Half an hour before Pixie Lott is even due to arrive, a photography studio in West London is becoming increasingly crowded. The plan is for Lott to model some of the spring/summer collection she has designed in collaboration with teen fashion retailer Lipsy. As such, the presence of a photographer, a photographer’s assistant and a stylist doesn’t need a massive amount of explanation. And a make-up artist is to be expected. And the pretty boy who ferries in bottles of spring water and pots of tea is only doing his job. Then there’s a pair of nice, jolly PR women, who, a short while later, are joined by more jolly PR women, who announce to everyone that Pixie is on her way. That’s more than ten people already. Then it turns out that Pixie is running late.

Someone is dispatched to locate a few bottles of cava (“not champagne, not prosecco – cava”), which, it is reasoned, would be nice for everyone, not least Pixie’s mum, Beverly, who is known to favour the Spanish sparkling wine and who has been accompanying her daughter all day. And when Lott eventually does arrive – tiny, breezy, blindingly blonde – it’s the matriarchal figure of Beverly who scopes the room, while her 19-year-old daughter chats with the make-up artist.

She explains how she has set up something on her computer back home in Brentwood, Essex, so that anything written about Pixie is e-mailed directly to her. Does she read everything? “Everything,” she nods.

This means that, over the past year, she will have read an awful lot. Last June, Lott’s debut single, Mama Do (Uh Oh, Uh Oh) – a track of high-gloss, electro-soul sass – went to No 1. Her second single, Boys and Girls, repeated the trick, while her album, Turn It Up, is currently certified platinum. She writes some of her own material, isn’t shy of a magazine shoot, and has already scored her first Hollywood acting gig (in the forthcoming Fred: the Movie). Yet it was, and still is, tricky to know quite where to place her. She wasn’t churned out by Pop Idol or any other all-singing, all-dancing reality show, despite the fact she is, palpably, all-singing, all-dancing. And while she doesn’t occupy the art-pop territory of, say, Lady Gaga, or have the rough-round-the-edges rawness of an Amy Winehouse, it’s not as though she’s pitched solely at giddy tweenagers. She will crop up in NME, or have her concerts reviewed in glowing terms by “mature” monthly music mags like Q, earning a kind of post-Girls Aloud, cool-kitsch kudos with older fans.

Today, she has already done ten hours of promo. “We did a shoot for a magazine for a couple of hours,” she says, a little bit husky, quite a bit Estuary. “Then I did 20 interviews. Then I did a TV show. And then I came here. I’m kind of a laid-back sort of person, so I just go with it.”

Does she find it weird that everyone milling about the studio is here solely for her? Again, a smile.

“I don’t really think like that. I mean… it is kind of crazy that there are so many people here, and earlier today there were loads of little helpers making sure everything is running smoothly, but I don’t really take all these things in. I’m not fazed by it. I’m not oblivious, but I just… crack on,” she says, looking into the mirror. “I’ve always wanted to do this.”

It’s a conclusion that’s impossible to avoid. Italia Conti stage school at 11, management contract at 14, record deal at 15 and two No 1s at 18. There are no existential crises about fame, no moaning about promo, no Twitter bickering, no kiss-and-tells (she admitted last year she has “never had a proper boyfriend”): nothing at all that might give a label boss angina. In conversation, she’s positive, enthusiastic, consistently on-message and too media-trained to be anything near rounded. But she’s sort of sweet, too, and not quite a pop automaton: at one point, she just about fights back a bout of the giggles she was about to share with the make-up artist. You can understand exactly why she’s been used to advertise, say, pink Nokia mobile phones, or the benefits of drinking milk, or, as per today, affordable summer fashion for girls.

“Me and my management, we get offered deals and stuff,” she explains. “And they say which ones would help me and which ones would do the opposite… things that wouldn’t suit me so much.”

Such as?

“I don’t want to name things,” she says, scrunching her nose up. “I can’t really think of anything anyway.”

She says designing for Lipsy was fun, even though she didn’t have much time to sort the spring/summer range.

“I tried on loads of different shapes, looked at which colours I liked,” she explains.

It sounds like a lot of girls’ fantasies, like being given a Fashion Wheel and a budget. Lott looks confused. What’s a Fashion Wheel? A PR explains, and she brightens. “Oh yeah! Fashion Wheel! I remember them,” she says, despite probably being too young to know about the Eighties toy. Anyway, she says, it wasn’t quite like that. There were meetings with business, marketing and design people: “There was all of us in a room together, discussing which colours were good and what sells well.”

Was it strange, being in those kinds of meetings? She reminds me that she’s used to them. She still hangs out with all her old friends, and they’ll come to her concerts and events, but she will get embarrassed when they don’t know how to carry themselves around industry bigwigs.

“Whenever I take them to meet important people, they don’t even know that sometimes you have to shake their hands,” she sighs. “They’ll be like, ‘Ooh, what do I do?’ ”

Could she give any teenage girls reading this advice on how to behave in important business meetings, then? She pauses and frowns.

“I think, for meetings, you always have to be really interested in what the other person has to say,” she decides. “Make them feel more important than you.”

She says she’ll be back in the recording studio tomorrow, and that, while all the fashion stuff is nice, her main focus will always, of course, be singing and music. And with that, it’s time for her shoot to start. She offers her hand and, under the watchful eye of Beverly, continues to crack on.

The Pixie Lott for Lipsy collection is available from Lipsy stores nationwide (020-7436 2000) and online at lipsy.co.uk

Source: Times Online