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"  Karen Anne lives in a small, sunny one-bedroom flat a few blocks from the English Channel in Brighton, the misty seaside town about an hour&amp;#039;s train ride south of London. Her apartment, sparsely furnished and relatively charmless\u2014mini fridge, rickety television console\u2014is exactly the kind of place you&amp;#039;d expect to find a 27-year-old singer in a rock band who&amp;#039;s partial to button-downs and jeans. Other than cream drapes covering the floor-to-ceiling bay windows, a few skull paperweights, a Rolling Stones coaster, and several scented candles, the only real attempt at interior design is a framed black-and-white photo of New York punk temple CBGB, which Anne has reverentially hung over the mantelpiece. Plus, of course, the guitars\u2014an electric Fender and an acoustic covered in Felix the Cat stickers\u2014an amp, and a computer, which is currently blasting the Talking Heads. In fact, the only hints at a life more fabulous can be found in her cramped closet: an Isabel Marant Lurex knit dress, APC shirts and sturdy coats, plus a smart black Bur\u00ADberry trench Anne was gifted by the house last year.  The front woman of two-year-old Brit indie-rock act Ramona has been well-served by her shaggy-haired, boyish blond looks, which bring to mind her own favorite style icon, Edie Sedgwick. Though the band turns out high-energy, hook-driven pop-punk reminiscent of the Ramones\u2014if the Ramones were led by an airy-voiced schoolgirl\u2014the quartet actually took its name from Bob Dylan&amp;#039;s 1964 waltz, &amp;quot;To Ramona,&amp;quot; an ode to a woman &amp;quot;torn between stayin&amp;#039; and returnin&amp;#039; on back to the South.&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;It was apt, around the time I was moving back down to Brighton from London,&amp;quot; Anne says.) Anne&amp;#039;s home, meanwhile, is a work in progress because she has other things sucking up her time. Say, nascent success: this month&amp;#039;s UK debut of Ramona&amp;#039;s second single, &amp;quot;New York&amp;quot;; the international release of the band&amp;#039;s self-titled first album, planned for later this year; and her starring role in an upcoming Burberry ad campaign. &amp;quot;How crazy is it that I played on that beach as a kid and now I&amp;#039;m doing a Burberry shoot with Mario Testino there?&amp;quot; Anne says, marveling at her unlikely role as a face of the British luxury brand. In Burberry&amp;#039;s new ad campaign, bowing in June, Anne broods in a lambskin biker jacket with zip-off sleeves alongside another comely musician, folk rocker Johnny Flynn. Ramona&amp;#039;s relationship with the trenchmaker began last year, when chief creative officer and known musicphile Christopher Bailey tapped the band to join Burberry Acoustic, a then freshly launched initiative aimed at promoting emerging British musical talent through slickly produced, exclusive videos posted on Burberry.com, Youtube, and Facebook. Many bands featured in the series, including Ramona, have gone on to play Burberry in-store events and attend fashion shows. For Bailey, who took the reins at Burberry in 2001, music has always been a rich source of inspiration, both in his designs (studded trenches, anyone?) and his ongoing brand strategy. In the past decade, the 39-year-old has dusted off the company&amp;#039;s outerwear heritage and its signature check for an edgier, more fashion-focused audience, with resounding success. In 2009, the publicly traded firm took in nearly $2 billion worldwide, with total revenue up nearly 30 percent in the third quarter of 2010.   Bailey is intimately involved in choosing the soundtracks for his men&amp;#039;s and women&amp;#039;s runway shows and packs his front rows with of-the-moment music acts such as Ellie Goulding and the Kills&amp;#039; Jamie Hince and Alison Mosshart. And Anne&amp;#039;s ad isn&amp;#039;t the first time genetically blessed musicians (or their offspring) have made their way into the brand&amp;#039;s marketing. Past campaigns have featured pop progeny Tali Lennox and Tara Ferry (children of Annie and Bryan, respectively), as well as Life In Film front man Samuel Fry and singer Coco Sumner, Sting&amp;#039;s daughter. Bailey even launched a rock- influenced fragrance, Burberry The Beat, in 2008; he reportedly inspired its perfumers with a mix CD that included tracks by the Arctic Monkeys and Razorlight.  If quaint Brighton seems impossibly far from the world of fashion advertising, that&amp;#039;s precisely what Anne loves about it. Famous for its turn-of-the-century pier and local rock candy, the city also boasts an up-to-the-minute music scene (the Kooks and the Pipettes are both Brighton reared) and progressive values (it&amp;#039;s home to two universities and one of the largest LGBT populations in the UK).  It&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;a good place to focus,&amp;quot; Anne says. Not that she appreciated that at 17, when she dropped out of high school to become a singer in London. That led to a bit of modeling, a stint cocktailing at the nightclub the Wellington (&amp;quot;I was a shit waitress&amp;quot;), and in 2009 moving back to Brighton due to that eternal artistic handicap, financial necessity. Now Anne thanks the move for bringing her together with &amp;quot;the boys&amp;quot;: bassist James Watts, drummer Fred West, and guitarist Charlie Snelling, whom she met at a local club shortly after her return. &amp;quot;I didn&amp;#039;t know anyone in Brighton and I had to find a band,&amp;quot; Anne says. &amp;quot;[Charlie] looks beautiful, so I asked for his number and if he played anything.&amp;quot; Their artistic chemistry produced almost instant results; through industry connections (Johnny McElhone and Sharleen Spiteri of the &amp;#039;90s Scottish pop-rock act Texas now serve as the band&amp;#039;s producer and manager, respectively), Ramona signed a deal with Columbia Records before the end of 2009. The cinematic, Burberry Acoustic\u2013produced video for Ramona&amp;#039;s first single, the radio-friendly &amp;quot;How Long,&amp;quot; was filmed last year on the East London banks of the Thames. Squinting and twisting toward the camera in a simple black collared shirt and jeans, Anne unfurls semiautobiographical lyrics in a sweet, lilting voice: &amp;quot;Twenty-three trying to find a release/ Highs and lows but I still can&amp;#039;t sleep/ Got no sweet dreams, for a wasted prom queen.&amp;quot;  Anne may have her insomniac moments these days, because she&amp;#039;s on the fast track. But the fact that this development is largely due to Bailey and Burberry is not lost on her. &amp;quot;You move back to your hometown, put a band together, and suddenly Bur\u00ADberry wants to do something?&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;It was that moment where you think life is so strange and funny, how it works.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/fashion/a11623/karen-anne/>