A briefs encounter with David Gandy

Photograph Suki Dhanda

David Gandy, a powerfully handsome man, perches on his handsome kitchen table in his handsome home on the edge of Richmond Park, arguably London’s most handsome neighbourhood. Classical music wafts from invisible speakers; the minimalist aesthetic is rounded off by large vases of hydrangea and roses (all white) and high-end monochrome photography on the walls. He wears a navy polo-neck and is barefoot. Something ineffable happens when the Observer’s photographer, Suki, turns her lens on Gandy. The 45-year-old model and entrepreneur’s cheekbones become more severely angular and those blue eyes, which have flogged us everything from posh aftershave to M&S loungewear and vitamin supplements to vanity units, seem to bore through you more intensely.

“You don’t have to even try,” says Suki, stepping away from the camera. “It’s the eyes. I just have to press a button.”

Suki asks Gandy why we’re here today, what he’s promoting. He patiently soft-pitches his clothing brand, David Gandy Wellwear, launched four years ago. The company’s latest release – perhaps overdue for a man best known for being photographed in his underpants – is the Ultimate Trunk. (Making this interview, quite literally, a Briefs Encounter.) Suki asks, somehow not sounding pervy, if we shouldn’t perhaps photograph him in those then? “No one needs to see that on a Wednesday morning,” Gandy replies.

Some of you may feel differently, in which case the internet is very much your friend. There you will be directed to iconic images for Dolce & Gabbana’s Light Blue fragrance, shot by Mario Testino, which exploded Gandy from unknown Essex boy to male supermodel, an (almost) unprecedented concept in 2007. The shoot, which showed him, then in his mid-20s, lounging crotch-forward on a boat in the Med, is also credited with starting an industry-wide shift from skinny, androgynous models to more muscular, classical-looking specimens. Then, if you want to get up-to-date, there are the stripped-down snaps of Gandy from his brand’s new campaign, which the Daily Mail described as “jaw-dropping”.

Gandy – who is an assiduous host: making tea, generally letting us nose around his spectacular pile – seems nonplussed by the attention that his mid-40s physique is generating. “There’s a surprise that still, after 20 years of me doing this, people are talking about, ‘How did you get in shape?’” he says. “For Dolce, the first one, I don’t even think I was in great shape. If I look, I can really criticise it.” (Review the photographs yourself, but he doesn’t immediately appear like a man enjoying too many chocolate digestives.)

The new photos are the result of hard work, sure, but not an outlandish regime. Gandy doesn’t have a personal trainer, typically working-out for up to an hour four nights a week in his well-stocked home gym after he and his wife Stephanie, a barrister, have put their children (Matilda, six, and three-year-old Tabitha) to bed. He never does cardio, unless you count walking Dora the rescue dog. He avoids processed food and beer, but otherwise insists that his diet and drinking habits are unremarkable, and a well-stocked kitchen cubbyhole wine cave backs up his claim.

That said, as the day of an underwear shoot looms, Gandy is well aware that he has a reputation to uphold. A month or two before, he ups his weight training to six days a week and increases his protein intake, because he’s burning so many calories. Then 48 hours before, taking cues from the bodybuilder playbook, he depletes his body of sodium (salt causes the body to retain water) and dehydrates himself for a day, while also carb-loading to stop his muscles “deflating”. Gandy sees my eyebrows shoot up: “There’s a slight art to it,” he says. “I’ve tried it, it works.”

So, in short: no, Suki, David Gandy will not be posing in his trolleys this morning.

Name a male model. Almost certainly the first you will alight on is Gandy. (Perhaps there would be some nominations for 1990s star Tyson Beckford or Jamie Dornan or Djimon Hounsou, but those last two achieved more renown as actors.) Gandy has worked tirelessly for 25 years to make sure that is the case, notably through a decade-plus, basically monogamous relationship with Dolce & Gabbana. Off-duty, he is a men’s magazine fantasy brought to life: the man who wears Savile Row suits with a Jaeger-LeCoultre watch and drives a 1965 Porsche 356 (all of which he does).

“In essence, it’s about branding,” he says. “Everyone knows the image of the guy in the white pants: let’s put a name to that person. If you said Christy, Naomi, Kate, Cindy, you don’t even need to say their surnames to know who they are. I was never to that level, but it was my ambition to get to that level.” And, to be fair, it was made trickier by the fact that there was a pretty famous Gandhi out there already.

Gandy’s ascent to supermodel status – and a reputed, according to the Mail again, £15m fortune – was not one anyone would have predicted. He grew up in Billericay to parents Brenda and Chris, who worked in property, travel and freight. Did anyone notice that Gandy was ridiculously good-looking? “No one ever mentioned it,” he replies. “And growing up in Essex, I’m not even sure if it was an idea that you even could become a model.”

There was also the notion, Gandy believes, that the job was a bit shameful – not masculine. Or that it was a faintly ludicrous profession, a notion which had extra currency after the release of Zoolander in 2001. “A lot of guys who were the big names back then, none of them particularly admitted to being a model,” he says. “They would say they were in advertising. I’ve always been very proud to say it.”

Add to that, there was the assumption that models were thick, a stereotype Gandy has had to battle, especially since he repositioned himself as an entrepreneur – first with M&S on the lucrative David Gandy for Autograph brand from 2014 to 2019, and now Wellwear. “People automatically presume you are not particularly intelligent, or you don’t actually do anything,” he says, with a wry smile. “And when you go into [meetings with] brands, I can see it in people’s faces: ‘Why are we listening to this guy from the photographs, looking at us in white pants?’”

Luck played a part in Gandy’s story: his University of Gloucestershire flatmate entered him into a modelling competition on Richard and Judy’s This Morning when he was 21, the prize a contract with Select Model Management. But the reason Gandy has survived and endured in a notoriously cut-throat industry is, he thinks, mainly down to hard graft. “Whether other models had the dedication to do that, I don’t know,” he says. “And that’s not being big-headed; we’re not talking about a five-year space. We’re talking 25 years. You have to have a story. You have to diversify.”

The emergence and success of someone like him – a male model, first and foremost, rather than an influencer, or even a model-turned-actor – is unlikely ever to be repeated. If you look at the men who front ads for fragrances now, they are all famous in other fields: Timothée Chalamet (Chanel), Chris Hemsworth (Boss), Jake Gyllenhaal (Prada). “I feel a little bit sorry for [young] models, because they’re expected to put their whole life on social media,” says Gandy. “I’m glad I didn’t have to do any of that. And I wouldn’t have done it. I still don’t.”

Did Gandy ever think about a pivot to acting? There’s a rumour (true, apparently) that he was sent the script for Fifty Shades of Grey, for the role eventually taken by Dornan. (According to some reports he was offered the part, as well as gigs on 300: Rise of an Empire and Hercules. He would also occasionally appear on the scattergun lists of potential new James Bonds.) “No. Didn’t consider it,” he says of Fifty Shades, and I think I believe him. “I’m already in a competitive industry… I didn’t have the drive and the fight and the perseverance to go to castings and get rejected again. It might have been laziness but I got to a certain point in the fashion industry where I didn’t have to cast. And I was more in control. I didn’t want to stop that.”

It’s time for Gandy to get back to his handsome life, so we finish on the subject of ageing; it comes for us all, but not everyone is constantly bombarded by photographs of themselves in peak physical condition. Does it bother him? “It seems to bother everyone else,” he replies. “But it really doesn’t. Or… in a normal way, like every other man who looks in the mirror some days and goes, ‘Good god, you didn’t get any sleep last night,’ or you’ve had a very, very busy week and you’re not looking your best. And sometimes you can think that you are looking OK.”

Gandy’s signature achievement, hard to believe, is not his enduring six-pack (eight-pack?) (or eight-pack?) at the age of 45. It is his longevity and ability to reinvent himself. Fashions change: what’s popular at one time has to be spun, contorted, turned on its head. But somehow he has defied that logic, with a sweeping sex-appeal that has become an enduring standard for male attractiveness.

In most fields, with his achievements, you would have to call Gandy a pioneer or an icon. But because there’s still an idea that his generation of male models were a bit silly, few people ever actually do.

The Ultimate Trunk is now available at davidgandywellwear.com