At around 11pm, at Chanel’s after-party, Libby Bennett grabbed a stranger’s drumsticks and performed a head-shaking solo for an audience of suits and pearls. “That’s my mission tonight,” the 19-year-old model said, calling from her home in Saddleworth, Manchester.
A week earlier, Chanel had presented its cruise collection at the historic Villa d’Este on Lake Como. “Whenever I see a drum kit, I get this urge. I saw it behind the curtain on the catwalk earlier that afternoon, so as soon as the band finished playing, I ran up and started playing.”
Keira Knightley and Sofia Coppola formed a moshpit with next-generation models Mia Armstrong and Ella Dalton. “For me, drumming is the same as modeling. I perform. I play an alter ego. I’m not myself.”
Bennett was discovered at 16, while still at music college, in London’s Soho, while visiting her sister. She’d been “discovered” before, of course—at 5ft 9in, with a shoulder-length frame and caterpillar eyebrows, she’d often been compared to Cara Delevingne. But she’d never considered herself that way.
“I was never a popular person in school, and I think that’s common in the modeling world,” she says. “So when people said I looked like a popular person, I just cringed. I didn’t see what they saw. I pushed it aside.” It wasn’t until she actually ran into her current agent—slamming his sandwich onto the pavement—that she began to wonder if the universe was somehow communicating its intentions. “It’s like fate is saying, ‘You can’t ignore me.’”
Two years on from her JW Anderson AW23 debut, Bennett is now one of her generation’s fastest-rising models. Having starred in campaigns for Louis Vuitton, Versace, Lanvin and Rabanne, she’s practically the living embodiment of Seán McGirr’s brave girl persona for McQueen, and her attitude on the catwalk has transformed her into something of an apex predator in just three seasons.
“Models used to be much more luxurious. I try to bring the same energy to the catwalk. I just want to see the 80s Jean Paul Gaultier spirit return,” says Bennett. But Bennett’s ambitions extend beyond the catwalk: as well as dreaming of becoming the face of Chanel beauty, her aspirations include starring in a Bond film, becoming the latest member of The Last Supper and, ultimately, being crowned Britain’s next supermodel. “I want to be as famous as Twiggy,” she adds.