Karen Elson

Forged in the explosive creative fire of the first collaboration between the photographer Steven Meisel and the makeup artist , a pale girl from the north of England was reborn on the cover of Vogue Italia in 1997 as “Le Freak,” a bold new face with shaved-off eyebrows and a flaming red crop. “There will never be another Karen Elson,” Karl Lagerfeld, Chanel’s designer, was moved to declare—later calling her a “beauty for the new millennium,” according to the London Evening Standard.

Growing up, the English rose was bullied for her gangly figure and ghostly pallor, but at sixteen it was exactly those two features that caught the eye of a scout. Now one of the most successful models in the business, she has built a brilliant career on that creamy, alabaster skin . . . .which is all the more striking when contrasted with her candy-apple hair and lazulite eyes.

But Elson, who told Vogue she considers her runway career an unlikely “lightning strike,” had long held another dream close: becoming a singer-songwriter. While walking each season for and Alexander McQueen, the model made tentative steps towards that goal, priming her pipes with James Iha of the Smashing Pumpkins (a onetime beau) and Melissa Auf der Maur of Hole, singing backup for Robert Plant, and duetting with Cat Power. And as a founding member of the political-cabaret group, The Citizens Band, she regularly performed in vaudevillian nightclub acts.

It was a model–rocker match made in heaven when Elson met Jack White, the front man of the White Stripes. Just five weeks after she walked on set to star in his 2005 “Blue Orchid” music video, they were married in a mystical ceremony in the Amazon. The mad-for-each-other couple packed up, moved to Tennessee, and promptly started a family. They had been married for some time before White discovered his wife’s songwriting talent and coaxed her into the studio to record The Ghost Who Walks, an album of haunting ballads (titled after her childhood nickname).

In the pages of Vogue, Elson has been captured as a Technicolor bathing beauty on the boardwalk of Blackpool, England, as a white-coiffed Louis XVI courtesan, and as Little Edie Beale, the tragicomic inhabitant of Grey Gardens. With her hair frizzled, she eerily channeled Vogue’s own creative director, Grace Coddington—cats and all—in a 2008 Age Issue profile on the fashion editor’s style. In 2010, she posed with her husband for the first time in an Annie Leibovitz portfolio coinciding with the release of her first album.

With both her careers in full swing, Elson lives far from the fashion crowd in her adopted hometown of Nashville. She runs a vintage-clothing shop, and she and her husband are raising two kids, Scarlett Teresa and Henry Lee. “It’s the first place that’s really felt like home,” she said in 2010.