For all of her cosmopolitan charm, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley is a farm girl by origin. She grew up in Plymouth, a port city in Devon, in the southwest of England. As she told David Letterman, “It’s the countryside, it’s the middle of nowhere.” Even so, like any teenager with big dreams, Huntington-Whiteley was restless for life in the big city. “I wanted to get out of Devon so desperately. London for me was where the big lights were,” she once said in The Guardian.
At 15, still wearing braces, she nabbed an internship and began life as a working model at 16. “I got a work placement at a modeling agency and then I spent the week making coffee and picking up the telephone and smoking cigarettes and drinking wine at 11 a.m., it was very ‘Ab Fab,'” she recalled to Letterman. She joked that she thought her first paycheck for modeling would be her only paycheck.
Naturally, part of that world meant an investment in fashion, but as she told The Guardian, that wasn’t totally her lane. But hey, it’s not like the girl didn’t try. Huntington-Whiteley said that she bought knock-off Ugg boots when they were just becoming popular but in Devon, this was lost on people. “I remember walking into a restaurant wearing them,” she told The Guardian, “and literally everybody turned to look at me, and they all laughed.” Well, no one’s laughing now.
Nicki
