Bliss magazine USA × October 01, 2007

The sweet life

Gwen tells us what gets her grinning

She might have found fame with her band and as a solo singer, but she’s played with a multitude of styles and looks that she’s almost as famous for. And that’s the really surprising thing about Gwen in the flesh – when you look at her up close, she doesn’t look like any of her guises. Sure, the bright lips, arched eyebrows and platinum locks are there, but somehow there’s another Gwen underneath. One who looks a lot softer and sweeter than her high fashion image might suggest.

Today, she’s tired because she’s slap bang in the middle of a world tour, but that doesn’t seem to affect her enthusiasm. “It’s because she has baby Kingston with her,” says a source who works closely with her whenever she’s in London. “Having him around makes her happy.”

She’s mega busy at the moment, too – besides the world tour, she’s styling the latest ranges for L.A.M.B and Harajuku Lovers (all the harder because her designer has just quit to go solo), working on her fragrance launch, writing new material for her band No Doubt AND fitting in time to be a wife and mum. But she’s happy – and here’s how she keeps smiling…

Gwen’s get grinning guide

1. “I try to stay normal.”
   With all her fame and money, it would be easy for Gwen to hide away from the attention from fans and the Press, but that doesn’t appeal to her. “We live in Los Feliz in California, and walk around everywhere with Kingston,” she says. “I want him to grow up as normal as possible. I don’t want him to hae a ’studio tan’ from not getting out for walks and staying in all the time. Or only being in his own backyard most of the time.”
2. “I’m really passionate about all the things I do.”
   “I have stylists who bring in things for me that just make me say, ‘Ah I am dying to wear that!’ I still get very excited about what I’m going to wear every day and what the baby is going to wear,” says Gwen. And this passion shows in both her music and her style. “It’s because both are so closely linked,” her London pal says, speaking exclusively to Bliss. “A lot of the L.A.M.B collection is influenced by music and street culture, so it works. Gwen doesn’t do either job half-heartedly. She works on every part of the design of her clothes collection with her small team. And she writes and works on the music production and is involved with video treatments too.”
3. “Rubbish telly can cheer me up.”
   “I am one of those Discovery Health Channel junkies who loves to watch those plastic surgery operations,” Gwen says of her guilty pleasure. “Other people in the room tend to be grossed out – I can watch people get cut open without squinting. I like to see the before and after. I’m personally not ready for anything being done to myself yet, though – people take going under the knife a little too casually in Hollywood it is a major surgery, after all.”
4. “I like to take on new challenges.”
   With everything that’s going on in her life, it would be understandable if Gwen just wanted to put her feet up for a bit – but she’s still doing new things, like her fragrance launch. “I can tell you that it smells good,” she says. “I doesn’t smell like burnt bacon!”
5. “Family is everything to me”
   “I absolutely want to have more kids! I love being a mother, it’s hard work but it’s the most fun you can have, too. And Gavin is such a loving dad and romantic husband. I’ve been really lucky! It totally changes your life, just like they say – whether your husband is a rock star or not!”
6. “Having a rock star husband does help!”
   “You know, our relationship has hills and valleys like any other, but he can relate to what I go through and with how the music business is,” Gwen says. “It can be so frustrating at times. You and your record company might not see eye to eye on new material or they might want to put an album out at a different time that you want to.”
7. “I work hard to get through the tough stuff”
   Gwen admits that there have been three really low points in her life – when she broke up with Tony Kanal, her No Doubt bandmate, when she and Gavin took a break from each other in 1999 and then when she found out that Gavin was Daisy Lowe’s dad. “You can tell by my style that I was searching so hard,” she says of the rough patch in 1999. “I was 29, and I was like, f*** it, I’m going to dye my hair pink.” And I had braces, the one thing I bought when I got rich.” And that’s the impression that Gwen gives. She doesn’t seem to wear her heart on her sleeve and tell the world all about her personal problems. She just works through them in her own unique way.
8. “I made the choice to work hard and to look good”
   “I love food, but I also love clothes,” says Gwen of her great dilemma. “I have a tendancy to be a little chunky. I am weak for cookies and pizza, but I let myself have a little here and there. I honestly have been on a diet since I was 10! I try to use the term ‘lifestyle eating’ now instead of diet, because I hate the whole concept, which I think suggests deprivation.”
9. “Writing helps me work out my head”
   “Writing the third album was a really hard time for me,” she says now. “I thought, I goota become a great writer, I gotta live up to who I want to be. I really define myself as a songwriter, it’s torture, but it’s magic when it happens.”
10. “I don’t care what others think about me”
    “I have a bit of whimsical side and am rather child-like in some ways. I’ve been criticised as being ‘too old’ to wear something and I don’t care. I still wear high-top sneakers, which I wore in high school and I will do the bare midriff thing as long as it doesn’t look too blubbery around the middle as I get older!”

TAGS: Gavin Rossdale, Gwen Stefani, Kingston, L Fragrance, Return of Saturn