How Iris Law is stepping out of dad Jude's shadow

It’s a cold, bright morning and model Iris Law is sitting on a sofa in a strip-lit basement. The incongruity is akin to spotting a rare bird perched in a Tesco beer aisle, although she is bejewelled rather than feathered. Her fingers are stacked with rings including a diamond one from her godmother, Kate Moss. Even her front teeth, perfectly protrusive with a slight gap inherited from her mother, actor-turned-fashion designer Sadie Frost, are studded.

‘They’re nail gems,’ she says, tapping her incisors. ‘I stuck them on with nail glue two weeks ago.’ Despite being a face of Burberry Beauty since 2017, Law is not an obvious luxury pony. One button of her black blazer (which she borrowed from her elder brother, Rafferty) is broken, her Beatles vintage T-shirt is from Camden Market and she’s wearing a friend’s childhood bracelet. ‘He wore it when he was three… the [personally] sacred is luxurious,’ she says, with the kind of north London accent one acquires growing up in a famous bohemian family, once at the epicentre of the Primrose Hill set.

Quietly spoken, Law seems shy at first but there are waves of enthusiasm for the extracurricular activities she fits in around school and modelling commitments: fashion design, drawing and photography. She often draws portraits, with Rafferty among her subjects. Both her mother’s house in Primrose Hill and her father’s in Highgate, between which she has lived since she was three, are filled with artworks. ‘My parents have a lot of [taxidermist] Polly Morgans. My favourite one at my dad’s is a ship with butterflies for sails. He also has a human skull from when he did Hamlet [in 2009]. Whenever I have anyone new to the house I say, “Come and look at the skull, hold it.”’

Eighteen-year-old Law is currently studying for her A levels — philosophy, English literature and art. ‘My dad encouraged me to do philosophy. I definitely get a love of learning from him.’ She has a sentimentality for the past not usually attributed to Generation Z. ‘There’s so much more sacredness to the things that people used to do,’ she says wistfully. ‘I take a lot of photographs. Film is so precious because it’s such a contrast to the disposability of the phone.’ She handwrites letters to her friends. ‘I have a diary and if someone sent me a nice text, I used to transcribe it. It’s so throwaway otherwise. I’ve filled up four shoe boxes with notes, pictures, a wristband [from a concert] or a napkin from a restaurant.’ She seems deeply nostalgic about the pre-digital past, not least the turn of the millennium when her actor parents were the poster couple for Cool Britannia along with their neighbours in north London — Moss, the face of British fashion, and the Gallagher brothers, of Britpop. ‘My favourite photo of my mum and dad is at the premiere of Wilde [in 1997]. My mum is in a dark red dress and she has red [jewels] around her collarbone and my dad’s in a white suit.’ That was three years after her parents met on the set of 1994’s Shopping. ‘I have a picture of that film on my screensaver. They had the best outfits… I would wear everything that my mum wore back then.’

Law is leaning towards fashion and jewellery design as a career. ‘This summer I went to my house in France and bought tons of children’s vests from the Co-op. I turned them into a skirt and a top by cutting them a certain way so that you can still see they are vests. I made natural dyes out of things like beetroot and tie-dyed some of the vests, too.’ She is interested in sustainable fashion — her hero is designer Matthew Williams. The zip-up bovver boots she wears today are by his label Alyx, one of her favourite brands. ‘I haven’t not worn these boots in London since the beginning of summer. So throughout all the heat, heat, heat, I wore them.’ Law was chided by her teachers for dressing unconventionally when she was younger: wearing red Dr Martens and pyjama bottoms to school.

Like Rafferty and her younger brother, Rudy, now 16, Law was born at a time when the lives of Primrose Hill’s famous inhabitants were a central focus of the tabloids. But, she says, she wasn’t initially aware of living life in the spotlight. ‘I remember going to a Vivienne Westwood show with my mum when I was 10 but I wasn’t doing things like that all the time. We were just going to school or having playdates. We definitely weren’t put in the public eye to the extent that we became used to it.’ Press attention reached fever pitch when her parents split in 2003 and her father began dating Sienna Miller. Now that she is 18, Law can put her parents’ lives in context, realising how youthful they were when they had children. ‘My dad was really young. He’d had all his kids [with Frost] by 30. Mum, too. She also had a baby face. I can never tell [her age] in pictures, I’ll say, “What, you had three kids by that age?” She looks 17.’ Law’s own memories of that time are of eating snacks on Primrose Hill. ‘My parents weren’t rock ’n’ roll when I was growing up, they were just my parents,’ she insists. ‘Everyone’s parents were rock ’n’ roll when they were young. That’s not a crazy thing.’

If her father has been repeatedly burned by press intrusiveness — he was a victim of the phone hacking scandal and his fathering of two more children with Samantha Burke in 2009 and Catherine Harding in 2015 was closely reported on — it does not seem to have negatively coloured his daughter’s view of celebrity. ‘I’m not in the position to know what it was like [to have experienced fame] as overwhelming as my dad experienced,’ she says carefully. ‘But I’m not pressing for [fame] and I’m also not pressing against it.’ Both her parents are now in steady relationships — Law with psychologist Phillipa Coan and Frost with businessman Darren Strowger — and Law professes herself keen to settle down young (she is currently single). ‘I want to have all my kids by 30,’ she declares. But she has decided against marriage, favouring instead the idea of a life partner celebrated by ‘a love party’. ‘I don’t want to be in a white dress, I want to be in a suit. I don’t understand why everyone should have the same wedding. You should personalise it.’

In the meantime before any of that, she wants to go travelling with her dad. ‘I went to Bolivia with him [when I was young] and I want to go back. He’ll see something on the street and say, “What’s that?” And then you have to stop and look at it, then go and find a book about it.’ She also wants to learn salsa dancing, go to New Orleans, Japan, Venice, and live in Rome. When she returns, the world will no doubt be waiting for her.