The holidays look a little different for Sofia Richie Grainge this year. Her first child, a little girl named Eloise, with husband Elliot Grainge will turn six months old around Christmas, and there’s a line of eager grandparents waiting to unwrap presents with her. As such, the Richie Grainges will have an open-door policy, while Sofia, wearing the moody-coloured velvet she feels most like herself in around Christmas, plays host to an “overload of family”.
Keen to carve out a sweet tradition of waking up and heading straight for the bauble-speckled tree on 25 December, there will be more red, white and blue parcels stowed underneath than usual, as the face of Tommy Hilfiger’s holiday campaign has been decking the halls with the king of Americana himself.
“This shoot represents a new era of my life,” says Richie Grainge of the photo series that swerves Christmas kitsch in favour of a decidedly sleek, anti-tinsel aesthetic. Think: quintessential preppy Manhattan staples and Hamptons weekend classics to spend the festive season in comfort, rather than trussed up like the sequin-choked stars in more traditional December editorials. “I really resonated with this campaign because creatively, it’s about all the different roles that a mother plays in her day-to-day life and how she may dress differently in all of those roles,” she adds. Central to Richie Grainge’s winter wardrobe, along with the wear-anywhere wool coats and throw-on-and-go black dresses she wears in the pictures, is the trench coat – a staple Sofia is particularly animated about. “There’s so much you can do with a trench,” she asserts of slinging it on with jeans, tees and trainers or over louche suits. “I almost consider it an accessory at this point.”
While not every day looks quite so polished as her holiday shoot with co-star Damson Idris, the 25-year-old model and media personality notes that her style hasn’t changed since becoming a mother. “I’m slowly starting to get back into my clothes, so that has made things a little different. But no, I’m not altering my style because I’m a mom,” she shares. “I’m super confident and comfortable in the way that I dress. If anything, my bag is just a lot fuller.”
Having her baby girl has made Sofia view Christmas gifting a little differently. The best presents, she believes, are the scrapbooks and photo albums she has received for Eloise, and the thoughtful surprises her husband bestows on her when she insists she doesn’t necessarily want “materialistic things”. “I’m not great at receiving gifts, I love anything that’s meaningful,” Richie Grainge explains of her natural mode of giving, rather than accepting.
While Sofia says her prep for the Tommy shoot was minimal – “I leaned into what is presently happening in my life and really just went out there and was myself” – she is refreshingly real about changes to her body. (When we last spoke during her pregnancy, Sofia said she was doing “anything humanly possible to get any puffiness away.”) The A-lister’s postpartum beauty routine is centred around “figuring out ways to cover up just some of the scarring [from hormonal acne] and dark marks from pregnancy”, which, she admits, she had a “really hard time with”. Her beauty saviours? Lancôme foundation and concealer – “It gives me that coverage, but it also still makes my skin look like skin, which I appreciate” – coupled with a stripped-back beauty routine and “tonnes and tonnes of hydration”, plus a brand that supports women through the various stages of their lives.
Working with Hilfiger at this juncture in Richie Grainge’s career, when she is being especially particular about the projects she takes on, represents something of a full-circle moment for the new parent, who first signed up to be a Tommy girl when she was in her mid-teens. “Being mindful with people that I work with and being able to [collaborate] with Tommy has been something I’m very thankful for,” she adds of keeping things close to home – exactly as it should be during the holidays.
