Iris Lasnet is a model, but she is first and foremost a farmer – and often a shepherdess. Every lambing season since the age of 12, she’s donned wellies and overalls to deliver about 800 lambs. Today, though, she is wearing new-season Chanel on set for Vogue.
The world took note of the fresh-faced beauty with hip-tickling hair when she walked in Burberry’s autumn/winter 2025 show, but insiders knew her name long before her runway debut. As the youngest daughter of the late model Stella Tennant and photographer David Lasnet, fashion, like farming, has always been a part of Iris’s world. Despite having a singular style aged 21 – she says friends describe her look as “half streetwear, half clean girl, with a little bit of gothic dropped in” – she was initially on the fence about swapping country life for the catwalk. Casting director Anita Bitton recalls having to reschedule their first meeting around her “extracurricular interests”, yet persevered out of pure intrigue – “Iris is far from typical. She embodies a beauty that feels timeless, androgynous and distinctly modern” – and tempted her into the fold. “I didn’t know if the chance would come up again, so I took it,” says Iris.
School comes first though. Iris spends her time bombing down the motorway (listening to a heady mix of Slowthai and Tate McRae) to Gloucestershire’s Royal Agricultural University, then back home to Berwickshire – where she has lived with her aunt and uncle since her mother’s death at age 50 in 2020 – to ride her pony, Trigger. (Her father, now an osteopath, lives abroad, but Iris stayed put to farm.) “I get back and say [to Trigger], ‘Mum’s home!’ and I always get a little whinny,” says Iris, her eyes lighting up as she describes packing a picnic and roaming for hours on her chestnut Irish skewbald. “My world revolves around him.”
Mucking out and mending hedgerows might be Iris’s idea of heaven, but the college syllabus came as a real shock. “I couldn’t have been more blind,” she says of her new life, which is more plant science, drone control and tractor safety protocol than scampering between meadows, though she does occasionally find time to clock off for a Guinness. Her background is blue-blooded – her grandmother is Lady Emma Cavendish, daughter of the 11th Duke of Devonshire and his wife Deborah “Debo” Devonshire, and her grandfather is Tobias William Tennant, whose older brother Colin Tennant, the 3rd Baron Glenconner, once owned the Caribbean island of Mustique – yet Iris has a strong work ethic (“If you stay on a farm, you work on the farm”) that is also proving helpful for those long days on set modelling.
Plus, snaps of hours-old lambs are an excellent icebreaker, as photographers Sean & Seng can attest: “Iris is the sweetest and most charming. We loved hearing her tractor and lambing stories, and kept trying to picture this gorgeous girl with Rapunzel-like hair out in the fields at 4am.” When I ask her how she dealt with the backstage scrum of London Fashion Week, Iris shrugs: “It’s not that hectic. I find it pretty chill.” Indeed when Burberry creative director Daniel Lee checked in on any pre-debut jitters, she charmed him with stories of the joy of watching calves sunbathe back home. “Casting Iris brings a sense of continuity with her mother’s history with the brand, which felt meaningful,” says Lee, praising her “aristocratic grace that feels entirely natural”.
Day to day, it’s steel-cap boots, vintage men’s Levi’s and basics pilfered from the wardrobes of her siblings – Cecily, Jasmine and Marcel – for 5ft 11in Iris, who typically scrapes her trademark mermaid locks into a bun with a crocodile clip (should you ever cross paths, ask her for a tutorial). “All my clothes do two jobs,” she adds. “If I need to go and check the cows, I’m not getting changed.”
While her personal wishlist is more likely to feature an actual saddle than Dior’s, Iris is pretty chuffed with a quilted Burberry jacket she scored on Vestiaire Collective, and she’s recently started wearing an Alexander McQueen skull scarf, a gift from a friend of her mother’s. She has Stella herself to thank for her Elizabeth Arden habit (“You can’t get in a Tennant family car without seeing the dregs of an Eight Hour lip balm”) and penchant for knitting before bed – the punk-spirited matriarch taught all of her children how. When asked who she looks up to, Iris’s reply is simple: “Mama.”
Iris’s gung-ho habit of slinging her overalls into the boot and driving from one rugged landscape to another is certainly enough to remind you of Stella, who got her big break in Vogue’s December 1993 “London Girls” shoot, styled by Isabella Blow and shot by Steven Meisel. Arriving on a sleeper train from Scotland, where she had been making an art piece using wool from her family’s sheep, Tennant’s beauty was “in her eyes”, Blow said. “She was absolutely wild, like a wild bird, a tomboy who’d never worn a dress.” To her costar, Plum Sykes, Stella was “a really cool, beautiful country turnip”.
As conversation drifts towards uni netball and wildflower schemes, rather than whose footsteps she is following in, the poignancy of the shoot is not lost on the crew. Stylist Kate Phelan, Stella’s frequent collaborator, says it’s clear that Iris, like her mother, won’t be defined by her modelling. “Stella’s special quality was that all of her was interesting – not just her face,” says Phelan. “Modelling, for Iris, has come as an extra bonus, but she’s her own person.”
“I kind of want to wait and see how everything goes – to keep it open and fun,” Iris muses of her future in fashion, one eye already on the road back to Gloucestershire.
Cover look: cashmere/silk sweater, £6,950. Leather jeans, £7,900. Both Loewe. Jewellery (throughout), Iris's own. Hair: Shon Hyungsun Ju. Make-up: Petros Petrohilos. Nails: Charly Avenell. Set design: Alice Andrews. Production: JN Production.