickly?
Valerie Lawson traces the steps. Two years ago, Gemma Ward dressed each day in a navy skirt with either a polo top or blue and white checked shirt – her high school uniform. Today, she wears chiffon, lace, tulle, silk, fur, diamonds, leather, velvet, crocodile skin and satin. And her blonde hair is no longer pulled back into a pony tail, but intricately braided, sleeked into a chignon, frizzed into an afro or smoothed into the waves of a ’30s screen goddess. In New York, Paris and Milan, she sways down the runway in that weird pony walk of today’s models as she parades the clothes of Valentino, Oscar de la Renta, Versace, Balenciaga, Alexander McQueen, Gucci and Marc Jacobs. In double-page ads for the labels Prada and Yves St Laurent, she gazes from the glossy pages of Vogue, Tatler and Harper’s Bazaar, her mouth impossibly red and bee stung, her wide-set green eyes resembling a china doll’s, her forehead a panorama of alabaster skin.
