Model with a mission

As top British model Jade Parfitt strides across New York's East Village, she has to navigate round men who stand gawping and rooted to the spot as the gorgeous six-foot blonde passes. She glides into a café, drops into a chair and orders a latte. While she does all this, she appears to be a girl with the world at her fingertips: graceful, beautiful, successful, a young woman in control of her destiny.

But Parfitt, 24, who has been at the top of her highly competitive game for the six years since she finished her A-levels, says it's an illusion. She does not always feel in charge of her life. "Modelling is a career where you don't have a lot of control," she says. "You can't choose when you work or who you work for. It is really about who comes to you."

Over the years many people have asked London-born Parfitt to donate her catwalk skills for charity fashion shows. "In my business you are constantly being approached to do shows for different causes," she says.

She has done this willingly, but one night towards the end of the year 2000, she and her then flatmate, fellow model Jasmine Guinness, began discussing how they found it hard to ascertain how much good they were doing by taking part. Or how much of the money actually got to the places it was meant to.

"We both wanted to do something where we had control over where the money was spent," says Parfitt. So, next day, she and Guinness set up their own charity.

The impetus to make a real difference also came from a recognition that they are very privileged. "I have been given an easy ride," Parfitt explains, "and that made me want to help people who haven't had such a good life.

"Jasmine and I have been in fashion for a long time and both made some great money at a young age. So it is nice to be able to do something for people who do not have luck on their side."

The two models called their charity Clothesline, "because the money goes from clothes to where we want it to go" - to Aids charities in Africa. Parfitt has two friends who are HIV positive, and the father of her friend American model Maggie Rizer died from Aids, "so part of the
motivation was personal", but mostly it came from a mounting despair about the situation in Africa.

"I know the problem is vast, but if we can just make a little dent, that's something to be proud of. No one person can rid Africa of Aids, but we felt it's better to do something rather than nothing," says Parfitt, who is moved to dismay at how little is being done.

"It is unbelievable that it only costs 50p to give an injection to a pregnant woman to prevent her from passing the disease to her baby, and yet they are not getting that. In South Africa alone, 200 babies are born with HIV every day."

Parfitt, the blue-eyed face of Clinique's perfume Happy, shrugs off this anger and brightens as she talks about Clothesline's first event, which was held in Dublin in 2001. "Jasmine and I called in every favour we'd ever earned, and did lots of begging," she says.

Over the six years since her mother entered her into a modelling competition on This Morning with Richard and Judy, which she won, Parfitt has worked with the world's top designers, and they all donated outfits. "We got Jean Paul Gaultier, Chanel, Alexander McQueen and Prada. John Galliano made two outfits specially for us and Giorgio Armani gave us a silk beaded dress which was worth £10,000 or something ridiculous.

Maggie [Rizer] was fantastic too. She really made people bid higher - if she didn't think they were going high enough, she started bidding for clothes herself. She was a star."

The next morning, Guinness and Parfitt were thrilled when they discovered they had raised £70,000. "We felt so proud," she says. "Clothesline is something that I really believe in; I love being a part of it and it gives me job satisfaction, which I don't get with modelling."

Since then Parfitt has been able to track where the money has gone. "There is one project in particular which I love - we bought a motorbike for a nurse in remotest Tanzania so she can go from village to village. And there is a place in South Africa helping elderly women whose whole families have died of Aids."

Parfitt hopes to go to Africa to visit the old ladies and children herself. "I would love to go this year. It will be fantastic to see the projects we have helped, and I would love to see the nurse on her motorbike."

Meanwhile, she and Guinness are back on the phones, "begging a lot" and trying to get the next Clothesline event organised. "We want to do the next one in London. We just need a great venue and we're off," says Parfitt, pushing the cold latte away.

"Ooh," she says, as inspiration hits, "perhaps you could ask your readers if anyone's got anywhere fab for us in London?"