Ruby Aldridge

       Ruby Aldridge is a hard girl to pin down. Her schedule is such that it takes a few weeks to get a 10-minute phone call penciled in, and even then, when a time is agreed upon, her New York agent calls the day of to say she’s a little tied up — scrambling around searching for her passport. (It’s probably under a heap of clothes somewhere in her Lower East Side apartment.) But it’s hard not to forgive her. She’s only 20 after all, and isn’t that what all 20-year-olds do? Lose their passports. Except most don’t have to fly to Paris at dawn for a round of couture shows.
        Aldridge, who has catwalked for Prada, Gucci, Dior, Proenza Schouler and Miu Miu, starred in last year’s Marc by Marc Jacobs campaign and is one of the new faces of Valentino, is having a moment. This shouldn’t come as any surprise to the British, who have always had a fondness for the Aldridges: her mother is Laura Lyons, an American model and former Playboy Playmate, and her father is the famous English illustrator Alan Aldridge, whom Ruby describes as the love of her life. “He’s the best, and just the most amazing, creative, modest genius I ever met,” she gushes. You might have seen his cartoony, psychedelic artwork in books for the Beatles and on album covers for the Rolling Stones, the Who and Elton John. Ruby is fortunate to have inherited good looks and a creative spirit (she’s currently learning to play guitar) in equal measures, as have all the Aldridge offspring.
         Her siblings — there are seven in total — include her older half-sister, Saffron, the face of Ralph Lauren for about a decade, and her full sister, Lily, another model (yes, there are many models in this dynasty; as I said, they’re a fine-looking lot), who is a Victoria’s Secret Angel and recently wed the Kings of Leon frontman, Caleb Followill, in Montecito, Calif. And then there is her half-brother, Miles (no, not a model, but he is married to one, the 1990s supermodel Kristen McMenamy). Miles is a fashion photographer whose highly stylized work has appeared in Vogue Italia, Numéro and GQ.
         “It was awesome,” says Ruby of the time they spent working together on this fashion shoot. “He’s my brother so it’s crazy . . . and a little surreal. . . . A part of me was intimidated as he’s such an amazing photographer and is very serious when he works; he’s a taskmaster! There was no slacking off!” One gets the impression that slacking off isn’t in her nature anyway — her energy is palpable — and with passport finally found (“Oh my God, I was literally freaking out.”), couture week beckons.