Her lucky number.(Agyness Deyn)

Byline: Mark Holgate

So is your name Dutch?, I ask her. Or Belgian? Or does it hail from Scandinavia, where the collision of vowels and consonants can appear to be some particularly perplexing anagram? "Actually, my mother, who is a Reiki master, wanted to call me Agnes," says Agyness Deyn, laughing, "so she asked a numerologist friend of hers for the best spelling. This one apparently gives you the most positive karma." Now, I don't know whose side you would count yourself on when it comes to the for/against numerology debate, but Deyn's recent runaway success as a model offers pretty compelling evidence that it does indeed work.

On the subject of numbers, here are a few more that are particularly relevant to the English-born Deyn. She's 21. She stands five feet ten. She weighs 110 pounds. (On the current furor about models and their build, body weight, and BMI, she has this to say: "You don't have to starve yourself to be a model; you just have to look after yourself. You can tell which girls are exercising and eating well.") She walked in 23 of the spring 2007 shows, turning up everywhere from Proenza Schouler in New York to Chanel in Paris. She was discovered twice. The first time was a couple of years back, when she was in London visiting her childhood friend Henry Holland, who designs a T-shirt line called House of Holland. A photographer stopped her on Kentish Town Road and asked her that age-old question "Have you ever thought of being a model?" (Her response: "It sounds like a laugh, so why not?") The second time, which really launched her career, happened about a year ago, when she walked into the offices of New York model agency DNA while on vacation, and Louie Chaban, who is now her agent, signed her on the spot.

But the number with the most significance to Deyn's career is ten. "Every decade, there is a girl of the moment, and right now, the moment belongs to Agyness," says young London designer Christopher Kane, who generationally shares Deyn's love of the trashier, flashier aspects of Eighties Anglo street style. And these girls do tend to be of a very particular stripe. Just when it seems that fashion is about to be plunged into crisis mode because the faces of the last few years have been anodyne and anonymous, along comes some shorn, gangly, and invariably British tomboy who whips everyone up into a frenzy. Consider Jenny Howarth in the eighties. Or Stella Tennant in the nineties. Or, indeed, Deyn today. She has energized designers because she is that rare creature: a model whose striking, anything-but-classic beauty is amplified by her ability to project her effervescence in every picture and on every runway. More startling, her left-field appearance has highlighted everything absent from the current lineup of models-and everything that is so right about ...