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Jade Jagger: ‘If you can’t accept your changing body, you’re deluded’

Jade Jagger - W Ibiza
Jade Jagger - W Ibiza

For most of us during lockdown, the only decision we had to make when getting dressed was which pair of tracksuit bottoms to put on.

To a certain extent, Jade Jagger was the same. “I love to be comfortable,” she tells me over lunch at Scott’s in Mayfair. “I wear a lot of tracksuit bottoms, [but] I don't think that necessarily means that we have to look too messy.”

She couldn’t look further from this image sitting across from me. The daughter of Mick and Bianca Jagger, now 49, looks as glamorous as ever in a printed Vivienne Westwood shirt-dress and platform wedge sandals, her neck, wrists and fingers stacked with jewellery of her own design, among them a solid gold ring carved with the face of a made-up Aztec god, a white gold sapphire and diamond cocktail ring and a neon orange cotton bracelet strung with beads.

It is a grown-up take on the boho image we’ve come to expect from Jagger – a look that predates Sienna Miller and Kate Moss and the Nineties Primrose Hill set whose coin belts and printed maxidresses were copied by H&M and Topshop so that a whole generation of young women were able to replicate their style.

Jagger was living the true bohemian dream back then, having relocated to Ibiza with her two young daughters, Assisi (now 29) and Amba (25), from her relationship with sixth form sweetheart, artist Piers Jackson. She is also mother to Ray, seven, with art director Adrian Fillary, from whom she is recently believed to have split after nearly a decade of marriage.

“I was looking for a Utopia, somewhere to start my adult life with my children,” she says of the move to the White Isle. “I was looking around Spain, Portugal, France even, and I was inspired by some friends of mine who were a bit more grown-up to come to Ibiza.

“They felt that it was the right place for me, where I would find the hippie side of me and the side of me that enjoyed more popular culture. And so in the late 1990s, I showed up there with a sausage bag and my kids, and I ended up in a beautiful place in the Old Town. And I didn't look back until about 20 years later when I decided that it was time to move on.”

It is her life on the Balearic island that has inspired her latest project, a collaboration with W Ibiza on a luxury cocktail set comprising a solid silver hand-carved shaker and two crystal glasses in a leather case. She designed every element, from the palm tree motifs in the crystal and on the shaker, to the marbled lining of the case, in three vibrant colourways.

It’s a perfect product for Jagger to have designed, really. She loves food, entertaining and travel, and it’s quite easy to imagine her whipping up a couple of cocktails (her go-to is a dirty martini with vodka) for unexpected guests - wherever she happens to be in the world.

Jagger last year with her daughter Assisi, granddaughters Ezra (now six) and Romy (now two), and her son Ray (now seven)

So how did lockdown affect a woman who usually lives life to the full? I ask if she found it hard to be grounded.

“Hey, I wasn't that grounded,” she replies. “I'm too much of a gypsy. I understand how to duck and dive out of everything - I've been surfing this world for a long time and I could smell the sense of panic, so I rushed to India to grab stones to make jewellery as quick as I could with my son under my arm, then I legged it to the other side of the world to hide underneath a rock in the Caribbean. But that's how I know how to live. And I guess that's a lucky thing.”

The pandemic did slow her though, and while many of us were feeling less inspired, it had a positive effect on her style. “It gave me a chance to breathe,” she admits. “Lockdown got me back into clothes. Instead of having no time in my life to dress up, I had more time to try things on, see what fitted, see what I could accept myself in. Try a different belt on. Even get back into all my heels. I found myself again a little bit because I wasn't in such a rush. And I found a bit more love for myself. And yeah, HRT perhaps made me happier.”

She still keeps the clothes she wore 20 years ago, even though she knows she’ll probably never wear them again. “They're so high up that I don't get to look at them and try them on,” she says. “And when I do, I know that I need a good few more centimetres to get my ribs back in.” Not that she plans to even try.

“I think that I always knew that my body was going to change. If you don't accept it, you're deluded. To expect to lose four sizes is unreasonable. And to expect to stay there after having three kids and three grandchildren is stupid when you can just look beautiful in something that fits you properly.”

Jagger is known as ‘Naughty Nana’ to those grandchildren (Assisi is mother to daughters Ezra, six, and Romy, two; Amba is mother to River, who turns two next month). “I hope that I am the best combination of strict and free,” she says. “There are so many children and siblings around me that my tolerance isn't as high as it should be. I'm the one trying to make them all go to bed early.”

Jade Jagger, pictured, wearing a printed floral dress with statement jewellery; Jagger at the races - Getty Images
Jade Jagger, pictured, wearing a printed floral dress with statement jewellery; Jagger at the races - Getty Images

She’s clearly besotted with them though. She took them to Alex James’ Big Feastival in the Cotswolds a couple of weeks ago, and speaks with such pride about how Romy climbed all the way to the top of the helter-skelter with her without complaining. “I suppose I am that grandma that wants to spoil them too,” she admits.

Though Jagger creates luxury goods for a living, it’s these kinds of moments that are her luxuries in life. “Yes, it might be bad to have your son on your lap watching some crappy TV show whilst you're working, but isn't that a luxury to be able to enjoy both those things at the same time?” she asks.

“Luxury for me is my emerald green cashmere knit that's moth-eaten but still smells of my family. Luxury is being able to cook the best tomato sauce out of some tomatoes that I thought were ready for the bin, and everybody really loving it.”

And perhaps it’s a perfectly, crisp, cold, dirty martini, too. Made at home in a cocktail shaker that itself is a work of art. “It has to be the first drink of the night,” Jagger says. “Because it just hits you in that spot there.” It’s hard to argue with that.

The limited edition luxury cocktail set by Jade Jagger and W Ibiza is available to purchase now, for more information visit wibiza.com/jadejagger