March 14, 2022 |
For the sixth cover of 10 Magazine Issue 68 – Future, Balance, Healing – model turned nutritionist, Rosemary Ferguson, wears Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello, as photographed by Derek Ridgers and styled by Sophia Neophitou. Making her name as a muse to Corinne Day in the 1990s, Ferguson became a face of the rising grunge movement in fashion. In more recent years, while raising her three children, Ferguson discovered another passion which would turn into her next career step. Here, she sits down with Ten’s Editor, Claudia Croft, to talk about her practice as a nutritionist and how it has changed her perspective on life.
Rosemary Ferguson remembers the day her life changed forever. She had come up to London from Farnham, in Surrey, and was hanging out in McDonald’s on Oxford Street with her mates when Corinne Day spotted her. She was 15 and destined to usher in a radical new grunge aesthetic alongside Kate Moss, who became a friend for life and is now her neighbour in the Cotswolds.
Day’s images of Ferguson thrill with rebellious youth. Gangly, in skinny jeans and a cobweb top, or lolling on a scruffy sofa in a grubby-looking flat, her androgynous look challenged conventional ideas of femininity and glamour. “Corrine’s take on me was quite realistic,” notes Ferguson. “When she approached me in McDonald’s, she thought I was a boy because I did wear boys’ clothes. That whole ‘Is it a boy or is it a girl?’ [thing] is actually very modern if you think about it now.”
“My kids now talk about the 90s like we talked about the 60s,” says Ferguson, whose daughters regularly raid her enviable collection of 90s and 00s Ann Demeulemeester, Miu Miu, Marc Jacobs and Helmut Lang. At the time, she was having far too much fun to think about her iconic place in fashion history. “When you look back at it, I can see it, but when you’re in it you don’t notice it so much. At the time I was like, ‘Are you kidding me, Corinne, you want me to go stand in the fucking freezing field until one o’clock in the morning?’ and I would be furious.”
all clothing and shoes (worn throughout) Alexander McQueen
Ferguson combined modelling and raving at the weekends with school, where she studied hard. “My mum said, ‘If you want to get away with murder, do well at school,’” she recalls. “She had no idea what I got up to at weekends.” She had planned to go to the London School of Economics and study psychology, but deferred when her modelling got in the way. “I’m eternally grateful to Corrine for showing me a world,” says Ferguson, who by the mid-90s was living in New York. “I met some of my best friends then, that are still my best mates now – Kate, James Brown, David Sims. We had a really good time,” she says.
The new wave of models were so very different to the Amazonian supers who came before them. They outraged the British tabloids who accused Ferguson and Moss of promoting heroin chic. “My mum would phone up and say, ‘Darling, there’s an article saying you are a heroin addict,’” she remembers.
She laughed most of it off and felt protected in her bubble of fashion friends and collaborators who had become the powerful new tastemakers of the era. “Everybody – the great photographers, the great stylists, the hair, the make-up – we were all the same age,” she says of this generational changing of the creative guard. “We were quite flashy because we were travelling a lot – but it was travelling for work. It felt quite hedonistic. We definitely had a good time,” she says and remembers laughing about hangovers on planes. “Oh my God, that feeling when you haven’t been to bed and you walk through the airport and it is so painful and torturous.” The whole thing was a bit of a laugh, Ferguson explains, describing guerrilla shoots with the influential stylist, Melanie Ward, done on the hop with a holdall full of clothes. “It was scattered and chaotic,” she says, not like fashion now, which is “more corporate, more professional”.
Ferguson had her first child, the model Elfie Reigate, at the age of 24. “I felt very taken care of by the fashion industry,” she says. “I used to take her on shoots.” There were occasions when the uglier side of the industry showed its face – she remembers the rib-crushing indignity of forcing her athletic body into tiny samples, and the time when someone criticised her nose in French thinking she couldn’t understand them (she could). “I’m sure it does affect the way you feel deep down,” she reflects, but surrounded by her gang of close-knit friends and collaborators, she escaped the worst abuses.
all clothing Richard Quinn, shoes Prada
Rather than resent the short-lived nature of a modelling career, Ferguson is grateful for everything it brought. “I had enough money to buy a house and support a child at the age of 24. You can have a whole career by the time you are 30 then you can retrain and do something else.” By the mid-00s, she began to think about what could be next for her. “I was aware that modelling wasn’t going to last forever. I needed to future-proof my life. I wanted to be in charge of something that I could control.”
Raising three daughters and making meals for them made her even more aware of the importance of food and nutrition. “I come from a holistic family,” says Ferguson. Her grandmother ran one of the first health food shops in the UK. The more she looked into it, the more convinced she became that good health starts with nutrition. “I’ve always believed that you can heal yourself, and food and nutrition have always interested me.”
In 2008, when her youngest daughter was two, Ferguson took the next step, enrolling in a part-time course at the College of Naturopathic Medicine in London. It was rigorous and scientific. “When you haven’t sat in a classroom for 20 years – it was so painful,” she recalls. But she stuck with it, got her qualification and began to establish herself as a nutritionist. She never stopped learning, amassing a host of letters after her name. Now she is studying for a masters.
all clothing Dior
The brain and gut are inextricably linked, she says, citing studies which have connected poor gut health with depression and ADHD. “You have the vagus nerve which goes up to the brain and sends messages. It sends dopamine and serotonin. Ninety-eight per cent of your serotonin is made in your gut, so all those hormones that give you your good-mood feeling are made in the gut. Your immune system comes from the gut. There are all these really intricate systems, and if your gut is not on fire then you’re not gonna go be on fire,” she says, before adding, “People often come to me when normal or western medicine hasn’t helped.”
Ferguson works from the Lanserhof clinic on Dover Street, takes online consultations and founded the Five-Day Plan meal delivery service. Alongside that she hosts a regular podcast with gut specialist Eve Kalinik, whom she challenges to try out different wellbeing approaches. “I don’t believe in being hard on yourself,” she says of the way people will anxiously deny themselves gluten, butter dairy, sugar, coffee or alcohol in the name of good health. “People are going crazy with stress of trying to be too good.” So while she takes on food and fuel that “help my body perform at its best and make me feel good”, she practises an 80/20 or 70/30 split of good things versus indulgences.
Her husband, the artist Jake Chapman, is a bad influence – “He’s like, ‘Yeah, let’s go to the pub and have a shot,’” jokes Ferguson. “I still like to have a bloody good night every now and then but it takes me longer to recover and I hate the ‘Bleugh’ feeling afterwards.” Ultimately, she loves the way looking after herself makes her feel. Cold water plays an important part in her daily routine: if she’s not cold-water swimming, she will have a cold shower, “[which is] really good for my dopamine and my mood. It also just gives me a little check-in, like, ‘Oh yeah, I’ll take care of myself today.’” She loves to run, does weights to maintain muscle mass and yoga for flexibility. She takes a liver supplement and fish oils, adding vitamin D in the winter and a probiotic cycle every six months. She practises fasting three times a week, leaving 16 hours between her last meal the day before and her first meal the following day.
all clothing and bag Balenciaga, shoes Alexander McQueen
“You are giving your gut time,” says Ferguson. “It’s 16 hours of rest and then you have eight hours of eating again. You are having two proper meals in that time, but you sit down, you take your time, you chew your food. It’s much more beneficial than eating a fast breakfast, fast lunch and fast dinner.” As well as breaking the cycle of permanently feeling full and constant oral stimulation, fasting has other benefits. With 50% of your energy going to digesting food, she explains, “It’s not about restricting calories. It will help you maintain your weight, but it just gives you so much clarity, it makes the body work better and feel lighter.”
Ferguson is the best advertisement for her own practice. “What you put in your mouth has a huge impact on how your skin looks,” she says. Hers glows. She’s tried Botox in the past to cancel out her frown lines, but doesn’t like the ‘done’ look. She prefers microneedling – in particular, the Morpheus8 procedure which she describes as “microneedling on steroids. It’s not putting something in, you’re literally just stimulating your own dermis and getting your own skin to work for itself.”
This year, she’s got a book on the boil, collaborating with the sought-after facialist Teresa Tarmey and the aesthetic physician Dr Wassim Taktouk. “That’s why we are doing it together,” she says, “because I’m healing the inside and they’re healing the outside.” The book should be a good read. As a clinician, her bedside manner is nurturing, reassuring and non-judgmental. “I really believe in healing yourself. I think a positive mental attitude is important. I have a belief that everything will be OK. My husband thinks I am mad. But, you know what, everything is going to be OK.”
Issue 68 of 10 Magazine – FUTURE, BALANCE, HEALING – is on newsstands March 18. Pre-order your copy here.
AWAKENING
Photographer DEREK RIDGERS
Fashion Editor SOPHIA NEOPHITOU
Text CLAUDIA CROFT
Hair NEIL MOODIE
Make-up ANDREW GALLIMORE at Of Substance using Augustinus Bader
Model ROSEMARY FERGUSON at Models 1
Nail technician EDYTA BETKA at Of Substance using OPI
Photographer’s assistant ROWAN SPRAY
Fashion assistants BRITTANY NEWMAN and FARAI BRODERSEN
Production assistant MO GUIMARAES
