Trinny Woodall is wearing all white – white suit, white waistcoat, white mesh platforms – and not just any old white, but white-white, as she calls it in her Instagram chats, the brightest, bleachiest white on the spectrum. She is scoffing a flaky croissant, which arrived with a square of soft yellow butter and a huge dollop of red-red jam. (“Thank you, Jonathan,” to the assistant; to me, “You sure you won’t have a bit?”) I watch as she alternates croissant and sloping bowl of coffee to her lips, unfazed by the danger to her suit. She’s talking in galloping vowels about a crash she had days earlier, a three-car collision on the corner of the street where she stayed in LA. Bruising makes it hard to sit for too long. She shifts her bottom, then heaves herself to stand and now is stamping round the cafe like a stabled thoroughbred. “My body is out of sync,” she says, “my knee and my ankle. I am bruised everywhere.”
On her left wrist is a white wound dressing of the hospital sort, but she flaps off my concern. There’s a lot of old school don’t-make-a-fuss about Woodall, who is 59. She says “darling” a lot, and “fuck”. Of the accident, I am imagining concertina-bonnets and wailing sirens; Woodall emerging through engine smoke in something from Zara, a neon suit, perhaps, or Alaïa (high street or high end: mid-range is “a waste of money”), keen to keep to the schedule because this trip to LA was after all mostly business. Beside her daughter Lyla, 19, work is Woodall’s primary and unrelenting preoccupation.
