ONE day he was a Govan schoolboy, the next he found himself catapulted into the upper echelons of the international fashion world and on glossy magazine covers throughout the world
With his distinctive sticky-out ears, low brow and angular, chiselled features he may not be classically handsome, but agents and editors claim 18-year-old Connor Newall can look beautiful, ugly, crazy and angelic all within one picture.
After working for just 18 months he has been on the covers of magazines from Vogue Italia to GQ, worked with the most respected photographers in the fashion industry and is now represented by 10 different agents around the world.
His big break came when Michael O’Brien, director of Model Team in Glasgow, was sent images by a casting agent of Newall from a Scottish Government short film One Knife, Many Lives, aimed at preventing teenage knife crime.
O’Brien wasted no time and after persuading a sceptical Newall to come immediately to his office, signed him up on the spot. Within days he had been booked for editorial shoots for GQ magazine and fashion label Alexander McQueen, skipping school to travel to London for shoots.
Now he is on the verge of launching four international fashion campaigns for cult brands including G-Star, New York label Dsquared and Italian Stone Island.
His rise from Govan teenager to one of the most in-demand male models is to be charted in a BBC One documentary Scotland’s Model Teenager, screened tomorrow at 7.30pm.
But to Connor, who still lives in Govan when he is not travelling the world with his mum Betty, a home help and his shipyard worker father, the transformation still seems surreal.
He told the Sunday Herald: "It's been amazing. I still can't believe that all of this is happening. I feel like I need to pinch myself. It's funny all this happening to a boy from Govan.”
Growing up in a family where he expected to join the army like his older brother, Newall had never thought he looked special and had never considered modelling. When O’Brien from Model Team first phoned him he thought someone was pulling his leg.
"I was going to tell him to bolt and hang up. But he told me to check out the website and phone him back when I'd had a look. I did and he called me a cab and signed me up.”
Yet despite a lifestyle which sounds like the height of glamour, there are downsides. Newall often finds himself homesick for Glasgow.
“In same ways it's like any job – there's good and bad,” he said. “I don't much like travelling and I hate flying. And you are in these places by yourself so you're stuck in a hotel room if you're not working. But I've met some amazing people. It can be great fun and the money is really good.”
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