With her big eyes and flaxen locks, Olympia Campbell might possess all the features of an English rose, but she says “vagina” a lot and bares her derriere on Instagram (even if it is artfully PicCollaged), so she probably wouldn’t be accepted into old-school-English-rose-polite-society. But that’s what makes her all the more interesting today. Like big sister Edie, Olympia is signed to Viva London, and isn’t just a model; she’s a firm feminist, always with a witty one-liner up her sleeve and isn’t putting all her efforts into the glossies and the runways, but has just started studying Human Sciences at university. Here are 10 things Olympia has to say about herself…
1. Olympia and Edie don’t argue (anymore).
“We don’t fight much, we got all of that and more out of our system when growing up together. We are a lot more similar now that our mental age gap has closed. There are 5 years between us and so until I was about 16 or 17 we didn’t communicate much. Our humour is fairly similar, although our day to day interests are quite different.”
2. Her Instagram bio is “VAGINA VAGINA VAGINA” because…
“It comes from a story in the last pages of a book called Vagina by Naomi Wolf. The story (which is true) is about three girls at school who decided that they were fed up with the lack of discussion and the lack of knowledge they had about their own vaginas. They were also annoyed by the few words they felt comfortable to use to describe it and also the reluctance of people to say the word “vagina”. Thus, one morning they told their teacher they had an announcement to make in assembly and in front of the whole school in unison all proclaimed ‘VAGINA VAGINA VAGINA’.”
3. She wants women to stop being embarrassed about their vaginas.
“There is, at the moment a sense of shame surrounding a lot of women and their vaginas. I am not merely talking embarrassment about ones sexuality, but about the actual shame that a lot of women feel at the very physicality of their vagina as a sexual organ. A lot of people will relate more to their boobs as a core area of their female sexuality rather than their vagina. This is an area that needs discussion especially within the increasingly commercialised sexual world that we live in.”
4. She just wants a normal life!
“I’m interested in playing out the normal trajectory of a teenage life. I’m interested in going to university and making new friends and joining societies and especially the course that I’m studying (Human Sciences) – all the things which at first seem incompatible with the erratic schedule of modelling, but actually fit together quite harmoniously. It’s nice to be part of a world which is so alien to your friends but then also have something else which keeps you grounded and reminds you that rejection (in modelling) is not the end of the world.”
5. Her career highlight was playing a prairie girl in California…
“The most recent thing that springs to mind was a shoot I did in California for WSJ magazine. It was just a really relaxed shoot and I got to see parts of California that I never would have gone to by myself. All those weird little lost towns and dusty old general stores.”
6. This is what she was like at school…
“A bit cocky, a bit of a nightmare aged 15-16, far too earnest and nerdy once I hit sixth form and settled in to my subjects.”
7. The best piece of advice she’s ever been given is:
“Life is a series of beginnings. The trajectory that you first start on does not have to be the same your whole life. The idea that it’s too late to do anything is ridiculous. You can begin a beginning as many times as you want.”
8. If she could make a documentary about anything in the world, she’d make one about…
“The vagina. I would make a documentary on the points in every person’s life when a large change occurs. What makes them so scary even though they are so natural.”
9. Her most used apps are:
“I use Instagram, PicCollage, Snapchat and Uber.”
10. She has no idea where she’ll be in 10 years time…
“But what I hope is that I’ll be trying one of the things that I find exciting and interesting.”
