Print exclusive: Arizona Muse’s modern romance
Far from your average boy-meets-girl tale, when supermodel ARIZONA MUSE fell in love with the French osteopath treating her son, she waited a whole year before making the first move. A breakfast date, a proposal and a baby-on-the-way later, they tell LUCINDA BARING their extraordinary story of modern romance…
Arizona Muse opens the door to her flat with bare feet and a broad smile. “You’re here! Hello!” She greets me like an old friend and takes me into the kitchen, where the family are preparing dinner and carrying it in bowls into the sitting room. Evening sunshine is pouring through the big glass windows of the Hyde Park apartment and bathing the mid-century-modern furniture in a summer glow. The table is laid and her handsome French husband of one year, Boniface Verney-Carron, invites me to join them for spaghetti bolognese and broccoli. Arizona’s nine-year-old son Nikko is waiting patiently to start his supper, while the model, dressed in white Arket culottes and a white T-shirt, wavy shoulder-length dark-blond hair pulled back and with a smattering of makeup leftover from a campaign shoot earlier that day, pours everyone a glass of water. It’s a cozy, familial scene, not unlike the one unfolding across London in my own home, and they seem perfectly at ease with the stranger in their midst. It’s not quite what I expected from the half British, half American supermodel who has fronted campaigns for Prada, Fendi, YSL and Louis Vuitton, and landed multi-million-dollar beauty contracts as the face of Estée Lauder and Chanel. “Can you bring the butter, my love,” Arizona calls into the kitchen. “I need butter with my pasta,” she says to no one in particular as she digs in.
Arizona signed to Next Models in 2008, when she was still in high school in Santa Fe, and fell pregnant with Nikko less than a year later, the result of a short-lived relationship. She returned to modeling in 2010 and gave herself six months, convinced her career wasn’t going anywhere. A breakout show season came within a few months, starting in New York, where she walked for Narciso Rodriguez, Marc Jacobs, Hervé Leger and Proenza Schouler. When she opened and closed Prada’s spring show in Milan later that month, the newcomer with the extraordinary otherworldly beauty, that film noir-y face, those eyebrows and wide-set almond-shaped eyes, was fast-tracked into the big time. By the end of 2011, photographers Patrick Demarchelier, Peter Lindbergh and Steven Meisel had shot her for Vogue and Prada, and Anna Wintour anointed her “the new face of American fashion”. I suggest Arizona’s success is a sign of her fortitude, building a stellar career while living in Brooklyn as a single mother to a one-year-old child, but she insists it’s entirely fortuitous.
Her “love” bringing the butter is a London-based osteopath with seductive brown eyes, dark stubble and a celebrity client list. “It’s as sickening as it sounds,” their friend Lowell Delaney, one half of the duo behind British label Trager Delaney, says. “The beautiful model and the gorgeous French doctor.” The pair met when Arizona took Nikko – then five – to see Boniface to stop him clenching his teeth at night. What followed can only be described as a great love story. After four appointments, Arizona decided she had to find another osteopath. “It was clear to me that I was weirdly in love with this man I’d never spoken to beyond the professional, ‘This is what’s paining me…’ kind of way.” She laughs, and it’s this slow, deep laugh, nothing girly or self-conscious about it. “I felt like this awkward stalker.”
What did Boniface feel whilst Arizona was battling this overwhelming sense of desire? “Nothing!” Arizona says, laughing. “It’s true! It’s OK!” “It’s not true,” Boniface insists. “But there’s that sacred line I would never cross. It’s too dangerous.” Was he excited, though, when he saw her on his schedule? Did he notice when she stopped coming to see him? “That’s a good question,” Arizona turns to him. “Were you …?” She laughs and presses him. He shifts in his seat. “Well, of course. She is beautiful. But you understand what I’m saying.” They laugh again and he reaches out for her, smiling, reassuring her, and looking a little uncomfortable.
“I started dreaming about him pretty much every night. I still do
”
Arizona couldn’t shake this enigmatic Frenchman from her mind – “I started dreaming about him pretty much every night. I still do” – and, after a year, she decided she had to make a move. “I realized I was never going to forget about him, so I wrote him an email about one of these dreams. It wasn’t sexual, we were just together and it was really nice.” She pauses. “It was probably the best piece of writing I’ve ever done. I’m not a great writer.” She was careful not to use the word love (“I thought I was crazy enough. I didn’t want him to think I was crazy, too”) and the email ended with a multiple choice. “It was funny,” Boniface recalls, “she gave me a multiple choice that gave me no choice but to contact her.” Boniface tried to explain away her feelings at first, telling her patients often ‘transfer’ onto their practitioner, that when their physical complaints are a manifestation of an emotional crisis, and a practitioner spends time listening to them, healing them, they feel drawn to them. “The email arrived and I thought, wowsers. I was very impressed. And I was flattered of course, but my response was pragmatic to start with it. I explained that sometimes there’s this genuine mistaken feeling of love.”
They agreed to meet for breakfast. “Somehow I managed to go out the night before, and I was feeling pretty rough,” Arizona says. “And I remember he was sitting there waiting for me at a cute little table with two chairs, and I was like, deep breath, ‘I think we need to move to a booth’. I was afraid I was going to fall off the little chair!” She bursts out laughing. “She was a bit drunk,” Boniface remembers. “It was funny.” But you waited over a year for this moment, I tease. “I know!” Did she go to that breakfast thinking, Am I crazy, or could this be it? “A bit of both,” she replies. “I was cautioning myself, thinking I had over a year to create the perfect man in my head. And he might not be nice, or not for me at all.”
They saw each other sporadically at first, as Arizona had made plans to move to New York. “We’d see each other two days in a row and then not for weeks.” Their relationship found solid ground when Arizona asked Boniface to join her at the summer solstice in Stonehenge. She spent the weekend before convinced he was going to break up with her. “My head wasn’t really in the right place,” Boniface says, “but we went, and that’s when I thought, this is it, actually. She’s my girl.” “Oh, really?” she asks quietly, sweetly, smiling at him.
Four months later, Arizona and Nikko moved back to London (“I knew as soon as we arrived in New York that it was a mistake. London is my city. Good things happen to me here”) and within six months they were engaged, the proposal story on a par with their histoire d’amour. “Let me tell it because Arizona doesn’t do it very well,” says Boniface. “It took me three months to prepare, and she just says, ‘Oh, yesterday he proposed.’” Arizona was led on a treasure hunt weaving through Florence’s old town (“In every place a hidden letter”), starting with a museum and ending in a tiny boutique near the Ponte Vecchio. Arizona was beckoned inside and led up four narrow flights of stairs. “I took the last one alone and emerged onto this stunning rooftop, and Boniface was there with Champagne.” He got down on one knee with a ring set with stones belonging to his grandmother. Later that day, they bumped into friends at the airport and told them what happened on the roof. “And one of them says: ‘That’s weird, I was on a roof on the same street, taking pictures, and I thought I saw a couple.’ He takes out his phone and shows us his landscape pictures of the bridge and we are in it, at the moment Boniface was on one knee.” They were married in London last June, Arizona in a 1930s-style bias-cut slip by Alice Temperley, the simplest dress the designer has ever made. “She didn’t want any ornamentation,” Temperley says. “It was all about their day, and marrying Boniface; she wanted the dress to be almost not there.”
This is a relationship in which romance is a centrifugal force. They still send letters to one another. “Writing lovely messages or texts, or saying something nice in person. We do that a lot.” They also touch all the time, a passing kiss on the way to the kitchen, a brush of the shoulder, a squeezed hand. For Boniface (named after Bonifacio, the town on the southern tip of Corsica where he was conceived), being tactile is innate, a natural part of his European upbringing. He grew up in Lyon in an eccentric household, his father an art dealer, the house always full of artists, cousins and creative souls. After 35 years of marriage, his parents split up, but they continue to live in the same house, often not seeing one another for days. “It’s a curious arrangement. They have a profound intellectual respect for one another, they just can’t stand each other.”
It’s an arrangement Arizona understands well. Her American father – also an art dealer – and British mother separated when Arizona was five and also continued to live together for a while (not in Tuscon, Arizona, where their daughter was born, but in Santa Fe). “I think I’m romantic because my parents were not,” she says. Her father now lives in Nevada, her mother in Massachusetts, and she visits both as much as she can. Her mother stayed home to raise Arizona and her younger brother Teddy and then studied to get her masters in psychology when she was 50 and now works as a parenting coach (Arizona asks for her advice, “but she’d give it anyway”). Arizona’s own parenting choices are mostly a reaction away from the way she herself was raised. Her mother had a very “unloving, cold British childhood” that saw her and her two younger siblings packed off to boarding school when their mother died. “They had no family love, no hugs, none of that.” In response, Arizona’s mother showered her own children with love and gave them a very free existence. “No one ever said ‘no’ to me, which is not the right way of doing things at all. I thought I was in charge, and I was a child. Of course, now my mother would do it all differently, but she did a really amazing job with the knowledge she had at the time.”
If Arizona grew up an American hippy, Boniface was a typical French bourgeois, his parents avant-garde in mind but authoritarian in manners, and he has evolved into the stronger disciplinarian of the pair. “Nikko was six when Arizona and I started dating, and I was walking on eggs,” he says and Arizona laughs. “Eggshells, my love. He always gets that saying sweetly wrong.” But he and Nikko got along from day one. Boniface is teaching him to speak French and play the guitar (“We have music lessons together, I’m learning the bass guitar”), and they share a love of football. “I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I thought, Am I going to take this on? But then I realized this boy doesn’t have a dad, and I could be his dad, and that’s pretty cool.” Arizona agrees. “I think you just have to approach the child with love,” she says. “And that’s what Boniface did so brilliantly well. With no instruction from me.” The three of them had one tricky trip to Israel, early in the relationship, when Nikko acted out, but when they got home Nikko told his mother he thought Boniface was going to be his dad. “I was like, shhhh, he doesn’t know that yet, so we can’t tell him. He has to figure it out on his own.” Perhaps Nikko wasn’t overly protective of his mother because she had always promised him a father. “I’ve always told him, ‘We’re waiting, you and me, we’re waiting for this dad, and he’ll come one day. And we don’t know who or when, but when I marry someone, that will be your dad.’ That’s why our engagement was such a big deal, for me and for Nikko, because to us that meant forever. That was the signal.”
The morning after Boniface proposed, when the three of them were at home in London, Arizona took off her ring and gave it back to him. “I took the ring into Nikko’s bedroom,” Boniface explains, “and I said: ‘I have a surprise. I want to propose to Mama.’ So Nikko and I went in and did it together and the three of us had a big cuddle in bed.”
“I’ve always told Nikko, ‘We’re waiting, you and me, we’re waiting for this dad, and he’ll come one day…’ That’s why our engagement was such a big deal, for me and for Nikko, because to us that meant forever
”
Their life together is a careful balance of parties – “We live in this glamorous city and love to dress up and go to nice places, though we’re just as likely to eat in Le Pain Quotidien” – and family. “The minutes with Nikko are so important; time means everything to children”, and they always come home to have supper with him first, before going out. Vacations are usually rural and not at all luxurious, moving from a glittery night out in Monaco to eating madeleines with Boniface’s grandmother. Their friends are a cosmopolitan mix of French couples, London families and a few old pals from Santa Fe. Arizona often refers to Nikko’s godmothers, part of a loyal circle I sense has seen her through her time as a young single mum. Friendships with fellow school parents haven’t come easily, Arizona being 10 years younger than most of the other mothers. “I wanted to go out all the time when Nikko was four and five, and they were having their second kids. They all had husbands and I didn’t.” “Plus she’s famous,” says Boniface. “So the mums think she’s unapproachable. It’s easier for me because I’m a bloke. The dads are friendly.”
They spend their downtime reading, watching documentaries or interesting movies, and playing sport. They run together, and both do Xtend Barre classes and Pilates. Arizona’s movements are balletic in their grace, the elegant way she drinks from a wine glass, sits in her chair. “Boniface compares me to Jar Jar Binks!” the bumbling amphibian alien from Star Wars with huge teeth and long flappy ears. “Sitting down, she looks very elegant,” Boniface explains. “Then she stands up and it all becomes a bit wobbly. You should see her run.” “Or walk down a catwalk,” Arizona agrees. “I have one of the worst walks in the history of models. I’ve had about 60 hours of teaching and I still haven’t got it. I never will.”
If that’s true, it hasn’t hampered her career. She’s still walking the catwalk – “That mix of fear and thrill never goes away” – and shooting endless campaigns. They both travel for work (“We saw each other for 10 nights in three months at the start of the year. It was hard”), but Arizona keeps her trips to one or two days. Has she always been a homebody? “I’ve always been a mother. I’ve had my child since I was a child, and I’ve never known anything else.” She loves clothes – “Boniface is actually better at dressing me than I am. We always go shopping together.” Nikko, too, loves picking out his mother’s clothes. “He has an amazing eye, that boy,” Boniface says. Something he has inherited from his biological father (a stylist who Nikko hasn’t been in contact with since he was three), perhaps.
Away from her modeling career, Arizona is launching a sustainable fashion brand in February with her friend (and former artistic director at Matthew Williamson) Georgie Macintyre, starting with a small collection of 10 exceptional party dresses. “One of our big focuses is on terminology. In the three years I’ve been studying and researching this, I’ve realized we all misuse the word sustainable. The fabrics will be natural and organic – recyclable fabrics are not good enough, because they’re still made from virgin material. Some sustainable brands still use synthetics because they are less energy intensive, but I want to work with materials that can go straight back into the ground and be composted. We have to think of the waste – every product that is made will eventually become waste, and how will that waste be disposed of?” If tech has become Karlie Kloss’ calling, sustainability is Arizona’s. It comes from the heart. In the last 18 months, she has been invited to speak on panels for sustainability consultancy Eco Age, she gave an introductory speech at the new V&A exhibition Fashioned from Nature, and is working with conservation charity Sychronicity Earth, and The Sustainable Angle, which sources sustainable fabric.
She’s also studying to take the Series 65 exam, a financial advisory qualification usually taken by investment professionals (“I need to know about finance; we all do”), and plans to create a word-of-mouth mentoring business for young models. “Often they have no one looking out for them; they need someone who understands their career, understands the risks, and who can help them think long term and strategize. I’d tell them to use that word with their agents all the time. I didn’t figure that out until nine years into my career.” Arizona may not have a #MeToo moment, but she feels she was taken advantage of financially. She once contacted her agency to enquire when a payment was due. “They said ‘oh yeah, we’ll send it’. I was like, but you wouldn’t have, if I hadn’t asked?”
“Of all the discussions we’ve had, this has been the biggest surprise,” says Boniface. “It’s mind-boggling that a model can earn the money, and the money stays with the agency until the model asks for it.” Would they go so far as to say the system is corrupt, or just greedy? “It’s definitely greedy. But they’re not lying. If you ask, they’ll give. But these young models are not armed with the right knowledge.” Arizona wants to help young models have financial control. “Models are an extraordinarily powerful group of people who are rarely rallied together, and this could be a really positive change.” As positive, she says, as the way models are now being chosen. “Brands are building themselves around women who have a voice, such as Dior and Adwoa Aboah. I love that.”
“Often, [models] have no one looking out for them; they need someone who understands their career, understands the risks, and who can help them think long term and strategize
”
I sense that Arizona’s relationship with Boniface has coincided with a coming of age, a confidence that comes from experience but also from his strength; her free spirit nourished by the sense of structure he provides. And yet there remains a fragility to her, a sweetness (“She is the gentlest woman I’ve ever met,” Boniface says), that makes you wonder how the industry – coupled with her role as a very young single mother – hasn’t crushed her. “I’ve been hurt,” she admits, “but even the toughest people get hurt. Life is cutthroat, but not in the ways you’d expect. I’ve never felt my peers were cutthroat, but I was quite cutthroat on myself. I think I made it harder for myself than I needed to.”
Arizona has only recently started enjoying her career. She’s not part of a model girl gang, as they were bonding as she was going home to her baby. “It would have been good to have friends at work. I would have enjoyed it sooner.” She’s not very good at social media, always forgetting to capture the moment. “I totally missed the boat. Joan Smalls, Karlie and I were all equals, the same caliber, and then Instagram happened, and I didn’t do Instagram, and look at those two now and look at me. If you don’t catch fire with it the instant it comes out, you’ve missed the moment.” She wants to prove herself away from the catwalk and Boniface feels she’s fighting back in a way for missing out on a university education, playing catch up. “Before I always received acclaim for being 5ft 10 and having a nose and cheekbones,” she says, “and it’s a new experience for people to be interested in me for what I’m interested in.” She’s also looking forward to scaling back – on modeling, at least – as she and Boniface are expecting their first child in November (“Pregnancy can be a great moment of motivation for women, and I’m a big supporter of the ones who take their children with them when they work”).
Nikko is still sitting with us – patiently, seemingly in his own world – and then every now and then he chimes in with a question that makes you realize he is entirely present, listening to the conversation and showing a wisdom and quiet curiosity beyond his nine years. They never brush away his questions, or hush him. I comment on how sharp Nikko is, and she thanks me. But Boniface is equally proud. “He’s so curious. It’s amazing to see.” We discuss Mario Testino (“I didn’t work with him until much later in his career, long after the alleged abuse”) and Terry Richardson. “It’s an amazing opportunity to have a son in this climate,” Arizona says. “Our children are going to be the ones who affect real change.”
They reach for each other again, Arizona this up-for-anything girl, this “huge nerd who is interested in everything and excited by life”, according to her friend Delaney, but who remains wide-eyed in this rather romantic way, Boniface her anchor, even though she’s weathered life’s storms exceptionally well on her own. It’s nearing 11pm, Nikko now long in bed, and I take my leave, our evening more akin to dinner with friends than a magazine interview. He’s telling her how that morning Nikko asked if he should call him Dad. “He said: ‘I want to, but it’s a bit weird, I need to call you Boniface a bit longer’. I think it’s the baby; when the baby is here, the baby will call me Dad.” Arizona is putting her arms around him. “You always say it is up to him, maybe he needs to hear you say, ‘OK, call me Dad.’” I creep out and close the door.
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