Irene Sinclair’s serene, smiling image gazes from billboards, advertising hoardings, magazines, buses and tube walls across the USA and Europe. She has also been the subject of magazine and newspaper articles throughout the world, and recently she has been featured on 30-metre-high adverts in Times Square, Wall Street and on an external wall of Milan Cathedral (see picture, next page).

However, this particular model is not your average, spoilt-brat catwalk queen and could not be more different from the likes of Jodie Kidd or Kate Moss. She is, in fact, a great-grandmother and a 96-year-old woman, who remains both astonished and delighted by her sudden, unexpected global celebrity.

Irene (known to her friends as Renee) is an animated, cheerful and vivacious woman who looks at least twenty years younger than her age. She sits, straight-backed, in her chair and tells me about her experiences. She was born in Guyana in 1908, taught history (‘the Elizabethan period was my speciality’) in her native country and arrived in Hornsey in 1957 to help look after her daughter’s young children. She moved to Stoke Newington on her retirement in 1971 and settled in Filey Road and then Yorkshire Close. ‘Stoke Newington was so dull and uninteresting then. I didn’t like it at all.’ How do you feel about it now? ‘Oh, it’s a different place. I’m very happy here. Church Street is like a little Paris.’

On to Renee’s big adventure. Dove soap – part of Unilever – had dreamt up an advertising campaign designed to challenge stereotyped versions of female beauty. A casting director arrived at Renee’s sheltered accommodation in Yoakley Road looking for a suitable woman, between 70 and 80 years old, to illustrate old age.

When informed by the block’s manager Andy about Renee, she knocked at her door and, confused by Renee’s apparent youth, asked her if Renee’s mother was in the flat.
One thing led to another and she was soon in the studio of top photographer Rankin – cofounder of Dazed and Confused and snapper of the Queen – who spent four hours and took six hundred pictures to find the perfect image for the ad.

The ad launch was held in September last year in New York, and Renee was selected as the only British model out of the seven in the campaign to attend. Naturally, she was flown over first class by American Airlines, accompanied by a Dove representative, and booked into a suite at the $500 per night Lee Parker Meridien Hotel in Manhattan. She spent four days enjoying photo shoots, television and radio interviews and champagne dinners, and revelling in her sudden change of circumstance. ‘It was marvellous. I never felt beautiful in my life but I feel I am now.

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