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Kylie Minogue on Elle UK’s June 2010 cover

BI-CURIOUS, BONKERS AND VERY, VERY BENDY, ABBEY LEE IS THE BIG FACE OF 2010. RICHARD GRAY FINDS THE YOUNG AUSSIE IS UP FOR ANYTHING.

Abbey Lee Kershaw has just thrown her leg over the back of her head and is holding it there for what seems like forever. She’s wearing thoes improbably heavy McQueen crab-claw shoes, the freaky-looking ones from the show; but she holds her leg still and doesn’t move. This is perhaps the 14th time she’s done this in the space of three hours. “Hold it! There! Twist your body - a little to one side. Yes!” says the photographer. And she does, at increasingly obtuse angles - she’s a former dancer. Her eyes look straight into the camera; they are wide and blue and almond shape, just like thoes you see in Japanses manga cartoons.

In the past two months, Lee has emereged as the hottest face of 2010. Heavily in demand for all manner of campaigns, shoots and shows, she’s up there with Lara Stone, the gorgeously curvy girlfriend of David Walliams; the gapped-toothed daughter of rock royalty Georgia May Jagger; and the sexy wide-eyed brit model Daisy Lowe.

The shoot breaks and Abbey pulls off thoes huge McQueen shoes, lights a cigarette and dows some coffee. “Do you live in London?” she asks me in her soft Aussie accent. “I’d move there tomorrow, I love it- but the weather sucks.” She’s something of a lunatic, Abbey. Next she’s telling me how a model should always carry a spare thong in her bag, and how her pet lizzard, which is called Annie Hall, likes to sit on her shoulder when she goes to the pub: “A lizard is a perfect pet for a model,” she says. “They only need feeding once a fortnight. And I’m always travelling, so it’s perfect. If I had a dog it would drop dead of stravation.”

Then she shows me her tattoos; “I’ve got one on the palm of my hand, a peace sign on my finger, a little owl, and two new ones on the side of my stomach. I had them all done in white ink so I can still model - it means the are invisible.” Then there’s her secret tattoo, hidden in the inside of her bottom lip; an amateur pin-and-ink job. It’s supposed to say “truth” but it reads more like “bacon”. If you get bored with the tattoos there are always the piercings - 10 of them in total: nipple, nose, belly and the seven in her ears. Don’t they hurt?

“I find the pain fascinating,” she riffs. “I enjoy putting myself through it, which is weird because I am scared of needles. It probably comes from when I was four and dying of meningitis and had to have two spinal taps. I was always in hospital as a kid; I had a tumour on my knee, lots of broken bones. I loved climbing trees’”

So was she propular with the boys? “Well I’ve swung both ways, so it’s a bit different for me. I don’t call myself bisexual; I’m just experimental. I was always looking for somebody to sweep me off my feet, but then I got bored after two months and was on to the next.” Abbey is currently into men, on inparticular, Matt who is “hot and a singer in a rock band”. This “experiemental” side helped fuel rumours that Abbey was sleeping with fellow model, the lesbian Freja Beha. She refuses to comment , but admits “she didn’t have to act that much” in a now famous sex-inspired shoot she did with Beha for the French magazine Purple. This explicit spread, where both girls posed in various cod sapphic tableaux and varying states of undress for the photographer Terry Richardson (kissing in bras, in panties, boobies out) caused outrage in the blogosphere, where Richardson was accused of cajoling the girls for his own sexual satisifaction.

“Terry doesn’t force girls to do anything they don’t want to. He puts you in a g-string in a pile of mud because you want to do it. You touch yourself because you want to. For me, that shoot was truth about how things were between us both, and I felt good doing it. I’m not ashamed of it - why should I be?”

Does Abbey ever have a sense of shame? “I once wet myself in bed and my boyfriend at the time woke up wet through,” she says. “I’ve done all kinds of embarassing things lie that, but there’s no room for embarassment or shame, life’s just one big joke. It’s because I have no sense of shame that I am always willing to give things a go: I’ve been ridden horses naked into the sea, I’ve climed rocks, all kinds of things. Thats why I do this job. I’m always looking for the next door to open” And when it does, you can bet this girl will jump straight throught.

Style Magazine

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