She married a lord and became the style-savvy muse to two of the worlds leading fashion designers. Amanda Harlech tells LYNN BARBER why she left John Galliano for Karl Lagerfeld, and why well all be in jodhpurs next season
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I STILL, for the life of me, can't understand what Lady ("Call me Amanda") Harlech does. She is usually described as "muse" to Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel, but she doesnt like that word - "I find it rather old-fashioned. I think I'm more amusing." She talks about being a sounding-board, or a wall against which Lagerfeld bounces his ideas she is very fond of metaphors from which it is often difficult to unpick the truth. She says her job is extremely challenging, and that after each trip to Paris she feels as though her eyeballs have been flayed. But whatever her job is, she is universally agreed to be very good at it, and very well paid, not only with money but and this is the point at which I start hyperventilating with envy with a permanent suite at the Paris Ritz.
The suite is used by other guests between her visits, but the manager, Manfred, reserves it for her during the collections, and the housekeeper, Martine, puts away the hotel clutter she loathes and replaces it with her books, scented candles and sheets, which are stored for her at the Ritz.
She stores most of her couture clothes there because, she says, it has proper closets whereas she has clothes moths at home. Pretty good, eh? And she has been doing this muse lark for 10 years for Karl Lagerfeld and before that, for 12 years for John Galliano, which is just about as good as it gets in Paris fashion terms.
Moreover, she doesnt have to work in Paris for more than half the year.
She is expected to be there for the collections, and Lagerfeld has more than any other designer six for Chanel, four for Fendi and four for his own label but between times she stays at home in Shropshire in the west of England, with her two horses, two dogs, two cats and two children. She rides (she used to hunt), she cooks, she paints, she gardens, she does yoga, she shops and then every few weeks she swaps her riding boots for Manolos and flies off to Paris to be a muse.
So how do you become a muse? Why cant I be one? I suppose it helps that she is effortlessly chic, tiny, beautiful and looks elegant whatever she is wearing. She is also and this I find much harder to acknowledge friendly, charming, intelligent, good company and all the things I was rather hoping she wouldnt be.
I realised we came from different planets when she was telling me about her divorce and suddenly broke off to announce: "You know, I never normally talk about this, but I love your green necklace and I feel a connection. I do. Because I was expecting someone so different, so frightening, but I love all the colours you're wearing you are a true soul."
Oh, believe me, Amanda, I'm not. I am wearing the green necklace only because I forgot to collect my blue trousers which I would have worn with a red necklace from the dry cleaners, so I was forced to wear brown. It is the purest chance that I appear "a true soul." I find it frightening that anyone can attach so much importance to clothes. Although when she shows me her boudoir, with all the rails of fabulous Galliano, Chanel and vintage dresses, the drawers full of Manolo shoes, the antique kimonos, the wonderful ivory-silk embroidered coat she wore for her wedding to Lord Harlech in 1986, I am almost converted. And these are not even her best clothes her best clothes are in Paris. But she keeps them all because: "The dresses are not haunted, but invested with something that I don't want to let go happy times, I suppose."
She tells me she hardly thinks about clothes between collections, and seldom buys new ones. But as the collections approach, "I know I'll be dissatisfied with something, and will have to rejig it for whats coming. But you're six months ahead of when those clothes are going to be in the shops, so you have to do it yourself, from vintage and current, and a pair of scissors in my case. And once you see the right proposition, there is no other way of dressing.
"Coming up, I think it's jodhpurs and a tiny jacket, so dig out your tiny jacket and wear it with some breeches, and wrap a scarf round and you've got a look and you can do it yourself now, before the things come into the shops."
But I thought that to be chic you had to have your own style, not be a slave to fashion. "Yes, but your style is your take on how clothes are moving on. So if this was your perfect dress 10 years ago, you might have to do something with the length now, because skirts are a lot shorter. Skirts are either going to be long or short I have a feeling they'll go quite long, actually."
She has only once, as far as she knows, made a serious fashion mistake. She bought a pair of Manolo round-toed court shoes which made her think of Eva Peron. But Lagerfeld said "You look like a secretary," and she was so appalled she took them straight back. "They were fabulous but Karl was right; they werent me, they were too chunky for my leg - I didnt see myself correctly."
This precise eye is very apparent in her house. The exterior is quite ugly, even grim (she thinks it is two farmhouses knocked together with an Edwardian facade), but inside is the sort of dilapidated splendour that English aristos do so well - tattered curtains, dressers of lovely unmatched antique china, walls stripped back to the original plaster but still stained with traces of old paint, great jugs of sweet peas. Most of the furniture is ancient, collapsing, but there is a new Steinway given to her by Lagerfeld - she plays the piano, too.
The kitchen is, of course, vast, with a refectory table and two leopard-print dog beds for her whippets. The one discordant note is a huge blackboard which has all the usual stuff about phoning the plumber and fixing the lawn mower, but also a complicated list of dates and sums. These are her fuel bills, "because as a single woman it's terrifying how much it costs just running this house, and I'm trying to cut the fuel bill every way I can - it's $2050 every two months. If I lose my job, I wouldnt be able to do that, so I'm just going to turn the heating off. I'll survive. I'll just wear lots of woollies."
She has had a charmed life. Born Amanda Grieve in 1959, daughter of a successful solicitor and a beautiful mother, she grew up with her two brothers in upmarket Regent's Park in north London, where her neighbours included many famous names, such as actor Alan Bennett, writer V.S. Pritchett and director Jonathan Miller, who stopped her in the street one day and said: "You know, opera is the most amazing, orgasmic thing." She was only 11. She played dressing-up dolls with another neighbour, Jasper Conran, and remembers cutting up one of her mothers couture dresses to make a witchs costume for Halloween - her mother didnt mind. But the Regent's Park idyll ended when her parents divorced and moved to the country, and she had to switch from her London day-school to board at a private school in Wiltshire.
As a child she planned to be a prima ballerina, and (of course) won a place at the Royal Ballet School. But her mother was worried she would develop turned-out feet, and so introduced her to riding. She was also good at painting, acting, piano and says that when she left school it was a toss-up whether she would go to fine arts school, the Royal College of Music, or Oxford. (Are you being sick yet? I almost am.) She chose Oxford to read English, which she loved so much she was tempted to do a PhD on "Henry James and moral bankruptcy," but then her friend Sophie Hicks got a job as fashion editor of Harpers & Queen and asked her to come and help. "It was electrifying." With typical Amanda luck, Sophie Hicks soon moved to Vogue so Amanda took over her job as junior fashion editor, which meant working with all the new designers and photographers, such as Mario Testino. "We'd shoot these things that were like fairy tales, really. But I was a difficult, tricky, over-idealistic editor who would dig her heels in and refuse to do things because they were too much like advertising. So at the point where I think they were going to fire me, I met John [Galliano], who was the visual response to everything I could have imagined he did shows which were stories and adventures - so I went with him."
Galliano couldn't afford to pay her, but by this time she was married to Lord Harlech and "provided I had my train fare back to Shropshire, I had a roof over my head." Her husband was Francis Ormsby-Gore, son of the British ambassador to Washington (she fell for his "gypsy brown eyes"), but his father died in a car crash during their engagement, so she became Lady Harlech when she married. They had two beautiful children, Jasset and Tallulah, and were idyllically happy for the first few years, living on the family estate in Shropshire and spending summers at the other ancestral seat, Glyn, in North Wales. But, like so many aristocrats, they were land-rich, cash-poor, so Amanda kept working to pay the school fees and luckily when Galliano moved to Givenchy he was able to pay her more her son went to Eton, her daughter to Cheltenham Ladies' College. Jasset is 21 and doing graphic design, aiming to work in advertising; Tallulah, 18, hopes to be an actor.
But working in Paris meant Amanda was away a lot, and her husband went into decline according to Catherine Wilson, the Telegraphs style editor, "from being a rakish, Heathcliffian figure, he descended into the demi-monde of alcohol and drugs." He was convicted of drink driving several times, and of possessing heroin at a railway station. (His sister had died from a drugs overdose, and his brother by shooting himself in the mouth.) Then one weekend Tallulah, aged eight, asked Amanda why this other woman was sleeping in Daddy's bed. Apparently it had been going on for two years.
"I didn't want to get divorced, but at the point where your children are part of it, you have to do something. I would really love it not to have happened because it haunts you, it will never go away, and it is probably the biggest failure, and I have to live with that."
There was no question of her keeping the marital home. She had to rent a tiny cottage down the road and squash in with the children. "It was a shoebox. It meant they kind of lost their childhood early, but now they're really proud of me and they come home often." After the divorce she was "an outcast" from the aristocracy, but she didn't mind she rarely uses her title in England, although it comes in useful in Paris.
The end of her marriage coincided with, and caused, her move from Galliano to Lagerfeld, but she couldnt say that at the time, and Paris was abuzz with rumours. The same weekend she found out her husband was having an affair, Galliano was negotiating a contract to move from Givenchy to Dior.
"I understand," she sighs, "that anybody who has just got the job of his dreams is not going to say: There's this English girl that I need on the payroll. And I remember ringing up and saying, 'Don't do this to me. I really need to be financially independent now.' And Karl Lagerfeld knew I was having problems and all he said was: 'Look, get Dior to take you seriously. I'd love you to work for me, but you have a very special relationship with John, and I respect that. But this is what Chanel would offer you. Take this contract to Dior and say, 'Match this.'" So I did, and they rang back and said, 'Is this a joke?' I asked round lots of friends, like Anna Wintour, and they all said: 'Make a professional decision for the first time in your life, Amanda,' and I did. It was scary. But I had to do it. I couldnt go on working for 30,000 a year." Was Galliano upset? "Very. He saw it as a betrayal."
But they have gradually become friends again. At first she found working for Lagerfeld very different to working for Galliano. She and Galliano had started from scratch together, so they were almost like brother and sister and part of her job was to boost his confidence and say, "You can do it." But Lagerfeld was old enough to be her father and knew he could do it he had been Kaiser Karl presiding over his court in Paris for years. Moreover, the courtiers were not exactly welcoming. "I'd come in to work and find theyd stuck up pictures of roast beef in my office, which they thought was funny, or I'd find them giggling over a portrait of me that Karl had done. But thats in the past. Theyve realised that I'm not a threat - I don't want their jobs." Did she tell Lagerfeld about the pictures of roast beef? "No, Karl is someone who believes you either swim or you sink. You do not expect him to protect you, you protect yourself."
After her divorce, Harlech had a long relationship with a local farmer she met hunting, but that ended last year. "So I'm by myself. I am not good wife material because I'm fiercely independent and like to go off and do my own thing. I'd come back from a trip and be tired and have no more to give him. Or I'd be in the stables all day we had eight horses and crawl into the kitchen at seven, exhausted. Happily exhausted, in a way, because I'd managed not to think all day, kidding myself that manual labour frees the mind, but in the end it imprisoned mine. So, understandably, he found someone else. It's sad. Eight years is a long time." How long did her marriage last? T"welve. Not doing very well, am I?"
No. It rather confirms my theory that people who are keen on clothes arent keen on sex. But then she perks up and says, "But it's good for writing. You know that gap between where you are and where youd like to be? Within that gap, there is an ache and an aspirational leap which is very good for writing."
She has written the texts for two photography books, one called Palazzo by Lagerfeld, and one called Sicily by Michael Roberts, both to be published shortly. I get the impression she doesn't expect to remain a muse for ever, and is looking for a second string to her bow. Maybe she's wondering what she'll do if Lagerfeld retires, though she insists he will never retire and is never ill. She claims not to know how old he is - "he's got to be younger than me in some respects because he has a helluva lot more energy" - but if she looked him up on Wikipedia she would find he is 73.
Does she ever worry about her future? "Yes. And then I think: Well, I can turn the heating off and just write my way out of here, in my woollies. Joan Didion is a total icon to me, she's a brilliant writer and she just does it - she writes, and she's gone through hell. It's possible, isn't it?"
It is. But for her to mention her own writing in the same breath as Joan Didion's makes me so furious I can barely speak. It was a terrible mistake to have worn the green necklace.
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