INXS of celebrity nothing to sniff at in the rag trade

(Ready to walk the walk: models April Rose Pengilly and Megan Gale on the portico of the Melbourne Town Hall yesterday.)

Beauty is handy, but in modern modelling it is notoriety that can turn "just another pretty girl" into a hotly pursued catwalk celebrity.

For Megan Gale, 31, it was her spiralling fame as the "face" of David Jones and the bombshell star of Vodafone advertisements in Italy that turned her into a super-celebrity model. For 18-year-old April Rose Pengilly — not super yet, but definitely a celebrity — family connection sets her apart from the beautiful pack: her father is INXS band member Kirk Pengilly. She is being spruiked, with Gale, as a star of David Jones' swanky spring collections launch at the Melbourne Town Hall tonight.

"I usually just use my first and second names to avoid that (connection)," Pengilly said yesterday. "A lot of people don't even know who I am."

But a lot of people do, too. David Jones widely broadcast her credentials in the lead-up to its spring launch. Now it has stuck, and that can't be such a bad thing. "You get to a certain level (of fame) and it gets a lot easier," Gale said. "I did my pavement pounding, but now I couldn't tell you the number of jobs I knock back."