Most mornings start the same way. Joe and I walk to ‘our’ beach at the end of the road around 6am with six or seven of our dogs - sometimes the whole pack of ten, if everyone’s feeling cooperative.
The light at that hour is something I never get tired of and for three or four kilometers we just walk with the dogs playing happily, running and chasing one another through the waves until it’s time to head home.
I’m Gail Elliott. I’ve been in fashion for over thirty-five years — modelling since I was seventeen, walking runways from Paris to Milan to New York, and designing since 2003 when I started Little Joe Woman with six silk slip dresses because of a feeling that something was missing from my own wardrobe. And the thing I keep coming back to, when anyone asks what this stage of life feels like, is that it feels like the most assured one.
Gail and Yasmin — backstage, Paris
Amber, Yasmin and Gail — Chanel show
Not assured in the sense that I have all the answers. But there’s a clarity that comes with living past the point where you’re trying to prove anything. I did my twenty-plus years on the runway — four cities in a day sometimes, the Concorde, the magazine covers and fashion page shoots for every designer and with every photographer you can name. I loved it. I’m proud of it. And I reference it the way you’d reference a brilliant trip you took — fondly, specifically, without needing to go back.
A selection of Gail’s magazine covers
What I have now is different and, I think, better. Pilates twice a week because I love it. The morning walk with Joe and the dogs because it’s the best part of the day. I pay attention to what I eat — not rules, not a programme, just an awareness of how I want to feel. I stopped drinking about five years ago, not for any dramatic reason — my life just quietly moved in a different direction, and I realised it suited me.
The friendships are the thing I treasure most. Yassy, Cindy, Helena, Turly, my sister — we were bridesmaids at some of each other’s weddings, and thirty-five years later we’re still calling, still visiting, still showing up. That kind of continuity is rare and I never take it for granted. When Cindy came to celebrate my birthday in Bali a couple of years ago, we sat together and it was exactly the same as it’s always been. Time does that to the real ones — it doesn’t change them, it just confirms them.
Christy Turlington and Gail
Gail and Cindy Crawford
I wear my mother’s Indian gold bangles every day. I’ve barely taken them off. They’re the thread through every chapter — modelling, building the brand, moving to Bali, sitting here now writing this. Some things just travel with you.
And I think the brand has been on that same journey. When I started LJW all those years ago with my husband Joe Coffey as CEO, I was filling a gap I could feel — pieces that moved with a woman’s life, day to evening, travel to home, one chapter to the next. Twenty-three years later I feel very proud that we still have our brand in an industry where fashion brands come and go.
I’m so grateful to work with someone I trust and love being around, who I can make decisions with and who has the business sense to always be taking us to the next level.
Joe Coffey and Gail
The clothes have the same quality I do: considered, real, unhurried. The details are right because we’ve had the time to get them right. I didn’t plan that. It just happened, the same way life does when you stop forcing it.
Cindy Crawford
If you’re reading this and you’re in this chapter too — or approaching it, or well into it — I want you to know something. It’s good here. Not perfect, not effortless, but deeply good. You know who you are. You know what you love. You know who matters. And that’s more than enough.
Love Gail xx
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