The urban swan

Picture Estelle in the video for American Boy, her No 1 hit from April 2008.

And while she may ostensibly be just another in a string of R&B ingénues to grace the charts with her aerated paean to Stateside masculinity – a West London girl gone global, jamming with Kanye West – she might also just be something new altogether: the first hip-hop swan princess.

Today, Estelle is wearing a grey jumper with asymmetric zips that looks very much like European avant-garde designer Martin Margiela. It turns out to be Alexander Wang, teamed with second-skin indigo jeans, knee boots and a Louis Vuitton headscarf.

While Hepburn may seem like something of a hackneyed reference point, with everyone from Coleen to Posh citing her as their stylistic exemplar, the miscegenation of Hepburn’s look being adopted by an urban girl does offer a whole new aesthetic. “In Funny Face she was all in black for the majority of the film, and she was an underground hipster kind of a girl,” muses Estelle. “She was able to morph, she was able to go in any direction and still set a trend. Grace Jones was a piece of frigging art, she was a mannequin, she went with the androgynous thing, she took it and went as far as she could go with it; that’s fearless, that’s crazy, that’s not been done and I admire that.”

So, if everyone else is wearing PVC leggings or Ugg boots or any of the other unthinking trends that pollute our sartorial cosmos, does she buy into them? “No. I’d do it when it had finished or I’d do it way before they would do it.”

As you’d expect of a new-school swan, she’s a resolute classicist when it comes to labels. Her favourites are Fendi, Chanel and YSL. “Mr Lagerfeld, we love you. I’d love to meet him,” she enthuses. “I also like Jean-Pierre Braganza. He is great.”

But it’s shoes she reserves her most intense passion for. “I’m a shoe freak – the first thing I go for is a shoe. I’ve got 400 or 500 pairs. I go in for new shoe designers, like Charlotte Olympia. I love Nicholas Kirkwood; I’ve been standing in his shoes for two years. Shoes are like an artwork – they’re investments as well, and they always fit. For regular days, I’m all about the flats. I’m not into people who always run around in dumb high heels. The higher the better on stage, the higher the better when you’re going to a party and the higher the better when you wanna feel sexy.”