By Joe Bromley

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Were it not for the frill-free Shoreditch small plates joint Duchy being all but empty on the damp, September Wednesday lunchtime we meet, I’m sure the whole place would have spun 180 degrees in their spindle-back seats as Jean Campbell walked in.

The model and podcaster is the epitome of an English rose living in Dalston, which she has done for the past four years. She possesses an Elizabethan beauty: elfish features, glass skin, white-blonde hair which folds over her forehead to the right, piercing blue eyes and a slender, 5ft 9in frame. The following day, as she smokes her Golden Virginia roll-ups on Portobello Road wearing a scarlet velvet Richard Quinn ball gown and towering Vivienne Westwood platforms for this photoshoot, passers-by inevitably stop, holler “wow!” and gawp. In front of the camera, she is a transfixing sprite whose body twists to the sound of the clicker.

But today it’s all model-off-duty stuff: she flashes the melting smile that luxury brands have fawned over since she was scouted aged 12 at the Birmingham Clothes Show, and paying her for since she was 16, before pulling out her wired headphones, shoving them in her Miu Miu Matelasse leather belt bag, and peeling off her £5,500 studded, black leather cropped Burberry trench coat. Sliding into a booth, with a waft of her woody Santa Maria Novella cologne and a sparkling yuzu beverage now in hand, Campbell exhales. “Sorry, I’m a bit hazy from walking in the rain.” Her voice is boarding school clipped (thanks to a Downe House education): proper and endearing. She is nervous to start. “You know it’s difficult to talk about something you really care about, and need to get right,” she says.

Many will recognise Campbell as one of Britain’s top models, whose looks have earned her a spot on the cover of Vogue no less than 13 times, as well as Elle, Porter, iD, Dazed — you name it. She juggles walking shows (expect to see her on Burberry and Dilara Fındıkoğlu’s catwalks during London Fashion Week) with shooting campaigns (her latest, for Pandora, is just out) and showing face at the hottest events (“I don’t go to everything — I go where I know it will be really appreciated”) with friends (besties count Vivienne Westwood’s granddaughter Cora Corré and supermodel Adwoa Aboah) or her boyfriend of two and a half years, artist Orfeo Tagiuri (“he’s an artist — and a legend”).

Others will remember her from the days she was splashed across Tatler and the tabloids. She is, technically, Lady Jean Violet Campbell, daughter of the 7th Earl Cawdor — a Scottish peer and architect who grew up in Cawdor Castle, famous for its ties to Shakespeare’s Macbeth — and former Vogue editor Isabella Cawdor. But she has never used her title — “I’ve never called myself that, it’s a kind of archaic thing that doesn’t really have a role in my life” — and winces away from the topic.

Instead, Campbell is here to discuss a venture close to her heart: her podcast I’m Fine, which she launched in June last year and grapples with the sensitive topic of pain in its myriad forms. “I started it because of my own experience with chronic pain, and I realised that it’s a neglected subject. I wanted to see if there were other things to learn,” she says.

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There certainly was. The first season of her podcast (a whopping 34 episodes) saw her interview experts on gritty subjects, from dealing with pain after cancer to understanding depression, while her soft but inquisitive style lends itself to celebrities opening up. Model and actor Abbey Lee discussed her endometriosis struggle, while face of the 1960s Penelope Tree reflected on her battle with an eating disorder.

Season two, out on October 1, will be even more impressive. The 20 episodes are all filmed — “a much bigger production, it’s like doing a TV show,” she quips — and broach the topics psychologically, as well as physically. It will range from interviews with supermodel Amber Valletta and alternative medicine advocate Deepak Chopra to discussions of indigenous pain with Yellowstone star Mo Brings Plenty and the difficulties of parenting with mental health expert Natasha Silver Bell.

A waiter appears, and breaks Campbell’s passionate flow. “Are we eating?” she asks me. “I will,” I reply. “I’m so happy — I’m starving,” she smiles. She orders the fresh spaghetti with Vesuvio tomato sauce (she has been a vegetarian since she was 11) before slouching back in her seat to detail the extraordinary story of her formative years, which saw her balance life-changing diagnoses and invasive surgeries with a glittering ascent into the highest echelons of fashion.

Born and raised near Nairn in Scotland, Campbell is the eldest of four siblings and moved to London aged seven for her father’s work. Her introduction to serious pain came prematurely, at 12, when a skiing accident “ripped my muscles, tendons and my subscapularis muscle off my growth plate,” she begins. After a complicated surgery the injury was fixed, but it had accelerated underlying hip dysplasia which had become impossible to ignore aged 15. “At that point I couldn’t really walk for more than five minutes.”

Campbell recalls the teenager who adored sports and cross country running going into an operation, where her pelvis was broken into three parts and rearranged, “super blind”. She had not considered, at that point, that she would never run again.

A year and half spent on wheelchairs and crutches followed, as she re-learnt to walk. “It changed me psychologically. Suddenly the way that I’d learned to be in the world was no longer possible. Everyone had started going out with people; I didn’t know how to manage that.” Did it translate into anger? “No, I was so sad. I was depressed,” she says.

Paradoxically, it was at this time she had her big break. The October 2013 issue of British Vogue featured a spread of her styled by Joe McKenna and shot by Bruce Weber in Montauk, proudly introducing “new model Jean Campbell”. By December her first campaign, for Burberry and photographed by Mario Testino, was blown up on billboards. She was just eight weeks out of surgery when she posed for it. “I had to lie down in all the pictures,” she says of the images that see her horizontal on a pastel blue, crushed velvet sofa surrounded by the likes of Jamie Campbell Bower and Neelam Gill. The star, albeit a wounded one, was born.

Her pinch me moment came during a shoot with photographer Tim Walker, styled by Katie Grand for LOVE magazine in 2014. “It was at this dilapidated mansion in Northumberland. Kate Moss and Gwendoline Christie were also in it, and obviously Kate Moss was like the coolest person ever. Waking up in a tumbling down mansion and eating bran flakes for breakfast opposite Kate Moss and Tim Walker? I was like, I’ve arrived… Slash, why am I here?” she recalls.

During the time taken for her hip to mend, and as Campbell handled both her burgeoning career and exams, the other hip had taken the strain. “Almost immediately after I had healed, at 18, I had to do it all again,” she says, still visibly melancholy. That proved to be no quick fix, either. “The pain persisted after the surgeries and I found out that I had a whole load of other issues. I was told that to be pain-free I would need to have eight more operations to break the tops of my legs and readjust them.” Her reaction was abrupt. “I thought: I’m going to be 100 years old by the time that is done. F*** off.”

“I was put on painkillers et cetera [during the operations],” she continues. “I didn’t have an addiction, but going through the process of coming off painkillers, I can say from my experience, is an extreme thing.” As soon as Campbell had recovered from the second operation, she boarded a flight to New York. “Literally as soon as I could walk, I moved,” she says.

The food arrives, and she twists her pasta contemplating how, now over a decade after her last surgery, the complications remain so prominent in her day-to-day. “It’s very much still a thing in my life. I’ve found ways of making it manageable, but the pain varies. It’s been quite painful recently,” she says.

Dance at Pineapple Studios, Pilates, yoga and regular swims in Parliament Hill Lido (“I’ve decided this winter to try and beat the winter depression and try to go every day”) help keep her body strong. “And meditation has been massive for me: the way I describe it is like creating a distance between how I feel and think and what’s actually happening. If you feel like your body is a burning house and you’re too close to that, I can’t be an involved person,” she says.

It makes sense, then, that her first guest on the new series of I’m Fine will be Chopra, who specialises in meditation. Another episode she is excited to release will see her question Cambridge University professor Giles Yeo on the rise of Ozempic, which she has seen re-shape her industry.

“I haven’t heard about any drug this much since OxyContin and Viagra,” she says of the fat jab boom. “I’m trying to think when I actually first heard about Ozempic — it definitely wasn’t someone saying like I’m so glad because I need it [for medical purposes]. It was in fashion. Initially it was like, what is this thing? Then suddenly everyone is taking it.”

It’s a contentious topic in fashion today, as models and members of the front row have very noticeably shrunk. “I’m not on Ozempic,” Campbell says, “but I also don’t look at it in a judgmental way. It’s relatable, the idea of wanting to be a bit lighter. But you can’t help but think: OK, what is the longevity of taking this for cosmetic use? It is a drug, and something that hasn’t actually been tested for cosmetic use. There are loads of questions.”

While most models are currently fixated on fashion month, now in full swing, Campbell is busy thinking about attending an Oxford University Masters talk, where she will hear The Body Keeps the Score author Bessel van der Kolk speak at the end of the month, as well as starting a series of workshops to help a group of veterans to find solutions for pain and PTSD. She looks happy.

“When I was 19, I remember feeling a real lack of hope. You know you look forwards in life, and that feeling of looking forwards had evaporated,” she says. “But I’m a busy person these days. And, you know what, I actually love it.”

Season two of Jean Campbell’s podcast I’m Fine starts on October 1, podcasts.apple.com

Photographer: Matthew Huston

Styling: Karen Clarkson

Hair: Charlotte Mensah

Make-up: Quelle Bester

Photography assistant: Harry Frost-Smith

Post-production: Yelena Popova

Styling assistants: Sioned Cordiner and Virginia Corelli