Amelia Gray.

Last summer, Amelia Gray flew east from the West Coast on an exploratory mission to Manhattan. For one reason or another – well, one mainly – Ms Gray and her family are People magazine shorthand for Los Angeles. The trip was about stretching her wings, trying on her own identity for size, shedding a tabloid skin that had mostly been moulded for her at an age she was too young to openly table how uncomfortably she was feeling its squeeze. ‘I feel like people have put me in the box of “pretty California girl next door”,’ says Amelia. ‘And I’m realising that is not who I am, at all.’

New York, she says, was pretty much mind-blowing for Amelia. There the world started to make sense. Alone, she felt curious, confident and new. ‘I went to Fashion Week in August,’ the 20-year-old explains, ‘and I simply never left.’

Amelia is a prepossessing communicator, infectious company and often laugh-out-loud funny. Her V2.0 is at the vanguard of a highly promising modelling career. There are familiar touches to her, an open-eyed awe at the world beyond her immediate sightline which carries about it clear reminiscences of Cara Delevingne and Kendall Jenner at the outset of their journeys. Yet she is resolutely her own woman.

‘I was just like, I’m ready,’ she says. ‘This is it. This is my dream. I’m ready to 100 per cent commit.’ Something had unravelled within. ‘I am at heart an East-Coaster.’ For anyone who has witnessed Amelia’s many highs and various lows as one of the daughters of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills franchise, this is her mic-drop moment. She smiles. ‘I don’t know how I ever lived in the West Coast. But that’s another story.’

Amelia took on a Lower East Side flat because she liked the fashion vista on the doorstep. ‘Like, can we just talk about the style?’ We can. ‘I’m taking photos of men and women on the street. All the time. I went back to LA for the holidays and literally everybody wears yoga pants.’ She pulls a face face. ‘I’ve been reading books a lot, and this has not previously been a thing of mine, and literally everybody in those books talks about “West Coast lazy style”. Everyone wears workout clothes. You go work out, come back, you put on more workout clothes and go sit on your friends’ couch all day.’ At 12, Amelia had asked her mom to buy her runway Celine. ‘And she said no, because, like, I was 12. My goal for 2022 is to buy more Celine.’

New York was a different story. ‘I think that there’s an energy there, where fashion is very important. That’s the type of environment I’m meant to be in. We’re not messing around. We walk everywhere. We take taxis. We don’t take the subway yet because we don’t know it, but we are working on it.’ She sounds like a college student attuning to their new environment. ‘Right? It’s my college. I’m just gaining more goals the more that I’m there. Walking down East Houston and seeing the huge Calvin Klein poster? I’m immersed around my work now, 24/7. It just feels right.’ Is that the billboard she wants? ‘Who doesn’t?’

Amelia has a manifestation book. She began taking fashion pictures, little mocked-up editorials with the best friend she’s holidaying with right now, at six years old. ‘It’s right by my house,’ she says of the CK billboard. ‘One day I’m going to be there.’

It is New Year’s Eve and Amelia is on her third day of a festive vacation with her BFF to a Cayman Island which has thus far managed to escape Omicron, mostly (‘only 350 cases,’ she notes). She looks gorgeous, animated and sun-kissed as she sits in her picture-perfect bleached clapboard hut, sun sizzling in from stage left (‘I cannot complain. You’re seeing raw beach girl Amelia in her element right now’) as she begins to unravel the way that she wants to play her fashion life.

‘This dream and goal of mine has never been about fame or material wealth,’ she says, warming through the conversation. ‘For me, it’s always been to prove to myself I can do it.’ Amelia knows that she comes with the kind of baggage that reality TV tends to bestow on its cast list. ‘I grew up in a family where it was inevitable for me.’ Her father, Harry Hamlin, is Hollywood to the touch. Her mother, Lisa Rinna, is a whole reality deal to herself. ‘I grew up on TV since I was 12 years old. So for me, the fame question is hard to answer because I don’t really know anything other than this.’

Finding herself in a new city was about correcting some of the assumptions which gathered around her, those throwaway facts that suit TV producer requirements. ‘I know my truth,’ she says. ‘I know who I am. But it can be hard when there are things that are written about you that aren’t true. Or that you don’t want people to know. Or a side of you that was once true but isn’t any more.’

This is a recurring feature in Amelia’s life. ‘A lot of the things that people talk about me might be something that once was [true] and isn’t any more. I am a completely different person than the person I was during those times. So I think that you kind of have to take everything with a grain of salt. Continue to keep your head up.’

Her model story is still in its promising infancy. Her first London casting, walking for Yuhan Wang, ‘was already so surreal. What’s happening? This is crazy.’ By her third London catwalk, for Richard Quinn, she succeeded in manifesting one of her desires when she got her eyebrows bleached. ‘Going into Fashion Week I had told my best friend, “I am manifesting this to happen to me. It has to happen to me.” I just kept sending it out into the world. I’d go to bed and be like, “Please, let me bleach my eyebrows.”’ When she was told in the make-up chair it was happening, ‘I literally started screaming, “Yes! Oh my God.’ All the other models were looking at me, like, “What?”’

Moving to the Lower East Side. Bleaching her brows. This is all part of phase-two Amelia: now with added edge. Not that she anticipates any of this will be plain sailing. She wants to put in her fashion homework. ‘This is definitely my college and I literally want to know every single thing about fashion. I want to be the person spitting every single fact in the room, you know?’

She appreciates there will be cynics. She gets to see them most days on her socials. ‘Now I’m in control of my own career, it can get hard at times. I’m trying to control what is put out for my next step. And that’s hard, not being able to control what’s out there about you. Just the weird stuff that people care about. What I’ve really learned – and this is advice for any girl on social media, even if they aren’t famous – is, just take the mean things that people say about you and be grateful for them, because at the end of the day they care.’

Her social media anxiety is not about ‘what some guy in Michigan behind a computer says about me. It’s about what casting directors say.’ She is a firm believer that beauty is only skin deep. ‘The most beautiful girl in the world can easily walk into a room and become the ugliest person in that room by her personality and how she treats people. I feel the most beautiful when someone tells me they’re surprised how nice I am, or “I love your energy” or what have you. Something that is an interior compliment.’

Amelia says she owes her ambition to her grandmother, the grand matriarch of the family who died only a month before we speak and had somehow in the early Sixties escaped a serial killer. ‘She taught me strength and resilience,’ she says. ‘To give some background, she always wanted to be an actress and never followed her dream, so it was kind of cool because my mom got to do her dream for her instead. She would always tell us, “Never give up, because I did. You’ll regret it.” Those small words really resonated with me and became pivotal.’

So Amelia’s big dreams for 2022 are now set in stone. ‘I still fear how people see me and perceive me,’ she says. ‘So my other goal for ’22 is to earn respect. To be truly respected in the fashion industry. To be that next girl, and to prove myself while I’m doing that. To earn it. In 10 years’ time, I want to be someone who can say that I know what it feels like for my dreams to come true.’