Fashion designer Phoebe Philo, famous for transforming both Chloé and Celine before she walked away from the industry almost seven years ago, returned late last year under her own name with a succinct collection of online-only offerings.
The last time Phoebe Philo, who has been called “the Chanel of her
“I say most of what I feel, and most of what is worth me saying, through what I make,” she offered recently. We were sitting in a blank white room in what would be her new headquarters in Ladbroke Grove in London, far from the hipster East End and the luxury stores of Bond Street. The office, still under construction, contained not a single personal item — not even a marketing photograph on the wall.
Her black nylon bomber jacket, rounded in the shoulders and cropped above the waist, looked sort of like a small turtle shell into which she could withdraw and emerge at will. Under the bomber she wore gray pinstripe trousers and a matching oversize shirt. Her brown hair was pulled into a casual ponytail, and she wasn’t wearing any makeup. She is as uninterested in artifice as she is in oversharing.
When Philo speaks, she does so in elliptical phrases, using questions as an opening to more questions.
Although she became famous for transforming both Chloé and Celine, she walked away from the industry almost seven years ago and pretty much dropped out of sight, transformed into a myth practically overnight — the fashion unicorn whose work was an answer to questions you didn’t even realise you had.
When she returned, late last year, under her own name, she did so to sky-high expectations and with a succinct, online-only offering of practical pieces for complicated characters who are unapologetic about their idiosyncrasies and inner lives. Quite a lot like “Phoebe” herself, as she is generally referred to even by people who don’t know her, in part because her clothes make them think they know her (or she knows them, or at least knows what they want). It’s both her superpower and her curse.
Critics and fashion insiders generally loved her new collection. It almost sold out in hours. And then the complaining began.
It was too expensive. (The average bag price is around US$5000; the top end of the collection includes coats for US$25,000.) It wasn’t surprising. You couldn’t try anything on, and the return policy was impossible. “I had the absolute worst customer experience,” said Alexandra Van Houtte, the founder of fashion search engine Tagwalk and a Philo fan, who bought a dress on the day the brand appeared.
Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.Which may be why, as the second delivery arrives and what Phoebe Philo-the-brand is really about comes further into focus, Phoebe Philo-the-designer has decided it is time to ... well, not exactly explain herself. But at least open up a little.
Never explain
“I don’t feel that there’s a huge amount of storytelling that needs to be done,” said Philo, 50. The subject was Philo’s reluctance to talk: about her work, her plans, herself.
“I’m not particularly into that,” she went on. “I don’t feel myself that I need a lot of that from other fashion houses. I feel that it’s just not necessary. To a certain extent, you either like it or you don’t. Someone telling me a story isn’t going to make me like it more. It is a coat. It’s a pair of trousers. I do appreciate a level of straightforwardness.
“I never know what to expect,” Philo said of people’s reactions to her work. “I feel like, ‘Who knows?’ I don’t jump on the feedback immediately. With anything I do, I tend to naturally build in a little bit of distance, which probably is just self-protection. It’s actually been something I think I’ve been practicing since childhood.
“Through some experiences, maybe friendships, relationships, I learned it can sometimes be a good idea to just keep a bit of space between yourself, your inner self and sensitivities, and that stuff. In today’s world, maybe it’s a necessity.”
Philo is famously private. She has never been on X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, Facebook or TikTok. Although she lives close to her office with her husband, Max Wigram, and their three children — their daughter Maya, 19, and two younger sons — her homes (she also has one in the country) have never been photographed.
Although famously fine-boned and fragile, she can be immovable when she wants. It’s tempting to see her tendency to lean on jargony words like “processing” and “learnings,” and her refusal to engage with the usual dance of publicity, as deliberately obstructive, except that her close friends say that this is characteristic of how she interacts with the world.
“I’ve gotten used to how she communicates,” said Bella Freud, a designer who has known Philo since she was at Chloé and who often meets her for long walks on Wormwood Scrubs with dogs (or, when they were younger, strollers). “We rarely talk about fashion. More about thoughts, things to do with confidence, authenticity. It’s almost like she’s exploring a philosophy. I quite like the abstractness of it and not demanding to know what she means.”
Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.Peter Miles, who worked with Philo for 10 years at Celine, and helped create the identity for the Phoebe Philo brand, agreed. “She has never wanted to give people what they want,” he said. “Or, rather, she does want to please but not in the way you expect to be pleased.”
When pushed about the groundswell of anticipation and fantasy surrounding her return, Philo sighed and stared at the wall.
“There may have been an expectation that I could have provided everything to everyone immediately,” she finally said. “And that’s just not possible. It takes time and effort to make most things that have meaning. One has to stand for something.”
What does Phoebe stand for?
This is how Philo describes her own work, which involves loose jeans that unzip to the rear in the back, cave man trousers and coats covered in shaggy embroidery, high-collar almost military trenches and a pillowy silk “scarf” that looks like a cross between a giant padded doughnut and a neck brace. “It’s very intuitive,” she said of her work. “A response to what I see around me, how I see women dressing, how I feel myself, my relationship with clothes.”
She is not, she said, one of those designers who tries everything on. But she does think: “Could I imagine wearing it? Will it be comfortable? How does that really feel?”
Ruthie Rogers, a chef and the co-founder of the River Café in London, who has known Philo for decades, is one of the women who wears it. Once she discovered Philo’s Celine, “Basically, that’s all I wore,” she said. Now she is a Phoebe Philo customer. She bought pieces from the first collection because, she said, “they are clothes for a woman who doesn’t want to be sexualised, but they don’t deny her sexuality.”
Sandra Hüller, the German actress from Anatomy of a Fall, is the only recognisable face in the new brand imagery, which also features a close-up of a bare belly with pregnancy stretch marks and fleshy rolls, and some shimmying feet, cut off at the knees so all you see is the dancing of leather-fringed mules.
Philo views her work as one continuous collection and does not believe in seasons. She prefers the word “edit” and divides those edits into “deliveries”. (Delivery 1 of Edit 2 is on sale now, and Delivery 2 is planned to arrive at the end of March.)
When the terminology was first introduced, along with the statement that the brand intentionally made less than the anticipated demand, it was widely misinterpreted as a strategy calculated to drum up extreme consumer FOMO, or fear of missing out.
Philo said that was not her aim. The point was to create a baseline of data to help her figure out how much she would need to produce to satisfy her market without ending up with lots of stuff to liquidate — and to encourage customers to build a coherent wardrobe slowly, over time. That’s why customers were asked to sign up via email to be alerted about deliveries.
“I don’t know why there has to be such a beginning and an end in our industry,” Philo said. “I don’t know why it can’t just be continuous.”
Well, maybe because planned obsolescence is what drives a fashion business? In today, out tomorrow, and all that?
Philo knows she has to move product. She’s not naive, and in any case she and her husband are the majority owners of the business, so it’s her money on the line. (LVMH, the luxury group that was her employer at Celine, has a minority stake.)
“I still don’t believe it needs to be like that,” she said. “I continue to wear clothes today that I’ve had for 20 years. One of my favourite pairs of trousers is a pair of Chloé trousers I made. They’re important to me, these pieces. I don’t want to get rid of them. So what we have now is a body of work over a year, and it’s all connected.”
Her children support her work, she said, “but they’re not fans at all”.
“My daughter has a couple of pieces,” she added. “She’s really sweet. Sometimes she’ll say, ‘Oh, Mom, can I get that?’ But they don’t mention it that much. Their algorithm isn’t vibing on me.”
Doing it her way
When Philo left fashion, there was a general sense of mourning — and a tendency to see it as an indictment of “the system,” that amorphous force that abuses creativity in the name of commerce. After all, she was the first designer to ever take maternity leave, when she was at Chloé, and at Celine she used to muse backstage about the joys of disappearing into the country. She seemed to need fashion less than fashion needed her.
“Celine was wonderful,” she said. “It was an incredibly important experience in my life.” But she wanted to live an examined life, and she didn’t think she could figure out what that might mean when she was committed to something else. The first year away, she was in the middle of moving, so she focused on that. And hanging out with her family, fielding headhunter calls. (She won’t name the brands.) She considered activism, nonprofits.
“I always tell my kids, the more you mess about, the more you find out,” she said, using a fruitier term than “mess”.
“Quite quickly, I realised that work was something I needed,” she said, “and I think I had a sense it was actually going to be within fashion,” even if she knew she didn’t want to go back to what she had done. In most big houses, designers’ jobs end at the runway. They don’t oversee the ad campaigns or the merchandising or the store design. Philo wanted to have fingers in all of that, even if independence and a startup meant not flying first class or having a driver or lots of orchids in the office.
“Fundamentally, that is not the stuff that makes me happy,” Philo said. The stuff that makes her happy involves baking, galleries, riding, clubbing, her family, her friends. She said she was constantly “walking the tightrope” between ensuring downtime and discovering inspiration. “Once she knows she can trust you, there are no barriers,” Rogers said.
After Rogers’ husband, architect Richard Rogers, fell during a trip to Mexico and was in the hospital for months, Philo came over for breakfast one day wearing a big gray tweed coat that Ruthie Rogers admired. “She just took it off and gave it to me,” Rogers said, and she refused to take it back. “It’s kept me safe and warm since.”
Edward Enninful, the former editor of British Vogue, who has been friends with Philo since they were kids in West London, said he used to bug her endlessly about when she would make menswear. “I always expected I would have to buy one of her women’s coats and get it tailored,” he said.
Then, just before the Fashion Awards in London last year, she presented him with a gray double-breasted suit, “just because she wanted me to feel good about myself,” he said. “I always wear black. I had never worn gray in my life, but I trusted her. It was very liberating.”
Philo knows that the usual designer trajectory is to start a bare-bones brand, show what you can do and then get the golden ring of a big job with a fat contract. But, she said, doing it the other way around was her answer to the questions: How can I do my best work? What is my potential? How can I have the most responsive relationship to the world that we’re living in today?
She won’t articulate it, exactly, but she’s effectively trying to retrain people in how to shop and how to think about what they buy.
“She’s a pioneer,” Enninful said. “And pioneers always take the heat.”
A store, a show: What’s next
“My learning curve has never been greater,” Philo said. “I think people imagined that somehow we had been quietly building a huge organisation, but I had maybe two members of staff. I’m involved in renting space, buying office furniture.” She currently has about 100 employees.
Miles was one of the people she contacted early on, when she was forming the idea of what her brand might be. They talked about it, he said, “for maybe two years’” about the meta issues of what it means to translate your name from something personal to something corporate; from something you own to something everyone can own.
“I toyed with the idea of made-up names,” Philo said. “Some words are satisfying to say. Some of them are really rude as well. There are really good swear words.”
But in the end, Philo said, “there was something straightforward about just using my name”.
For all her talk about not paying attention to the outside noise around her business, Philo knows some things have to change. They are working on smoothing out the returns policy, offering more ways to pay and alerting subscribers when a piece they like is back in stock. As the collections get fuller, there will be a greater range of prices, with some jersey pieces that are (relatively) more affordable. Although she isn’t apologising for the prices.
“The intention, really, is that the pieces stick around for a while,” Philo said. “They have to be made well, and they have to be considered. And that tends to come at a price point.”
During the height of the Covid pandemic, which coincided with her planning, shopping habits had changed in a way that she saw as working to her advantage because it meant she could start without a store, but she doesn’t intend to keep it that way. By summer, she hopes to open some sort of physical space — maybe temporary, maybe not — first in New York, then in London.
There may even be a show, in time. But right now and, she said, “in today’s world, where there’s so much fashion, and so much big fashion, I try to remember that most of the big houses started with one human being who had an idea about what they wanted to do.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Vanessa Friedman
Photographs by: Charlotte Hadden
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
More fashion
The latest news, in-depth profiles and fascinating features.
My style: Toni Street’s journey through fashion, from Canterbury jerseys to frothy frocks. The broadcaster’s style has helped shape her public image.
Dan Ahwa: Why the hoodie remains a wardrobe staple (and where to shop the best right now). The clothing equivalent of a ‘blankie’ offers both comfort and security.
Kim Kardashian’s former executive is the new face of a luxury NZ fashion brand. Stephanie Shepherd talks New Zealand fashion, beauty and more.
Kate Sylvester reviews the fashion of ‘Feud: Capote vs. The Swans’. The fashion designer scans her expert eye over the show and its elegant costumes.
Who knew recycling could look so good? NZ designers making art from off-cuts. Meet the designers attempting to stitch together a new future for circular fashion.
