Before Georgina Chapman chose to break her silence to Vogue writer Jonathan Van Meter, she spent a lot of time soul-searching, wondering whether she should do so or not. Just after the very serious allegations of harassment, abuse, and assault against her husband, Harvey Weinstein, first became known last October, they separated. She disappeared from the public eye, retreating to look after their two young children, and trying to create some semblance of normality in her working life at Marchesa, the fashion label she founded with her business partner and lifelong friend Keren Craig. But how does one ever even begin to cope? When I went to see Georgina not long after the news broke, she was near mute with shock, trying to process the emotions—anger, guilt, revulsion, fear—as well as grappling with the terrible wider human cost in all of this.
I’ve known Georgina for a long time. We first met back in 2004, when she and Keren were launching their label, and she was giddy with anticipation and excitement about the future. She was warm, funny, and extremely self-deprecating. Georgina is essentially quite old-fashioned, and just as she was always the good daughter—she is still very close to her family—she also became the good wife. She adored Harvey, but in the blink of an eye, she went from being in a seemingly happy marriage to looking back on a relationship that had become both bewildering and terrifying.
I am firmly convinced that Georgina had no idea about her husband’s behavior; blaming her for any of it, as too many have in our gladiatorial digital age, is wrong. I believe that one should not hold a person responsible for the actions of his or her partner. What Georgina should be receiving is our compassion and understanding. Just before we finished this issue, I met with her again. While still in turmoil, she was intent on doing her best for the children she loves so much, and ready for life as an independent woman. She could begin to see a future.
On the day in late February when I arrive at Georgina Chapman’s town house in the West Village to interview her, it’s unseasonably hot, nearly 80 degrees. I am ushered to the parlor floor, where, even though it feels like August outside, a fire is roaring away. As I wait, it suddenly dawns on me that I am sitting in Harvey Weinstein’s living room. He purchased the six-story house in 2006, the year before he married Chapman, and she has since put her stamp all over it: black floors and white rugs, chinoiserie, lots of gilt and glass, hydrangeas in a vase, a Jo Malone candle burning. On a console table are silver-framed photographs from happier times, mostly of the couple’s children: India and Dashiell, seven and five. All evidence of the original occupant would appear to have been scrubbed away—except for a large piece of art hanging in the hallway. At the bottom, it is signed, “For Harvey Weinstein.” The drawing is dominated by a large empty circle, next to which it reads, “The moon was here.”
I had been introduced to Chapman, dressed in a floor-length dark print dress, a couple of weeks earlier at the West Twenty-sixth Street atelier of the fashion company, Marchesa, that she co-owns with Keren Craig. That day, she struck me as hyperalert: flitting around, wide-eyed and nervous, uncomfortable in her skin—or lack of thereof, as it were. She mentioned, almost in passing, that she hadn’t been out in public in five months—not since the news broke in October of so many unbearably similar accusations by so many women of harassment, abuse, and r*pe perpetrated by her husband. When she appears today, dressed in jeans, a white T-shirt, ballerina flats, and an armful of gold bracelets, she is more relaxed, though there’s a gallows humor—a morbidity—firmly in place. When I mention the disturbingly warm weather, she laughs and says, “Think of all the poor plants that are going to spring out and then die.”
We head downstairs to the ground floor, where most of the living takes place: a big, casual, open space with lots of color, modern furniture, and surprising art. There’s a huge, elegant kitchen that looks out onto a backyard, and a TV room where Dash, on spring break, is sitting on a sectional, ensorcelled by some kind of electronic device. At 42, Chapman looks younger. Or is it that she seems younger? In photographs, she has often reminded me of Victoria Beckham—chiseled and somewhat brittle-looking. But, today, dressed so California-casual, her hair now long and blonde, with wide-set blue eyes and fine features, she looks more like a younger Michelle Pfeiffer. Though she is English to her core, using whilst and learnt in a thick, posh accent, she is more goofy than I had imagined. As we sit down to lunch—a simple spread of veal Milanese and eggplant parmigiana—she seems a bit flustered, unable to maintain a hostess facade for too long, or even to decide where I should sit.
Our meeting, in her soon-to-be ex–town house that her soon-to-be ex-husband recently sold, was meant to be the moment when Chapman would finally, publicly address for the first time what happened. The night before, she had called me fairly late, and I thought she was going to back out. She sounded worried, apologizing profusely, talking fast. She was not ready to address anything too difficult, did not feel prepared. I reassured her that we could talk about her life before Harvey or about Marchesa—which is exactly what we did at first.
Not long after the news broke, common wisdom had it that no actress would ever wear a Marchesa dress again, and no bride would ever walk down the aisle in a gown designed by Chapman. In January, she canceled the runway show for Marchesa’s fall 2018 collection, which fueled rumors that the brand was in trouble. But Chapman says she herself made the decision not to offer any clothes for awards season. “We didn’t feel it was appropriate given the situation,” she says. “All the women who have been hurt deserve dignity and respect, so I want to give it the time it deserves. It’s a time for mourning, really.” But she also has loyal supporters. “A lot of people reached out and said, ‘Let me wear something,’ ” and Scarlett Johansson picked a Marchesa gown to wear to May’s Met ball.
Fashion now is such a social business—so many parties, so much self-presentation. Turns out, Chapman has felt insecure and awkward at social functions for much of her life. She does not enjoy being the focus of attention, which is one of reasons she has a tendency to redirect focus onto others. As the actor David Oyelowo, her friend of 25 years, tells me, “It’s something she’s had to cultivate: the ability to try to fade into the background. That’s why, when she’s at a party, she spends a lot of time and energy making other people feel comfortable, listened to, important.”
As our lunch is winding down, I ask, almost in passing, if Chapman really hadn’t been out in five months; she seems to shrink before my eyes as her mouth goes dry. “I was so humiliated and so broken . . . that . . . I, I, I . . . didn’t think it was respectful to go out,” she says. “I thought, Who am I to be parading around with all of this going on? It’s still so very, very raw. I was walking up the stairs the other day and I stopped; it was like all the air had been punched out of my lungs.”
I ask if she’s been seeing a therapist. “I have,” she says. “At first I couldn’t, because I was too shocked. And I somehow felt that I didn’t deserve it. And then I realized: This has happened. I have to own it. I have to move forward.” She takes a long, deep breath. “There was a part of me that was terribly naive—clearly, so naive. I have moments of rage, I have moments of confusion, I have moments of disbelief! And I have moments when I just cry for my children. What are their lives going to be?” She has been crying through most of this, and now she breaks down into sobs loud enough that her assistant appears with a box of tissues. “What are people going to say to them?” She is crying so hard she has to take a moment. “It’s like, they love their dad. They love him.” It is almost unbearable to witness, this broken person in front of me. “I just can’t bear it for them!”
Chapman grabs a tissue and wipes her tears away—“I wasn’t prepared to say any of that!”—and lets out a deep, guttural laugh.
Things are less fraught when, two weeks later, I meet her at her office at Marchesa and she is surrounded by her team, easily smiling and engaging the world—or at least her world. One of the few working ateliers left in Manhattan, Marchesa is a surprisingly big operation, with about 80 employees, and sewing machines whirring away. Chapman is wearing black leather pants—leggings, really—with zippers at the backs of the ankles, an untucked white tuxedo shirt, and a pair of bedroom slippers studded with fake pearls. Her hair is pulled off her face with a band, and she’s absentmindedly eating from the bag of popcorn that’s sitting on her desk next to an achingly beautiful arrangement of pale-pink and white roses.
Keren Craig is in her office, along with a couple of other women on the design team, as they look at fabrics and swatches and mood boards in search of inspiration for the resort collection they are just beginning to work on. Craig is dressed much like Chapman was the day I first met her: long black floral-print dress to the floor, but with creeper boots, also studded with fake pearls. When I ask if they bedazzled their footwear together, they shout “No!” in unison and crack up laughing. “They came bedazzled,” says Craig. Chapman rolls her eyes. “We don’t have time to bedazzle our shoes, unfortunately.”
The two women met when they were seventeen, during what the British call a foundation course at the Chelsea College of Art and Design. After stints at different art colleges, in the early 2000s they were both living in London. Chapman was getting work doing music videos and, in one particularly odd job, making costumes for a female wrestler. “Crazy getups!” she says.
In 2004 Chapman and Craig rented a studio together and came up with the name Marchesa because Craig was enthralled with the book Infinite Variety, about the eccentric fin de siècle glamour-puss Marchesa Luisa Casati. Their initial idea was to create a loungewear company. Just weeks into this new venture, the two women were invited to a Louis Vuitton party in the English countryside, and, as Craig puts it, “We were like, Now that we’ve got this fashion label, we really ought to make ourselves something to wear.” They wound up seated at a table with Isabella Blow, who was so taken with Chapman’s dress that she borrowed it to wear to the Paris couture. Once Blow took them under her wing, they started to make real connections and then caught a series of lucky breaks: a sponsorship from Swarov-ski; advice from Jimmy Choo cofounder Tamara Mellon to focus on red-carpet dressing; meetings with powerful publicists and stylists like Nanci Ryder and Rachel Zoe.
By now, Chapman was dating Weinstein as she went back and forth between London, Los Angeles, and New York, and it did not hurt that he came to every Marchesa show, usually with a celebrity in tow. Marchesa managed to get a dress on Renée Zellweger for the premiere of Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason in London. “The next morning,” says Craig, “she was on the cover of every single British newspaper with a picture of our dress.” One day they got a call from Neiman Marcus with an offer they couldn’t refuse: to put Marchesa in multiple stores and help with production to create a diffusion line, which became Marchesa Notte. “In order to make that happen, I had to move to New York,” says Chapman. “I only meant to come for a few weeks, and then never left.”
When you ask about her fashion inspirations, Chapman cites John Galliano and Alexander McQueen—two of the most theatrical, outré designers imaginable—but there is nothing even remotely edgy about what she does. She is unapologetically romantic, clinging to a decidedly unfeminist ideal that there is no happier moment in a woman’s life than when she finally finds that perfect dress. As one fashion insider puts it, “Georgina puts pretty girls in pretty dresses—and there’s value in that.” And Chapman has no illusions of being avant-garde. She describes Marchesa dresses as “keepsakes,” to be worn “lots of times” and then hopefully handed down to a daughter. “We’re not doing disposable fashion,” she says. “We treat each dress like a piece of jewelry, an entity unto itself, with its own journey. It’s not just one in a queue.”
That being said, they do have bestsellers and perennial favorites. I ask Chapman about price-point sweet spots. “It really depends,” she says. “One of the gowns we did last season was nearly $13,000, and we couldn’t stop selling it. And then there’s an evening gown we make a version of every year that sells for around $4,995.” Chapman runs down the hall, grabs one, and dangles it in front of me. “It’s quite sexy. You’ve got a corset, it’s off the shoulder, you get some drama around the neck with these feathers, it nips you at the waist, gives you a bosom, and you get a bit of leg! When you get it out, you know you’re going to feel good in that dress.”
The formula has worked for them. As recently as 2016, actresses wore Marchesa more often than any other designer on the red carpet. As Christy Rilling, who fitted Michelle Obama into nearly every dress she wore as First Lady, says, “Their atelier is really special. And they’ve gotten better over the years. I’ve seen what they do for the Oscars—they really make magic happen.”
One of the criticisms that has been leveled at Marchesa is that they’d have been nothing without Harvey Weinstein, who, people have claimed, bullied stars into wearing his wife’s dresses. “They absolutely had a push from Harvey,” says Chapman’s friend the writer Neil Gaiman. “But you cannot hype something from nothing and make it last. And Harvey’s hyping worked because George is actually an artist. I’ve watched her at work and been impressed and fascinated. She has a vision, and she’s really good at it.”