“Naomi Who?!”: Beth Ditto Shares Her Backstage Diary From London Fashion Week

Ditto is, of course, well-accustomed to the catwalk. She walked for Jean Paul Gaultier in 2010 and Marc Jacobs in 2015. “It’s hilarious to me because I’m not trying to be a model,” she says. “I don’t think anyone is like, ‘Oh my God! Get this girl on a plane – Naomi who?!’” And yet it makes a lot of sense that Jeffrey should cast Ditto as his supermodel of choice. Those blistering riot grrrl vocals and an irrepressible, not-to-be-f***ed-with attitude has made Ditto an avatar of queer club kid rebellion since joining Gossip in late ’90s. (Even if she would have happily side-stepped the Loverboy club nights the designers organised at Vogue Fabrics to fund his MA at Central Saint Martins.) “It’s cool if you like raving, but I don’t give a sh**,” she says. “I can’t listen to one type of music all night? That’s like classical music to me. I really need songs with words and I like partying on my own soil in hotel rooms. I wanna be comfortable. I’m a pig-headed 43-year-old, so I’m not gonna do something I don’t want to.”

That one of the most visible proponents of the indie sleaze era might have spent the mid-Aughts choosing bed over Berghain feels almost ahistorical. I wonder how Ditto feels, then, about the movement’s much-reported revival. “I don’t know?” she says. “Imagine if I was like, ‘We’re back, baby! Get the band together’. The thing is: I had thought we had lost that moment forever and so it’s cool to see enough time pass for a comeback. People talk about all the partying, but it was mostly just us DJ-ing for each other. It was really intimate and we weren’t posting sh** all the time. And so you know what I would really like to see again? People being in the moment and doing things for the f***ing fun of it.” The next time I see Ditto, she will be doing just that: leading a soulful rendition of Patti Smith’s “Gloria” with backing from the Somerset House choir while the Loverboy cast skip, twirl and send rose petals flying onto guests’s laps. Ditto styled her own hair for this moment. “It would have taken too long to explain to someone else,” she reasoned backstage. “So I’ll just f***ing do it myself.”