Georgia May Jagger on her rock 'n' roll life

Georgia May Jagger stands to greet me, all graciousness and gappy white teeth and the Texan good manners of her mother, the former supermodel Jerry Hall. She seems wildly confident for her 19 years, sassy and comfortable with her ravishing beauty. And why not? She comes from a family where beauty is in ample supply. She has inherited her mother's bouncing blonde curls and pert physique, and to her father she owes her indecently plump lips and her princess swagger. Not that Georgia May likes to talk about Mick Jagger; Rolling Stones frontman and notorious philanderer. She is voluble and charming on many subjects but when his name is mentioned her blue eyes acquire a sudden sullen deadness.

We are talking about her Southern belle name, which is something of a mouthful: 'My friends call me George, GM, or Georgia. But most people who know me from when I was little call me Georgia May,' she is saying. Is that, I ask, what your father calls you when he tells you off? She turns her head away, as if she can't bear to look at me, and remains silent for some seconds. 'I don't remember the last time my dad told me off,' she says, finally.

It is the only sour note of the interview. No doubt there is an element of boredom - what teenager wants to be asked about her aging rock god-dad ad nauseam? But Mick Jagger's serial infidelities, and the effect these would have had on Georgia May's mother, must have taken a toll on her young life. It was a gilded childhood, yes, with Caribbean Christmases and ponies and private schools, but Jagger was a chronic seducer, embarking on a dalliance with the model Carla Bruni (now Bruni-Sarkozy) not long before Georgia May's birth; and was said to have paid his new baby a perfunctory visit before jetting off to Thailand to be with his lover. Jerry Hall has spoken openly of the heartbreak she experienced during her 23 years with Mick Jagger, and how the birth of his son Lucas to the Brazilian model Luciana Morad, 18 months after the birth of her fourth child, Gabriel, in 1999, was the final straw for her emotionally, precipitating their separation. The couple are said to have remained on good terms, living next to each other in Richmond for a time, celebrating Christmas together, all for the children. But no child can be immune to the selfishness of a feckless father, however charming, fun and famous he is. And it is interesting how much more animated and unselfconscious Georgia May is when she talks about her mother, a powerful matriarch, and, by all accounts, a pretty wonderful woman.

'My mum is just a really nice person, and she has always made me be thankful for life, and my quality of life. Her advice to me about being a model was always be yourself, be happy, never do something that you don't want to do.'

Georgia May was just 16 when she first walked for Vivienne Westwood, and three years on she heads campaigns for Rimmel, Versace, Chanel and Hudson jeans, with whom she has a £1 million deal and for whom she is routinely photographed wearing nothing but mid-rise denim and lots of hair. But she doesn't just want to be a model. 'I would like to do all kinds of things: photography and art and designing; I want to help do charity things for animals and things like that.' She recently returned to Richmond to move back in with her mother and her 13-year-old brother Gabriel ('My friends are always like, "Richmond is not London, it's the countryside!" But I'm like, "It is, it is on the District Line.') after six months in New York's East Village with her sister Lizzie, studying art, philosophy and photography; 'I loved New York, but I missed my dog, my mum and my friends.' She has just designed a range of jeans for Hudson inspired by Slash from Guns'n'Roses and her mother's early Southern style. 'She was always telling me stories about how she and her four sisters would buy men's jeans and starch them so they stood up by themselves and then pull them on so they could get on their horses and ride 20 miles to the rodeo on Saturday night, which was the only thing to do.'

Jerry Hall had a dirt-poor upbringing in a small town called Gonzales. Her father was a war hero suffering from post-traumatic stress who abused alcohol and amphetamines and beat his daughters. Escape was high on the agenda for the leggy 16-year-old Jerry. Her raunchy, rancher-girl looks got her all the way to Paris, where she lived with Grace Jones, dined with Dali and Sartre and became one of the hottest models of the Seventies, posing for the cover of Roxy Music's Siren album when she was 19 and breaking Bryan Ferry's heart when she was 21 by leaving him for Mick Jagger. They met at a dinner party in Manhattan in 1977, when Jagger was in his full jet-setting, hob-nobbing, 'I'm the most famous person in the world' pomp, still married to Bianca Jagger, spilling his seed and hanging out at Studio 54 with Truman Capote. He went on to write 'Miss You' for Hall and they were immortalised in fuzzy neon by Andy Warhol. When Hall fell pregnant by Jagger in 1984 it was widely anticipated that they would produce the most beautiful baby the world had ever seen. Elizabeth was followed by James in 1985, then Georgia May and finally Gabriel in 1997. By this stage the narcotic chaos of the Rolling Stones was a blurry memory (for Jagger, at least), and the children had a relatively stable upbringing in their Richmond mansion.

Mick Jagger no longer lives next door to Jerry Hall, having decamped to a townhouse in Chelsea. He is in a serious relationship with the American fashion designer L'Wren Scott, and seems a stern family presence despite those celebrated decades of debauchery, committed to education and concerned when his children too eagerly embrace the dilettantism that their birth allows. 'My dad was fine about me doing modelling at 16 because I always said school was important to me,' says Georgia May, with just a trace of her father's estuary twang to her plummy accent. 'I always chose my jobs carefully so I wouldn't have to take too much time off. It got harder toward the end with my A-levels; there were sleepless nights and I was doing my homework on the plane coming home, but I pulled through. And now my dad is really happy about the design. He's really proud that I am already moving on to other things.'

Mick Jagger attended a Kent grammar school and then the LSE. Georgia May went to Collingham school and oddly enough was in the same class as her half-sister Jade Jagger's daughter Assisi - her niece. 'I always joke with them about it, especially when we were younger, I would say "Call me Auntie".' It is a sprawling family, an inevitable result of her father's liberal approach to love. Georgia May sees Jade occasionally, 'in the summer, on holiday', as well as her brother Lucas, 11, and her eldest sister, Karis, the daughter of the American model Marsha Hunt, 'when I am in LA'. She is particularly close to her sister Lizzie and although there is an eight-year age gap between the two girls they often used to be dressed in the same clothes: 'My Texan grandma, Meemore, used to make us lots of interesting outfits, flowery dresses with matching bloomers underneath. I also used to have to wear a lot of hand-me-down clothes. In our family we do that kind of thing.'

Her interest in art was inspired, in part, by the gallery-quality collections that she grew up with - both her parents are collectors. 'I love Lucian Freud and Irving Penn. My mum has one of Lucian's earliest paintings and it is so different to what he does now. I always find it really interesting to see what an artist started doing and where they ended up. To see that they improve, like Van Gogh, that's really inspiring.' She is applying to do an art foundation course in September, 'But I'm finding it hard to decide whether to do art or photography.' She has declared a desire to become a wildlife photographer and recently visited Yosemite National Park in California to take black and white Ansel Adams-style photographs. 'But I also like taking pictures of my friends, long exposures, distorted stuff. Right now, I'm experimenting. I think that's really important in art and photography, to try a lot of different things in the beginning.'

She has refined musical taste, informed by her older siblings and her boyfriend, Django James Stewart, the son of Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics. 'I'm like a middle-aged person; when my friends go on about modern bands I don't know what they are talking about. I'm into rock 'n' roll, like Jimi Hendrix. Not so much because of my parents, who used to play a lot of Nina Simone and older blues, but my brother and sister. On my 12th birthday James gave me a stack of albums, The Pixies and The Cramps and The Misfits, and Lizzie gave me Led Zeppelin and Motown. We used to listen to Motown and The Ronettes a lot when we were younger.' She loves Mae West films and the deep-fried food of her mother's Southern homeland, and likes reading rock biographies. At the moment it is the Patti Smith memoir Just Kids, which details the New York punk's doomed friendship with the artist Robert Mapplethorpe. 'I love Patti Smith, she was incredible. But I haven't got to the end of the book yet because it keeps getting sadder and sadder and I keep having to stop because I can't take it any more.'

Most of Georgia May's creative heroes, like Patti Smith, like Jimi Hendrix, like her own mother, started out as kids from the wrong side of the tracks who had to overcome huge obstacles to realise their potential. It will be a challenge for Georgia May, with all her advantages, to truly fulfil her own artistic ambitions. So perhaps she does need that anger, displayed so fleetingly yet so forcefully.