//Everyone, and I mean, EVERYONE, from the cleaning lady to the Presidents and Kings love to say how tough life was when they were young, how they grew up out of poverty and their oh-so-humble background. Give me a break man!
Ethel Fong is living the good life
Singapore's first Ford model was the face of Armani, married her Prince Charming with castle included, and now helps poor kids get an education. -ST
Wong Kim Hoh
Tue, Dec 25, 2012
The Straits Times
Two formally suited businessmen stop talking and start staring as she strides confidently across the lift lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel in Orchard Boulevard.
Her full lips, smoky eyes and glossy long tresses are striking. So is her slender 1.8m frame, clothed in a tasteful ensemble of champagne- coloured Ralph Lauren silk blouse, black Balenciaga pantsuit and pointy toe Mary Janes from Manolo Blahnik.
In the 1980s, Ethel Fong turned heads as one of the rare Asian models who worked the runways of Paris, London, New York and Milan, graced the pages of Italian Vogue and W magazines, and became the face of an international Armani campaign.
She quit the catwalk 23 years ago to marry entrepreneur Jean Chalopin, a Frenchman with a 700-year-old mediaeval castle, and raise two children, both of whom are now in university.
But the 49-year-old has clearly lost none of the presence which got her a contract - making her the first Singaporean and second Asian to do so - with the world-famous Ford Model Agency in New York in 1985.
"I will try to remember," she says with a laugh, when asked to chart her journey from gawky kampung girl to jet-setting international model.
"It seems like my last life now," says Mrs Fong-Chalopin who now helps to run StoryPlus, a foundation she set up with her husband to support literacy and education for underprivileged children. Her beginnings, she says, were humble. The second-youngest of seven children of a shipyard painter and a housewife, she grew up in a wooden house with a zinc roof on a little hill in Pasir Panjang.
She got into Raffles Girls' Primary School, she says, on the coat tails of her cleverer older sisters. "But I couldn't sustain it. That was why I was kicked to Pasir Panjang Secondary School," she adds self-deprecatingly.
She was, she claims, a wall- flower: tall, gawky and excruciatingly shy.
"I shouldn't be telling you this but at 15, when other girls were wearing bras, I was still wearing a singlet. So no, I was not popular with the boys."
Her gawkiness and her pigeon gait got one of her older brothers sufficiently worried to ask their mother to do something about the situation. Her mother decided to invest $200 for her to attend a deportment course conducted by a modelling agency.
The course more than just improved her daughter's posture, it led to a career - but not before a lot of tears were shed.
"After a few sessions, one of the instructors asked me if I was keen to do fashion shows. I was flattered but it was also made quite clear to me that it was because of my height, and not my looks," she says.
Determined to do something about her shyness, the then 16-year-old accepted the offer.
Parading in public was harder than she expected. But she steeled herself.
"I told myself that since I decided to do this, I had to do it well. I had to understand the profession, and
I needed personality to showcase what I had to model. I had to get rid of my fear," she says.
To go for broke, the business student decided to drop out of Ngee Ann Polytechnic in her second year.
"I was not very good at multitasking and I felt that if I continued that way, I would not succeed in either."
The decision did not go down well with her parents who believed that modelling was not a proper job for a girl.
"I promised my mother that I would not do anything that would make her ashamed of me. I asked her to let me make my own choices," she says.
The scene then, she says, was intimidating.
"Many models at that time such as Tina Tan and Gillian Barker came from good families and a certain social background. For them, it was glamour play," she says. Tan's father was a property developer and her grandfather was rubber tycoon Tan Lark Sye, while Barker's father was the late law minister Eddie Barker.
"With my background, I felt a little inferior and a bit of an outsider. I had to learn all those designer names. I had absolutely no idea," she recalls.
She signed on with Carrie's Models after a year, and tried to move beyond the catwalk to take on photographic assignments.
"It was like being slapped in the face. I was just not what Singapore wanted. My features were different. I have thick lips and a big smile. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, they wanted girls with small lips."
There were countless rejections.
"Clients even called my agent in front of me and said, 'Why did you even bother to send her down?'" she lets on. "I'd take a deep breath and walk out and the tears would fall after that. I had to cry outside and not at home because doing this was my own choice."
Fortunately, she was resilient, a trait she thinks she inherited from her mother.
When Mrs Fong-Chalopin was 12, her mother ploughed all that she had saved into a small little terraced house in Chwee Chian Road off Pasir Panjang for the family. But she lost everything when the developer went bankrupt before the house was completed.
"I was only 12. Watching my mother cry day and night at the construction site was not easy," she says. But her old lady, she says, was a fighter. She worked hard, borrowed and managed to pay off enough of the developer's debt to regain the house.
"I learnt then that life is not always fair," she says, adding that this early lesson helped her cope with the many rejections she faced in her early days.
To make herself stand out, she experimented with make-up, and studied shoots in international magazines, teaching herself how to pose and project different personas.
One of the first people to give her a break was local designer Tan Yoong who loved her looks and pushed for her to appear on the cover of Her World wearing one of his creations. Tan - who always art- directs shoots of models wearing his designs - remembers her well.
"She had the X factor. More importantly, she had a great attitude and was very hard-working. She would listen carefully and would always give me what I wanted," he says.
While she started making some headway, it was not until she ventured abroad that she became sought-after here.
Mrs Fong-Chalopin was modelling for an Emanuel Ungaro fashion show in Singapore when the French woman in charge of the event told her she should try her luck in Paris.
So she did, without telling anyone.
"I only told my parents the night before I left. I was not sure what I was doing. I didn't want to become afraid or give anyone a chance to talk me out of it. If nobody knew what I was doing, nobody would know if I failed too."
It was a big move for an 18-year-old who spoke no French. But Mrs Fong-Chalopin returned a short while later, with a big confidence boost.
"There was interest in my looks there. I knew I could stay and find work and I knew what to do if I went again."
She did just that, and was soon modelling for the likes of Dior and Chanel. Not long after, she started getting offers to model in Milan as well.
That period in her life, she says, has become a blur.
"Everything happened so fast. I was just working and working," she says.
It was not all easy-peasy. The scene was not only competitive but also bitchy and fraught with temptations, she says.
"I was alone and I knew that to survive, I had to stay out of trouble. It was very important to me that I didn't have to call anyone for help. Anyway, who would come for me? They didn't even know where I was."
She had a simple philosophy: "Whenever things were not going a certain way, I would say 'no'. It's easier not to put yourself in a situation than to get out of it.
"Could I have gone farther if I had taken risks? Maybe. But I'm happy with the choices I made."
Doors also opened for her when she visited a boyfriend in San Francisco.
"I didn't intend to model there but I got a bit bored so he asked me to try it out there," she says. Within six months, she became the top-earning model in the city, appearing in the catalogues of big department stores such as Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom.
Jet-setting between Europe and the United States, she made a good living, often earning more than $50,000 a month.
Her profile in the US received a boost in 1985 when she decided to visit the famous Ford Model Agency, which has produced top models from Lauren Hutton to Elle Macpherson, while on an assignment in New York.
"I had a few hours before catching my plane so I dropped in to see them. I didn't have an appointment and they said they didn't see anyone without an appointment.
"But Katie Ford (daughter of agency founder Eileen Ford) was walking down the stairs and she saw me.
"Was it luck? Was it the right timing? Or was it meant to be? I don't know," she says.
The news made headlines in The Straits Times. By then, her success overseas had made her a hot commodity in Singapore too.
"It's strange," she says with a smile. "The same people who turned me down were now saying that they knew I would make it."
In 1986, she scored another coup when designer Giorgio Armani handpicked her to be the face of one of his campaigns.
"My agency in Milan sent me out on an assignment. They didn't tell me what it was for. I ended up in this magnificent building in Milan.
"It was like a palace and I remember tight security and walking through quiet corridors before I came to a room. A man was standing in the room."
That man was Armani. She passed him her portfolio, he looked at it, and five minutes later, just said "thank you" and sent her off.
"The next day, I got the job," says Mrs Fong-Chalopin.
The campaign appeared in the pages of Italian Vogue, W and other international fashion magazines.
"It opened a lot of doors for me. After the campaign, I got 11 shows in London without having to audition," she says.
It also got her a husband. Her photographs - taken by famed photographer Aldo Fallai - caught the attention of Mr Chalopin, a French TV producer and writer, while he was flipping through a copy of Vogue before going into a meeting.
Apparently he tore the pages out, and told himself: "If I find this girl, I will marry her."
Six months later, by a strange twist of fate, one of his fashion photographer friends was commissioned by The San Francisco Chronicle newspaper to trail Mrs Fong- Chalopin as she worked the fashion show circuit in Europe.
The photographer engineered a meeting between the two in Paris, and the rest is history.
Now a private investor, Mr Chalopin founded production company DIC, which had offices in Europe, the US and Japan and was the world leader in animated children's TV programmes including hits such as Inspector Gadget, The Care Bears and The Littles.
Three years after they began courting, she decided to give up modelling.
"The timing was right: I was 25, I achieved my modelling goal of appearing in Vogue, I was tired of living out of suitcases.
"I was getting older and girls were starting younger, I met a wonderful man and felt that it was time to concentrate on my relationship, and to build my life as a woman, not as a model."
They wed in 1998 in Chateau de Farcheville, a romantic castle which had 200 rooms and a moat, which Mr Chalopin had bought.
Husband and wife spent the next 11 years renovating it, turning the rooms into 15 beautiful suites. The kampung girl from Pasir Panjang became mistress of the manor, overseeing a staff of 27 including chefs and butlers.
"Culturally I learnt so much. It was like running a hotel," says Mrs Fong-Chalopin, adding that her son Janvier, 20, and daughter Tanis, 19, were raised there.
The couple decided to sell the castle six years ago. It was just too big.
"In life, there are many chapters. It was a nice chapter but it had to end. We didn't want to leave it to the kids because it could be a poisonous gift. There is no guarantee that they can afford to upkeep it," says Mrs Fong-Chalopin, who now owns homes with her husband in the Swiss Alps, New York, Beijing and Singapore.
To give their children a cosmopolitan education, the family lived for periods of time in Lausanne and Beijing. Their son is now studying economics at Johns Hopkins University; their daughter is doing music composition at New York University's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development.
Now that her children have flown the coop, Mrs Fong-Chalopin is devoting more time to StoryPlus, the foundation she and her husband started 10 years ago to help improve literacy and support education among underprivileged children.
So far, the foundation has supported the building of schools and orphanages in Mozambique and Burkina Faso in Africa as well as Bhutan.
"Our foundation is not big, I don't go fund-raising at all. I go with projects which I feel are sustainable and worthwhile, supported by people I trust. But I really hope to take it to another level," she says.
"I have been extremely blessed in so many aspects of my life. But in my travels, I've come across people born in places or families where a happy outcome is unlikely or not possible," says the former model, who comes home at least four times a year to see her parents and siblings. One of her brothers runs a car company, another is the managing director of a multinational while one sister runs a teakwood plantation in Indonesia.
She is now exploring other causes and has put together a book titled Obor, The Torch Bearers, featuring Indonesians who, despite their own problems, are helping others in significant ways.
London-based lawyer Karen Fong says of the friend she has known for 25 years: "She looks very sophisticated now, very different from the kampung girl that she was. And yet inside her, there is still the kampung girl who loves her family, her husband and her children and treasures her friendships and the simpler things in life."
Mrs Fong-Chalopin turns 50 next July and will celebrate it by scaling Mount Kilimanjaro in the summer with her family.
She sees life as a book with many chapters.
"Hopefully, I have a few more chapters to go, and I hope they will be influenced by torch bearers too."
kimhoh@sph.com.sg
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