Model behaviour

Four businessmen are lunching at the Electric, Notting Hill's cool new private members' club, completely oblivious to the fact that they are being closely scrutinised by a supermodel seated two tables away.

Crouching behind an ocean liner of a club sandwich, she is clutching a mobile phone and cackling like a Bond villain. 'You're not gonna believe this,' hisses Saffron Aldridge in her 'Norf London' accent. 'It's a camera phone! I took a picture of them. Ha, ha! You can't get away with anything any more.'

Dressed casually in a pale pink V-neck with floppy satin cuffs, figure-hugging Chloé jeans, and a pair of furry Chanel boots, she's letting off steam, slurping Coca-Cola and wolfing down more than you'd expect a model to put away in a week. She looks radiant, lightly tanned with her blonde hair rounded up in a clip.

The past three months have been hectic. In between modelling and running after her two sons (Milo, nine, and Finn, five), Aldridge, 35, a single mother, has been working flat out putting the finishing touches to her latest fundraising project: Through the Eyes of a Child, an exhibition made up entirely of children's photographs, with the proceeds going to the NSPCC.

The launch party for 300 last night, another Aldridge creation, promised to be as glittering as her chunky ring (a gift from her jeweller friend, Solange Azagury Partridge). She roped in friends - Trudie Styler, Sharleen Spiteri, Laura Bailey, Liberty Ross and Bella Freud - to form the charity committee. Bryan Adams auctioned a photographic session with him behind the lens; Tiger Woods donated his golf clubs; Bloomberg footed the bill. But it is Aldridge who was calling the shots - and she loved every minute.

An expert at striking the perfect pose, 'Saffy' has spent most of her life in front of the camera. At 16, she was signed up by a modelling agency. By 19, she had an exclusive four-year contract with Ralph Lauren. She whizzed round the world (first class), staying at the top hotels, earning a fortune. The American designer, who dubbed her a 'latter-day Lee Radziwill', was so enamoured that he signed her on for another four years - a major coup for a British model who was by then a mother of two.

Fundraising is Aldridge's first stab at doing something beyond modelling. After years of taking direction, being told where to stand and when to smile, she's relishing being in control. 'Saffron's very demanding with results,' says Kevin Kollenda, her former model booker turned photographer's agent. 'She wants everything to be as perfect as it can be.'

Her quest for perfection may well be the result of a childhood that was less than perfect, and a home life that has seen its fair share of both tragedy and heartache.

Born and brought up in Parliament Hill, North London, Saffron is the daughter of Alan Aldridge, the graphic designer who illustrated album covers for the Beatles and Elton John. But her parents' marriage fell victim to the Bohemian Sixties ('They both had affairs,' admits Saffron) and her father left home when she was just eight. While he remarried and moved his new family to Los Angeles, Saffron stayed in North London with her mother, Rita, a housewife. She stayed in touch with her father and even today remains on good terms with him. But as the only daughter - she had an older brother Miles and later a half-brother Mark - it was with her mother that she formed an extraordinarily close bond.

'My mother was so perfect to me,' is how Saffron has described her.
Ironically, it was against her mother's advice that she left her local comprehensive school at 16 with a handful of O levels to work on a hamburger stall in Camden Lock. One day, a customer, who turned out to be a model, gave Saffron the number of her agent at Take Two. She gave them a call and got her first job a month later, modelling jewellery for The Field magazine.

She worked in Paris for nine months, then tried her luck in New York where she was persuaded by her then boyfriend, Max Wigram (the art curator who recently split up with Phoebe Philo), to appear with him as an extra in a Ralph Lauren campaign shot by Bruce Weber. When Lauren saw the pictures, he hired her on the spot. All she had to do was be available for 26 days a year; the rest of the year was her own.

Aldridge became one of the most successful models in the world but, like many beautiful women, she was plagued with self-doubt and always felt a fraud. 'I never had any confidence,' she says. 'Any job I did, I felt insecure. And that's a horrible feeling to have every day. I used to say to myself, "The make-up artist is going to make me look greatî or "The lights are going to make me look great.î It was never me.

'I was very lonely at times. I was very much by myself. I remember being in Paris when I was 17. I was miserable beyond belief. I didn't know anyone. I'd save up my francs and go to the phone box to ring my mum.'

Being so cut off made it all the harder when tragedy struck. In August 1989, her best friend Julie died when the Marchioness sank in the Thames. for me. I think if someone's been ill, there's something almost cleansing about it. My friend who died on the Marchioness was buried and I still find that really difficult.'

A year after her mother's death, just after she had finished her first four-year contract with Ralph Lauren, Aldridge became pregnant with her first child by her partner, the Harrow-educated producer Simon Astaire. She feared that motherhood might halt her career but four weeks after her son Milo's birth, she was back in front of the camera, paving the way for the young model-turned-mum brigade.

Although her relationship with Astaire was to founder when her son was just six months old, motherhood gave her a taste of what it felt like to be in charge - something she had never known as a model. 'It was weird to have no control over the direction of the job you're doing and yet go home and be in control as a parent,' she says.

Saffron went on to find love again, this time with media executive Toby Constantine (cousin of fashion critic Susannah). They married, she gave birth to her second son Finn in 1997, and shortly after she signed her second contract with Ralph Lauren. However, this time she was to be equally unlucky in love and when Finn was 13 months, and after five years of being together, Saffron and Toby separated.

After her divorce, she met and got engaged to the advertising honcho Robert Campbell, but they never made it up the aisle. For now, all she will say is that she's happy being single and sounds like a teenager again reminiscing about crushes she used to have on her brother's friends (including the journalist Toby Young).

Her sons' fathers are very involved in their upbringing and she relishes weekends playing football and reading The Lord of the Rings to her boys. 'I have a lot more energy and time for my kids,' she says.

Recently she returned to Camden Lock for the first time in ten years. 'One of the stallholders recognised me,' she says excitedly. 'I was so chuffed. She wouldn't give me a discount because she said I'd done so well.'

She seems to have struck a balance between her personal and professional life that she never had before. 'I enjoy it more than ever,' she says. 'I think being older you have more confidence and it's not so important. When you're in your early twenties and modelling, fashion is your life. What matters now is my kids' happiness. If I go to work now, I have a great day, then I have a life at home.'

She is an operator and that is why the NSPCC is so delighted to have her on board. 'My father always says to me, "You should have been short and unattractive because you would have been more successful,''' she says. 'He believes in my business brain. I love being organised. I'm very good at getting from A to B quickly.'

The idea for the Through the Eyes of a Child fundraiser first presented itself to her in January 1998 after she had been sorting through some holiday snaps that her elder son had taken with her camera. It gave her the idea of raising funds by doing something that kids could take part in and enjoy.

Aldridge persuaded Canon to donate 200 free cameras, loaded with film, that were handed out to children in the UK between the ages of three and 12. They could photograph anything they wanted but they were under strict instructions not to get help from grown-ups. The top 200 shots went on display in October 2000 and were featured in a coffee-table book. Altogether, including the charity dinner and auction (to which Gwyneth Paltrow and Hugh Grant turned up), the project raised £150,000.

This year, 1,000 cameras were distributed worldwide, with the help of Virgin, to children as far afield as Shanghai and Delhi. Trudie Styler arranged for a child in Brazil to get one through her Rainforest Foundation. Aldridge and Kevin Kollenda spent three months sorting through 24,000 photographs. 'My God, some of them were so boring, I was falling off my chair,' she says, rolling her eyes. 'There would be a whole roll of the same thing. But one picture would always jump out. We did it two hours at a time with a good bottle of white wine.'

Her favourite roll from last year was shot by a nine-year-old girl who dressed and posed her Jack Russell in 24 outfits. This year, it is a photograph taken by a sixyearold boy from India of his toddler sister running towards the camera howling. 'My holiday snaps are always crap,' she says. What really gives her pleasure is looking at other people's work. One of her prize possessions is an Edward Weston nude hanging in the living room of her Notting Hill home. Her older brother, Miles Aldridge, is a fashion photographer - he and his wife, the model Kristen McMenamy, are both on the charity committee.

'I'm quite interested to start using my brain, to see what might happen. In the past, it has always been so easy to accept the next modelling job. But I would love to do something else. The charity has been a great success and I'm really proud of that but now I'm ready to do something for myself. It's just finding out what.'

The model-to-actress route interests her. 'But I'm not sure if I could go through the rejection of all those auditions,' she says. 'I couldn't be let down by my talents. It's not like modelling, where if they don't like the way I look, I can't do anything about that.'

Naomi Watts, the actress who found fame in David Lynch's film Mulholland Drive, is one of Aldridge's oldest friends. 'When we were 11, we knew every lyric and did every dance to Blondie,' she recalls. 'I'm so proud of her. She really put in the work. I used to say to her, 'Naomi, aren't you going to give up?'' She is at pains to point out that she and Kollenda did most of the grunt work for their fundraising project. 'I think if you make a commitment to something you should see it through. I enjoy it. I've learnt a ton. It's like running a business.'

Her biggest concern now is what to wear to the launch party. First time round, she wowed guests in a red beaded halterneck dress. But Aldridge wasn't happy. 'I don't know what I was thinking,' she says. 'It wasn't comfortable and red isn't my colour. Why did I put in those ridiculous hair extensions?'

She is determined not to make the same mistake this year. You can almost hear the cogs cranking into action as she formulates a plan of attack. 'I might ring Gucci,' she says. 'See if they will lend me that dress.'

Through the Eyes of a Child, Bloomberg SPACE, 50 Finsbury Square, EC2 (020 7330 7959), From 22 to 30 November 2002