She's a marchioness with a mansion on a Scottish island. Now Serena Bute is making A-listers' track pants, with fans from countesses to Vogue girls. She tells Anna Murphy about overcoming addiction and how she became a front-row favourite.
As befits a marchioness, Serena Bute is unsure how many bedrooms she has to her name. "I don't know," she says without hesitation or embarrassment when I ask. "My husband and I have six children between us, so we wanted to make sure we had plenty of room."
There's Scotland. Not only the vast four-storey Victorian gothic extravaganza amid 3,000 acres that is the family seat of Mount Stuart on the Isle of Bute. (The mansion was built by Marquess No 3 in the 1870s, a state of the art affair at the time, with one of the world's first indoor swimming pools, electric lighting and a lift. Her husband is No 7.) There's also the farmhouse where she and Johnny Bute – full name John Colum Crichton-Stuart, a 62-year-old former racing driver – live when they are there. ("It's better for watching Netflix.")
Then there's London, a suitably fabulous conversion of the sprawling former Monty Python studios, where they spend most of their time. There's Switzerland ("We haven't really been for a while"). And there's Ibiza. "We spend the summers there. The kids love it. And I find the Ibiza look very inspiring in my work."
Work. That's one thing that sets the 60-year-old aristo apart. More particularly, there's the nature of that work. She designs track pants. Very posh track pants, admittedly. Think top-notch silks and double-barrelled detailing rendered in hot hues inspired by the full-throttle decor at Mount Stuart. Think cocktails at Claridge's, in other words, not takeaway pizza on your sofa. Yet still. Track pants. How does the other half live? These days, in joggers, like the rest of us.
Bute originally got the idea from clocking what her daughters – one with Johnny, one with her first husband – and two stepdaughters wore. "I got to an age where the kids were slopping around in trackies and pyjamas. I wanted to wear something nice but just as comfortable. I had spent years in tight jackets and jeans, and I didn't want that any more."
So – having previously started a couple of small fashion brands – she conjured up a few pairs for herself. She soon found herself producing more for conveniently influential friends such as the socialite Countess Debonnaire von Bismarck. On the brand's Instagram there is a picture of Bismarck in cerise joggers giving her husband, Count Leopold, a lockdown haircut in their chintz-papered bathroom.
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What has long, with the ubiquity of athleisure, seemed a clever specialisation on Bute's part now seems an inspired one. Lockdown has seen many people – including, it would seem, countesses – wear little else. "Sweatpants forever" was the headline of a recent New York Times article that predicted the death of the fashion industry as we know it. Good news for Bute's brand, whose celebrity fans already included Kate Moss, Rita Ora and the model Adwoa Aboah. "It's about a way of life. An ease of living," she says. Tempted to upgrade your greying jersey joggers to brand Bute? Her sapphire and fuchsia silk iteration will set you back £345/$662 (serenabutelondon.com).
Bute's life to date has been at least as colourful as her brand, that Venn diagram of the glamorous and rackety that is catnip for the tabloids. She's even provided them with a front page or two along the way. When she was in her early twenties, and her late stepfather – Lord Rees – was minister of trade to Margaret Thatcher, "Somebody sold a story about a few of us. There was a huge picture of me on the front page saying, 'High-society heroin addict'. It was not a good moment. Pretty disastrous. My mother was furious."
Yes, following on from an upper-crust childhood spent largely in London and Wales, and a stay in France to – in Bute's words – "be finished off", there were the drug-taking years, which interfaced with the modelling years. "I was the world's worst model. I was shy. And then I found things to make me not shy. And then I was absolutely fine."
Except, of course, she wasn't. "I'd seen many friends fall by the wayside with it and I thought, that's never going to happen to me. I'm different, you know, and I can handle it. Then one weekend a friend of mine said, 'Serena, what are you going to do with your life?' And I had a moment of clarity and I thought, I'm going to die. That just seemed the only thing.
"That was on a Saturday, and on the Monday I called up my cousin who had just got sober. I went to see him and he'd been a really bad junkie and suddenly he was leading a normal life, married and happy. I thought, Christ, if he can do it, I can do it too. He and his wife took me to treatment the next day."
It was a "brutal regime" back then, she says. "I remember someone saying to me, 'You've been a failure all your life. You are just going to be a statistic on our list.' And I thought, you know, 'F*** you. That's not going to happen. I am going to prove you wrong.' For a long time that's what kept me going. I didn't want to f*** up again, you know?"
The designer was sober at 23, and has remained so. "My mother and stepfather just didn't get it at all. They'd always say, 'Oh, why don't you have a glass of wine with dinner?'
I might be fine, but I have gone this far, and I am happy without."
Her years of addiction have left a legacy, however. First there was the hepatitis C that she unknowingly passed on at birth to her elder daughter, Jazzy. ("It's a mother's worst nightmare.") Second there were the struggles with addiction of her younger daughter, Lola. After Lola's boyfriend, the son of a wealthy New York art dealer, committed suicide last year – cue more newspaper headlines – "Her life fell to pieces. But she's pulled herself through." Lola has now founded the Eternity Movement, which fundraises for four charities linked to addiction and mental health.
"As someone in recovery your antennae are always up. Which for my children has been frantically annoying. If you have that DNA it can manifest itself in many different ways. It doesn't have to be drink or drugs. Everybody has got their journey."
Bute – or Wendell, as she then was – had been clean for five years when she married her first husband, a Jamaican-born hoity-toit called Robert De Lisser. They moved to the island together, and she quickly found herself embroiled in a different kind of "nightmare". "My husband had legal problems from the past," is how she puts it. De Lisser was alleged to have been involved in a £60 million ($115 million) deal to smuggle cannabis from the Caribbean into America in the Eighties.
"The next ten years was kind of like living in the movies, but I couldn't turn the screen off. I couldn't press pause. In the end my husband had to leave." By then the couple had had a son and daughter. "It broke my heart for the children, because it was all so inexplicable to them." She spent the next 18 months bringing them up on her own in Jamaica.
"I had to make a choice as to whether I was going to go with him and take our two children, or not. I chose not to. Which was hard. I thought when I went there that I was worldly wise, that I had done a lot. But I was a baby." As for where her ex-husband is now, "I'd rather not get into that," she says. "Yeah, I don't know."
By now Jazzy's hepatitis C had been discovered. "She had obviously caught it from me, because of my using in the past. I was determined to keep everything going for the kids, to try to keep their life as normal as possible. But we had a difficult time because people didn't want their kids to come and play as they mistakenly thought they might get ill. And they knew what had happened to Robert. Jamaica is a lovely place to go on holiday, but to live? It's quite a chauvinist society, and I felt very alone."
She came back to London to get medical help for Jazzy, but also to attempt some kind of normality. "It was such a relief to be home.
I had all my friends, but they were all living a very different life. They were settled, married, their husbands doing the nine-to-five, dinner parties. I was quite traumatised by my experience. I think I had PTSD. For ten years it had been a question of survival. I had recurring nightmares for years. Every time I heard a helicopter it would make my heart race. So it took me time to adjust."
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She met Bute through his sister, an old friend. "We were both single parents. We became friends. We would take the kids to the park and things. It evolved over time." When they married in 1999 Bute found herself with the large family of which she – an only and "lonely" child – had always dreamed: her two children; his three children; the child they eventually had together.
"When I was growing up I used to go to school and tell everybody all about my brothers and sisters, all of whom were in my mind. I would always gravitate towards big families. Now I have one." Six years ago there was talk in the press that the couple were living separately and heading for divorce, and that the £45 million ($86 million) a consortium including Prince Charles had paid in 2007 for Lord Bute's second ancestral home – Dumfries House, in Ayrshire, which boasts Britain's best collection of Thomas Chippendale furniture – was going to have to be divvied up between them. "That was a blip," says Bute, laughing.
What a life. On balance, would she consider herself lucky or unlucky? "I don't look at it like that. I look at it that I have lived a full life. You know, it hasn't been dull. It's been very challenging. And I've been very lucky. I have had a lot to overcome, but I have done so to the best of my ability."
Written by: Anna Murphy
© The Times of London
