Clare Waight Keller, who designed Meghan Markle’s wedding dress, finds a different kind of luxury at a mass market brand.
Last month, standing in a sunny Manhattan studio among racks of clothes, Clare Waight Keller was back in her element. The British fashion designer, perhaps best known as the designer
At a moment when luxury fashion is trending toward an economic downturn, Clare is betting on a brand known for affordable, high-quality layers that are wardrobe staples.
Clare wore an all-gray ensemble of straight-leg trousers and a wool knit blazer from Uniqlo. As she walked the news media through her capsule collection, a concise line-up of US$25 cashmere-blend knits in soft shades of loden and moss and $60 pants in suiting fabric, bolstered this time with Uniqlo: C’s first menswear capsule, her ease reflected her long career in the industry.
Until 2020, she had been the creative director at Givenchy. She was the first woman to hold the job there. Her collections, favoured by the likes of Cate Blanchett, Julianne Moore and Gal Gadot, mixed a streamlined and modern aesthetic with precise and purposeful tailoring.
In 2018, Clare’s first couture collection for Givenchy was critically acclaimed. Then came the double-bonded silk cady gown with a bateau neckline worn by Markle for her wedding to Prince Harry in 2018.
The two women have remained close and share “a beautiful friendship”, Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, wrote in an email, adding that she owns several of Clare’s Uniqlo pieces. “Her pieces for the brand have movement and modern grace,” she wrote.
Now Clare’s role is to design trend-proof and democratically priced basics for a mostly ageless demographic. As Uniqlo’s creative director, she oversees mainline collections for both men and women, working primarily with teams in London and New York, where Uniqlo’s SoHo flagship plunked down in 2006.
Despite its reputation for working with outside designers and labels on capsule collections — Jonathan Anderson, Jil Sander, Marni — Uniqlo is not known as a designer-driven brand, which added to the surprise of Clare’s appointment.
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Advertise with NZME.Clare, who has said in interviews that she enjoys being outside her comfort zone, expected the mixed reactions. “Every time I make a career move, I feel my choices take people by surprise,” she said.
Even if she isn’t one to broadcast her interior life on social media, she has always steered her career with a strategic mindset.
And she is not the only high-profile designer to step in this direction. Zac Posen, whose red-carpet gowns made him a darling among celebrities and socialites, was hired this year to revive brands owned by Gap Inc., including Old Navy, Banana Republic, Gap and Athleta.
At Uniqlo, which is owned by the Fast Retailing fashion conglomerate, there is no resuscitation order. Things are selling, notably denim. According to Uniqlo, sales in the past three months have more than doubled compared with the same period last year, owing largely to a style of wide-leg trousers designed by Clare, which discreetly appeared in stores this summer.
“No press, no nothing,” she said of the new denim style. “They were just really resonating.”
‘You can never step off the train’
Clare, 54, grew up in Birmingham, England, an industrial, mostly working-class city. On weekends, her mother would shop at the city’s sprawling, open-air rag market for patterns, fabrics and trims for making clothes.
“She wasn’t a seamstress, but it was from necessity, from not having a lot of money,” Clare said over a recent breakfast in London, where she lives with her husband and teenage son. (She also has twin daughters in their mid-20s.) “It was my first exposure, in a way, to fashion and how you put it together.”
At the Royal College of Art in London, she plotted her future. The technical components of fashion had always fascinated her, but she also knew she needed a niche to stand out. “By being a specialist in knitwear, I gained that skill of understanding yarns, the knitting process, understanding how to construct a garment,” she said.
She was the only one of her peers to graduate that year with a job offer — working in knitwear for Ralph Lauren.
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Advertise with NZME.It set her on a career that took her to all four major fashion capitals, including New York at Ralph Lauren and then Calvin Klein, and Milan in the early 2000s to work under Tom Ford at Gucci alongside a team of designers that included Christopher Bailey and Francisco Costa.
It was an electrifying time for Gucci, which Ford had jolted back to life in just a few short seasons.
From Gucci, she moved back to London to work at Pringle of Scotland and then to Paris for Chloé, where she was creative director for six years, before moving to Givenchy in 2017.
Pausing between roles wasn’t an option — not as a woman, she said. Seeing how few of her peers made it back after taking family leave — whether for childbirth or caregiving — reinforced an unfortunate reality.
“I was at Gucci when I was pregnant with my twins,” she said. “There was no maternity policy in place. Tom said: ‘Okay, we need to deal with that. We need to put one in place.’ But it’s kind of amazing that it was never there before.
“I realised you can never step off the train,” she added, likening the fashion industry to a fast-moving competition of musical chairs.
The industry still faces criticism for its disappointing number of female creative directors. Clare believes that’s because their careers are often stymied early on if they have children. “The fashion industry employs so many women,” she said, “but it really does not favour them in the span of this incredible, important stage in their lives.”
She wants to see more women at the executive level and credits Marty Wikstrom, then CEO of the fashion and accessories businesses at Richemont Group, which owns Chloé, for offering her the job at the house. Clare was seven months pregnant with her son at the time.
“I think that conversation would have gone entirely differently if she hadn’t been a woman,” she said.
‘Still not perfect enough’
After three years at Givenchy, Waight Keller stepped down in April 2020.
“I thought, you know, maybe it can just be a short chapter at Givenchy,” she said. “Maybe short is actually kind of gorgeous.”
It was early in the pandemic and her first legitimate break in more than two decades. She went to Cornwall, where she stayed for several months, spending time with family. She took on the occasional creative project for local heritage brands, including the cashmere house Johnstons of Elgin. It was a liberating time and ultimately a “blessing”, she said.
In 2021, Uniqlo called. Yuki Katsuta, Uniqlo’s global head of research and development, reached out through a mutual friend. (“We were trying to improve women’s design,” Katsuta said at last month’s preview.) Talks originally focused on a capsule collection, a succinct wardrobe that could be built upon with co-ordinating pieces and colours should it extend to multiple seasons. The first Uniqlo: C collection was introduced in September 2023, followed by a second in March.
One thing led to the next, Clare said. “They said, ‘Do you mind having a look at this from the main line?’ ‘Can you give us your opinion on that?’” She found it all fascinating, especially the careful calibration of innovation and product development across a surprisingly limited number of styles.
Uniqlo produces only two seasons a year, with 250 styles each for womenswear and menswear, half of which is carried over from the previous season. “So in terms of newness, you’re playing with only 125 styles per season,” she said. At Givenchy and other luxury houses, the seasonal quantity is typically double that number.
“That’s one way to do sustainability,” said Sarah Shapiro, a retail consultant who writes the fashion newsletter Retail Diary. “I think a lot of people automatically put Uniqlo in the ‘fast fashion’ bucket. But to be fast fashion is to be producing so many styles to drive people to keep buying more and more.” Given that the gestation of a single new style, from design to completed product, is on average six months, Uniqlo becomes an even less likely fast-fashion label.
Waight Keller described the company’s ethos as one focused on making the perfect piece, citing a lightweight down jacket as an example. “It launched 20 years ago, but it still sells in the millions because it’s a timeless piece,” she said. “Each season they make these little tweaks to improve it. Yuki has this saying: ‘Even if it’s 99% perfect, it’s still not perfect enough.’”
Uniqlo has about 60 stores scattered across metropolitan areas in the United States. (There are roughly 800 in Japan and 2400 globally.) But there’s an aggressive growth strategy afoot, with a target of 200 stores in North America by 2027. Uniqlo has five stores opening in Texas alone in the next few months.
“The Western market is just an open door,” Waight Keller said of the company’s upward trajectory, especially as the luxury market cools.
Waight Keller hasn’t written off the idea of some day going back to her former world of rarefied fashion, but, in the meantime, she has recruited several former colleagues from Chloé and Givenchy — all female, she noted — to work alongside her at Uniqlo, where luxury means something different but no less valuable.
“Working with Uniqlo offers me the luxury of time,” she said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Laura Neilson
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
