etcetera | Life & Times Electronic Telegraph Saturday 14 February 1998

Sophie Dahl is the supermodel of the moment, but she already knows what she wants to do next, says Elizabeth Grice

LOCATING Sophie Dahl was never going to be a challenge. In a sea of neat, busy women, all pecking daintily away at their keyboards or talking into tiny headset microphones, she stands out like a magnificent lighthouse, beaming the dangerous message that she is different. Not just bigger than everybody else around her, but somehow more alive.

Sophie is the girl who is supposed to have broken the supermodel mould because she is a size 14 with generous breasts in a world of waifs. Statuesque, substantial, voluptuous, enormous, epic, plumptious, traffic-stopping . . . these are some of the least tasteless adjectives that have billowed around her this past year, making her sound like some freak of nature.

Yes, she is a big girl by catwalk standards, but put her in another setting - a student cafeteria or the ticket queue at Waterloo - and would we think her so very peculiar? As she weaves across the crowded offices of Storm, the London model agency, it is not actually her height or her embonpoint that make the biggest impression but her wide, welcoming smile, lovely cat's eyes and pallid arms.

She advances on pointy black ankle boots with heels. Her dress is skimpy, thin and black, her tights are slightly snagged, woolly passion-killers. During her recent holiday in Los Angeles, an inch of brown regrowth has appeared at the roots of her straight blonde hair. Jet-lagged and a little scruffy, she still seems to possess mysterious reserves of energy.

"I couldn't have imagined it in a million years," she says, reviewing a giddy 15 months. A chance meeting released her from an unhappy secretarial course and projected her to fame. She says she feels as though she's taking a year out after A-levels be fore settling down to something real. "Modelling is not wildly sensible, but it's great fun."

The story of how she was discovered is so improbable, yet so exact every time it is told, that it must be true. Sophie, 19, had just had a screaming row with her mother, the author, Tessa Dahl, over her future. As she was sobbing on the street, an exotic woman in a Philip Treacy hat and see-through trousers got out of a cab, struggling with her shopping bags. Still red-eyed, Sophie helped her to her house and they began a long conversation on the doorstep.

"We sat talking and smoking for an hour and a half, by which time my face had regained normality. Suddenly, the woman looked at me and said: "I think you've got the most beautiful face I've ever seen and the body of a Playboy bunny. I'm going to make you into a supermodel."

The woman was Isabella Blow, Vogue stylist and design guru, who says of her insatiable quest for talent: "I feel like a pig looking for truffles . . . it doesn't matter where they are, I'll find them." Suddenly, there was a luscious truffle on her own doorstep. "This enormous thing in front of my eyes," she recalls, a little too avidly, "I had this overwhelming desire to touch her . . . It wasn't just the face, it was the package - the face, the cheekbones, the eyes, the bosoms."

Blow took her new protegee to see Sarah Doukas at Storm, the woman who discovered Kate Moss. Sophie says she couldn't believe she was not required to lose five stone, shave her eyebrows or have her hair chopped off and dyed black. "They didn't do anything to me," she giggles. That was September 1996. A few months later, she was being hailed as the fashion sensation of 1997.

The higher her star rises, the wearier Sophie Dahl becomes of the attention lavished on her size. As the granddaughter of the children's author, Roald Dahl (and the inspiration for Sophie, the Big Friendly Giant's helpmate in The BFG) she has had to e ndure some jibes about being a giant herself. She particularly hates references to "Sophie and the Giant Peaches". "Why can't they just shut up?" she asks.

She admits that, in the beginning, she believed she had a part to play in helping to free women from the fashion industry's template of skeletal models - "legs up to their armpits and huge eyes". Now, she knows that, however long she lasts, there will be no revolution; she is a one-off.

"I was idealistic. The revolution on the catwalk's not going to happen because couture clothes are not built for bosoms and a bottom. However, I came along and . . . good, good. At least I showed it could be done."

Women write to her and approach her in the street to thank her for being proud to be big and for helping them over their eating disorders. "I get really embarrassed. Thank you for what? I didn't come here to be this crusader for curvy chicks. I just happened to be in the right place, at the right time."

All the same, she does hold a modest candle for women's emancipation from an impossible ideal. "If I got really thin, there would be women who would feel I had betrayed them." She would like everyone to feel comfortable the way they are. "Why can't we just leave everyone alone?" she blazes.

Sophie Dahl, the supermodel, is fair game - but why, she asks, should someone such as Judy Finnigan be criticised for the way she looked on holiday in her bikini? "When you become a public figure, you become public property and your body becomes public property, so everyone gets frightfully offended if you decide to do something to it.

"Supposing I suddenly went to have a breast reduction - which I am not planning to do - I am sure there would be a national outcry." She bursts into laughter and then, realising she has been carried away, says solemnly: "No. I'm giving too much importance to my bosoms".

How is such a strange cuckoo in the nest of fashion accepted by other models? "I think they regard me as a bit of a fraud," she says. There may be jealousy, "because I can get away with something that perhaps they couldn't," but she knows she doesn't pose a threat. "I'm sure people bitch behind my back. Fine."

Her independent appraisal of the fashion circus, despite being its newest act, is one of Sophie's many likeable qualities. "In this world, everything is surreal," she says. "You start forgetting what normality is; making your coffee, buying your groceries and having friends round - I crave all that normal stuff."

She likes staying with her best friend at Bristol university, "just being 20 and doing studenty things like going to dreadful bars". On visits to see her mother and step-siblings in Oxfordshire, she joins in water fights and slobs around in Timberlands and jeans. She even plays along with her brother, Luke, who threatens to take photographs of her in the bath so he can sell them to his school friends.

It is ironic that after a childhood spent longing for normality, Sophie should have ended up in a world of splendour and excess. She was the happy result of her mother's brief relationship with the actor Julian Holloway. At the mercy of Tessa's colourful love life and constant desire to move house, Sophie longed for a Blytonesque life of gentle routine.

The family joke was that when she said: "All I want is a stable life," her mother would reply: "All right, darling, we'll buy you a stable."

"I always wanted a Famous Five drinking-chocolate-by-the-fire existence," she says. "It sounded so wonderful and normal; whereas, when I was growing up, everything was always so big and dramatic and sometimes quite chaotic. It was never awful, and usually exciting and it prepared me for what I am doing at the moment. Had I come from an incredibly stable background, I wouldn't have known how to deal with my life now."

She went to 10 schools and, for several months at a time, was transplanted to India, where her mother had gone to find inner peace. There, she loved the structured life and devotions of the ashram, carrying out her daily tasks and meditation wearing a sari with jasmine in her hair. "I was upset and angry when we left because I thought we were going to stay there for the rest of our lives."

Has she forgiven her mother for bringing them back? "I've forgiven my mum for everything," she says steadily. "That's part of growing up. You start realising that your parents don't generally do things out of malice; they do them because they think they will be good for you. There's no point in holding things against them. It makes you a very angry person."

Last summer, Tessa Dahl tearfully admitted to a national newspaper that her daughter's sudden fame was hard to take. "Turning 40, having a hysterectomy and Sophie becoming so successful all at the same time has been just a tiny bit tricksy."

Sophie admits she was upset at her mother's confessional to begin with but says that they have since made it up. "I don't believe in airing your family laundry in public," she says. "Though I understand why she had to do it. It's one thing saying those things to your close friends, but it's an entirely different thing saying them to a nation of newspaper readers. I think she's got to the stage now where she's letting me go, and that's how it should be. I think our relationship will be a lot better because of that."

In fact, Sophie Dahl is now her mother's fiercest defender. "Everyone has dismissed her as this flake from the Seventies, and that makes me furious. They don't know what my mum went through [witnessing her baby brother being hit by a taxi, the death of her older sister from measles, helping to nurse her mother, Patricia Neal, through three strokes, and striving to live up to the expectations of an exacting father]. She had a very difficult childhood and she's a great survivor. She's kind and generous and all her real, true friends adore her."

If her mother made a mistake, she thinks, it was in becoming her best friend. "There have to be boundaries, otherwise everything becomes chaotic. You have to have - my thing - a structure. That's how I want to bring my children up. I don't want to be their best friend. I want them to be able to tell me things but I don't want to take them to parties. We had a lot of fun but, in the long term, it wasn't the best thing."

More than once, it occurs to me that it would be a great pity if Sophie Dahl remained in a profession that requires her to say absolutely nothing. She writes short stories, she wants to sing and she suspects her thespian blood may one day triumph. When fashion's affair with her is over, there will certainly be other suitors. For the time being, she is trying to "get grown-up and serious" about her substantial earnings; buy a house, deal with the tax man and put something by for a rainy day. "I'm making money, I'm very happy and I don't feel remotely exploited."