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Dedicated arbiter of fashion
BY JOHN DAVIDSON
JASPER Conran seems very, very pleased with himself. He positively bristles with pride as he swishes around the dauntingly immaculate rooms of his new London store - a ravishing Georgian townhouse in the very heart of Mayfair, just around the corner from Savile Row.
Everything within is placed with the utmost care. Garments (of which there are not many) are spaced with a precision normally redolent of rocket science rather than retailing. In fact, wherever I look, I see evidence of a truly meticulous attention to detail. Atop one glass console table, for example, there is a row of flagons filled with an unspecified liquid precisely colour-coordinated to the sharp apple green of two adjacent sofas. It’s what Anna Wintour of American Vogue might be tempted to dismiss as "matchy-matchy". I get the impression that asymmetry and jarring juxtapositions have no place here. Nothing seems left to chance.
Having made more money than any other London-based designer of his generation bar Sir Paul Smith, Conran has decided it’s time he had a proper showcase for his oeuvre. The 44-year-old has sunk £6 million of his own money into the project, rendering these premises one of the most startling exercises in vanity retailing Britain has ever seen. It looks incredibly impressive, of course. Almost as impressive, I might add, as Conran’s gleaming white molars and his personal evolution from muscle-T-clad disco bunny to impeccably besuited style-meister extraordinaire.
He doesn’t look much older than when we first met, the best part of 20 years ago - at most, only a pound or two heavier, though possibly a little more carefully dressed. I’m quite sure he must have a great personal trainer; perhaps he’s discovered a miracle moisturiser. But I really wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that he keeps a very scary portrait hidden away in the attic.
I hear myself delivering the word "fabulous" on cue as we enter each successive room. However, workmen have been called back to repair a leaky radiator in the jet-black men’s room - a place, please understand, intended to address a guy’s demand for sartorial distinction rather than any lesser calls of nature. With a self-consciously theatrical flourish, Conran motions the assembled brigade of rude mechanicals to remove themselves from view so as not to sully my impression of this space. I’m astonished when they dutifully crouch down behind a large green and pink striped sofa; I’ve rarely encountered such biddable tradesmen.
Faulty radiator apart, the whole place seems fiendishly glamorous, with its pale oak or stone floors and 18th-century panelling, now rendered white and inset with generously bevelled mirroring. It’s perfumed, it’s precious ... it’s one fashion designer’s idea of absolute perfection. Even so, none of it is quite as intimidating as it sounds. For, despite the acres of pure white upholstery, there’s something whimsical about the place that seems to preclude any need to stand on ceremony. Rather like the designer himself, it’s a little too camp to be taken entirely seriously.
"Lingerie," Conran announces in an especially lingering drawl, and sweeps me into what seems like a shrine to the ostrich feather-trimmed peignoir. Ah, if only Joan Crawford was still alive! She would surely feel at home here - although she might not find herself especially spoilt for choice, as the range of merchandise seems severely limited. Nothing so vulgar as a G-string or a push-up bra interrupts the rather negligible number of négligés.
Upstairs, an oval dining table winsomely sighs (well, nothing in Jasper Conran’s new world groans) under the weight of the designer’s best-selling designs in Wedgwood china and Waterford crystal. Next door, a bed is immaculately dressed (nothing here is ever rumpled) in linens of Conran’s own restrained design. You can buy the bed, those linens, the china, the crystal, the table upon which they sit - hell, you can order up the sofas and the glass console tables too. There’s nothing in the whole goddamn place that’s not for sale. Nothing. Not even the Prince of Wales check suit, white cotton shirt and pocket hankie the designer himself is sporting.
"Always, in my dreams," Conran explains, as we settle down on those apple green sofas rather than the bigger, whiter ones, "this was the way it would pan out." He’s telling me why, for all his fame and fortune, he still felt the need to create a flagship. "I think it does make it easier to read the intention. One thing sort of leads to another. It gives more resonance, I suppose. The dress ... the piece of furniture ... the china. It’s like a little laboratory of ideas. I think it’s a very important thing for my business."
But is it more significant as a showcase than a retail store? "I think a showcase is a very important factor. It allows people to see what you do and how you perceive it. It gives people a clearer idea. It’s not trying to be Harvey Nichols. Everybody is certainly welcome, but the reality is that the business is going to come out of a few people who do serious shopping."
The chosen location seems especially fascinating, given this level of investment could easily have bought Conran a frontage on Sloane Street or Knightsbridge - or a significant building anywhere down the Kings Road. "I didn’t want it to be Chelsea," he explains. "I had a hit list of where I didn’t want it to be. I try to convey Britishness in what I do, and, in London, you can’t say more British than Mayfair.
"It’s always traumatic when you’re doing a building, but this one is very heavily listed, so we had to work with English Heritage. Actually, that turned out to be nice, because they were so pleased with what we were doing. I knew pretty much what I wanted to do almost immediately. You’re dealing with panelled walls, so we put the mirror inside the panelling. I really think the building itself suggested what it wants, and I’ve kind of worked into that.
"I specifically didn’t want it to look like a shop-fit. So it all came from a furnishing angle rather than a shop-fitting angle. I knew I wanted pale floors. On the whole, the walls are pale grey - I mixed the colour myself. We have done a lot, but a lot of it was here in as much as it was essentially a very pretty building."
Elegant womenswear hanging in the first-floor rooms is drawn from Conran’s current mainline collection for spring 2005, presented on the runway during London Fashion Week last September. This merchandise is available absolutely nowhere else in Britain, and in only a handful of boutiques in the wider world. Yet, although exclusivity has a certain caché, you don’t need to know much about business to guess a collection with such restricted distribution is much more likely to be an image exercise rather than a cash cow.
The personal wealth Conran enjoys today is not rooted in sales of a few dozen pricey frocks to It girls, socialites and other fully paid-up members of the why-pay-less brigade. Rather, his considerable and widely envied success stems from a proven ability to satisfy mass-market consumers whose appetite for distinctive design is balanced by price-consciousness. To put it bluntly, Conran would probably never have acquired his fabulous apartment overlooking Hyde Park, his splendid country pile in Suffolk or his lavish new store, but for the launch ten years ago of J Collection - the first and most consistently successful brand under the Designers at Debenhams umbrella.
"I’ve always worked on the theory that if an idea’s a good idea, and you show it on a catwalk, then, believe me, somebody’s going to copy it. I had years of being knocked off - I don’t mean that in the sense of blowing my own trumpet, but it’s very frustrating when you’re only a little company and a big company knocks you off. So I didn’t really have any qualms about working with Debenhams. They were extraordinarily nice and polite. I do think that if something is a good idea a lot of people should be able to enjoy it, if you can make a version of it ... if, through economy of scale, you can make a good version of it."
The real wonder, of course, is that such an economy of scale (plus use of off-shore production and more cost-effective fabrications) can allow J Collection frocks at Debenhams to retail for little more than 10 or 20 per cent of the price asked for little black numbers at Conran’s new store.
"Debenhams is a completely different brief," Conran offers by way of reassurance. "When you do very expensive things, you know very few people are going to be able to afford them, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do them. It’s an aspirational thing, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But J Collection has got my handwriting all over it. When I see the products - well, if I could put them in this environment, you wouldn’t know they weren’t £500. I find that really exciting."
He puts his early success down to a coincidence of timing. "I was making very good, simple things - just easy pieces. I’d been at fashion school in America, so I came back with an American sensibility, and it was sort of the right time." He was soon dressing, on occasion, the late Princess of Wales, plus a bevy of other British and American style-setters who warmed to his spare, understated aesthetic and learned to treasure his matte jersey dresses and simple separates.
He now characterises those years as "hand to mouth" - blighted by perpetual cash-flow struggles and endless production difficulties. Yet, unlike so many other talented youngsters who burst on to the British fashion scene back in the early 1980s, Conran not only survived but developed a significant business.
He no longer grabs fashion headlines, and his designs seldom now grace the pages of Vogue. He jokes that he wishes his clothes could command as much interest as the gardens he has recently created at his homes in France and Suffolk. Yet, his popular appeal has probably never been greater.
"I ain’t Vivienne Westwood," he admits, without the smallest hint of regret. He certainly can’t hope to match the stellar status of his former boyfriend, John Galliano, whose unbridled creativity has made Dior once more the hottest name in French fashion. But his 25-year career has shown him to be more interested in putting people into nice clothes than unleashing a revolution or pursuing the hottest trends and coolest customers.
"I find it very difficult to say I have an ideal customer. I think it’s very dangerous and cynical to identify people in that way. As far as I’m concerned, every customer is my ideal customer. When somebody puts a dress on it becomes theirs - it’s not mine anymore."
Yet Jasper Conran will always be defined by his inordinately famous surname; as the son of Terence - the businessman who unleashed revolutions in furnishing and food - and Shirley "Superwoman" Conran. Surely such illustrious parentage must have roused curiosity in his first faltering endeavours - even if it didn’t actually open doors? "It might well have. I’m not saying it didn’t. My father was doing Habitat at the time, and my mother was a writer. But I do also think people will be spiteful. Perhaps you’ve got a level of spite on one extreme and a level of door-opening on the other."
Wasn’t his father, the mighty Terence, always on hand with astute advice? "Hmm. I think he spent a lot of time telling me what a useless businessman I was." Was he right? "Well, in the long run, not really."
Some business commentators suggest that Conran junior is now turning in a more impressive business performance than his father. "Every business has its ups and downs. I had to learn as I was going along, but I learned from my mistakes - I think it’s the learning from mistakes that’s important. In the crash of 1989, Bloomingdale’s took Chapter 11 [US bankruptcy protection which allows a business to restrict payment to creditors], Macy’s took Chapter 11, Barneys took Chapter 11 - my business was nearly decimated because I wasn’t getting paid. I presumed that these would be companies that wouldn’t go into liquidation or bankruptcy - oh, how wrong I was! I learned always to buy freehold, because it’s half as expensive as renting. I learned that you have to cut your sails according to your cloth ... I learned that cash is king ... These are not things that my father taught me."
Conran’s success today surely reflects an ability to make good business decisions. Equally, it also bears testament to the enduring appeal of his signature refined look.
"I tend to make clothes that will flatter people and make them feel comfortable. I don’t like waste. I like a black dress, you know - a nice, long-running, useful thing. However, I do have this problem where people come up to me and say, ‘I’ve got the best black dress!’ and I bet they’ve had it for 15 years too.
"Actually, there’s a lot of satisfaction even when someone says something like that, because what I think I do is design the friend in your wardrobe - the one that you know you can rely on in moments of weakness. I think women feel confident in my things. I think that’s my factor X."
Although his face freezes into a mischievous grin, Conran really could not seem more self-assured. But then he is, of course, dressed in clothes of his own confidence-boosting design.
BY JOHN DAVIDSON
JASPER Conran seems very, very pleased with himself. He positively bristles with pride as he swishes around the dauntingly immaculate rooms of his new London store - a ravishing Georgian townhouse in the very heart of Mayfair, just around the corner from Savile Row.
Everything within is placed with the utmost care. Garments (of which there are not many) are spaced with a precision normally redolent of rocket science rather than retailing. In fact, wherever I look, I see evidence of a truly meticulous attention to detail. Atop one glass console table, for example, there is a row of flagons filled with an unspecified liquid precisely colour-coordinated to the sharp apple green of two adjacent sofas. It’s what Anna Wintour of American Vogue might be tempted to dismiss as "matchy-matchy". I get the impression that asymmetry and jarring juxtapositions have no place here. Nothing seems left to chance.
Having made more money than any other London-based designer of his generation bar Sir Paul Smith, Conran has decided it’s time he had a proper showcase for his oeuvre. The 44-year-old has sunk £6 million of his own money into the project, rendering these premises one of the most startling exercises in vanity retailing Britain has ever seen. It looks incredibly impressive, of course. Almost as impressive, I might add, as Conran’s gleaming white molars and his personal evolution from muscle-T-clad disco bunny to impeccably besuited style-meister extraordinaire.
He doesn’t look much older than when we first met, the best part of 20 years ago - at most, only a pound or two heavier, though possibly a little more carefully dressed. I’m quite sure he must have a great personal trainer; perhaps he’s discovered a miracle moisturiser. But I really wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that he keeps a very scary portrait hidden away in the attic.
I hear myself delivering the word "fabulous" on cue as we enter each successive room. However, workmen have been called back to repair a leaky radiator in the jet-black men’s room - a place, please understand, intended to address a guy’s demand for sartorial distinction rather than any lesser calls of nature. With a self-consciously theatrical flourish, Conran motions the assembled brigade of rude mechanicals to remove themselves from view so as not to sully my impression of this space. I’m astonished when they dutifully crouch down behind a large green and pink striped sofa; I’ve rarely encountered such biddable tradesmen.
Faulty radiator apart, the whole place seems fiendishly glamorous, with its pale oak or stone floors and 18th-century panelling, now rendered white and inset with generously bevelled mirroring. It’s perfumed, it’s precious ... it’s one fashion designer’s idea of absolute perfection. Even so, none of it is quite as intimidating as it sounds. For, despite the acres of pure white upholstery, there’s something whimsical about the place that seems to preclude any need to stand on ceremony. Rather like the designer himself, it’s a little too camp to be taken entirely seriously.
"Lingerie," Conran announces in an especially lingering drawl, and sweeps me into what seems like a shrine to the ostrich feather-trimmed peignoir. Ah, if only Joan Crawford was still alive! She would surely feel at home here - although she might not find herself especially spoilt for choice, as the range of merchandise seems severely limited. Nothing so vulgar as a G-string or a push-up bra interrupts the rather negligible number of négligés.
Upstairs, an oval dining table winsomely sighs (well, nothing in Jasper Conran’s new world groans) under the weight of the designer’s best-selling designs in Wedgwood china and Waterford crystal. Next door, a bed is immaculately dressed (nothing here is ever rumpled) in linens of Conran’s own restrained design. You can buy the bed, those linens, the china, the crystal, the table upon which they sit - hell, you can order up the sofas and the glass console tables too. There’s nothing in the whole goddamn place that’s not for sale. Nothing. Not even the Prince of Wales check suit, white cotton shirt and pocket hankie the designer himself is sporting.
"Always, in my dreams," Conran explains, as we settle down on those apple green sofas rather than the bigger, whiter ones, "this was the way it would pan out." He’s telling me why, for all his fame and fortune, he still felt the need to create a flagship. "I think it does make it easier to read the intention. One thing sort of leads to another. It gives more resonance, I suppose. The dress ... the piece of furniture ... the china. It’s like a little laboratory of ideas. I think it’s a very important thing for my business."
But is it more significant as a showcase than a retail store? "I think a showcase is a very important factor. It allows people to see what you do and how you perceive it. It gives people a clearer idea. It’s not trying to be Harvey Nichols. Everybody is certainly welcome, but the reality is that the business is going to come out of a few people who do serious shopping."
The chosen location seems especially fascinating, given this level of investment could easily have bought Conran a frontage on Sloane Street or Knightsbridge - or a significant building anywhere down the Kings Road. "I didn’t want it to be Chelsea," he explains. "I had a hit list of where I didn’t want it to be. I try to convey Britishness in what I do, and, in London, you can’t say more British than Mayfair.
"It’s always traumatic when you’re doing a building, but this one is very heavily listed, so we had to work with English Heritage. Actually, that turned out to be nice, because they were so pleased with what we were doing. I knew pretty much what I wanted to do almost immediately. You’re dealing with panelled walls, so we put the mirror inside the panelling. I really think the building itself suggested what it wants, and I’ve kind of worked into that.
"I specifically didn’t want it to look like a shop-fit. So it all came from a furnishing angle rather than a shop-fitting angle. I knew I wanted pale floors. On the whole, the walls are pale grey - I mixed the colour myself. We have done a lot, but a lot of it was here in as much as it was essentially a very pretty building."
Elegant womenswear hanging in the first-floor rooms is drawn from Conran’s current mainline collection for spring 2005, presented on the runway during London Fashion Week last September. This merchandise is available absolutely nowhere else in Britain, and in only a handful of boutiques in the wider world. Yet, although exclusivity has a certain caché, you don’t need to know much about business to guess a collection with such restricted distribution is much more likely to be an image exercise rather than a cash cow.
The personal wealth Conran enjoys today is not rooted in sales of a few dozen pricey frocks to It girls, socialites and other fully paid-up members of the why-pay-less brigade. Rather, his considerable and widely envied success stems from a proven ability to satisfy mass-market consumers whose appetite for distinctive design is balanced by price-consciousness. To put it bluntly, Conran would probably never have acquired his fabulous apartment overlooking Hyde Park, his splendid country pile in Suffolk or his lavish new store, but for the launch ten years ago of J Collection - the first and most consistently successful brand under the Designers at Debenhams umbrella.
"I’ve always worked on the theory that if an idea’s a good idea, and you show it on a catwalk, then, believe me, somebody’s going to copy it. I had years of being knocked off - I don’t mean that in the sense of blowing my own trumpet, but it’s very frustrating when you’re only a little company and a big company knocks you off. So I didn’t really have any qualms about working with Debenhams. They were extraordinarily nice and polite. I do think that if something is a good idea a lot of people should be able to enjoy it, if you can make a version of it ... if, through economy of scale, you can make a good version of it."
The real wonder, of course, is that such an economy of scale (plus use of off-shore production and more cost-effective fabrications) can allow J Collection frocks at Debenhams to retail for little more than 10 or 20 per cent of the price asked for little black numbers at Conran’s new store.
"Debenhams is a completely different brief," Conran offers by way of reassurance. "When you do very expensive things, you know very few people are going to be able to afford them, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do them. It’s an aspirational thing, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But J Collection has got my handwriting all over it. When I see the products - well, if I could put them in this environment, you wouldn’t know they weren’t £500. I find that really exciting."
He puts his early success down to a coincidence of timing. "I was making very good, simple things - just easy pieces. I’d been at fashion school in America, so I came back with an American sensibility, and it was sort of the right time." He was soon dressing, on occasion, the late Princess of Wales, plus a bevy of other British and American style-setters who warmed to his spare, understated aesthetic and learned to treasure his matte jersey dresses and simple separates.
He now characterises those years as "hand to mouth" - blighted by perpetual cash-flow struggles and endless production difficulties. Yet, unlike so many other talented youngsters who burst on to the British fashion scene back in the early 1980s, Conran not only survived but developed a significant business.
He no longer grabs fashion headlines, and his designs seldom now grace the pages of Vogue. He jokes that he wishes his clothes could command as much interest as the gardens he has recently created at his homes in France and Suffolk. Yet, his popular appeal has probably never been greater.
"I ain’t Vivienne Westwood," he admits, without the smallest hint of regret. He certainly can’t hope to match the stellar status of his former boyfriend, John Galliano, whose unbridled creativity has made Dior once more the hottest name in French fashion. But his 25-year career has shown him to be more interested in putting people into nice clothes than unleashing a revolution or pursuing the hottest trends and coolest customers.
"I find it very difficult to say I have an ideal customer. I think it’s very dangerous and cynical to identify people in that way. As far as I’m concerned, every customer is my ideal customer. When somebody puts a dress on it becomes theirs - it’s not mine anymore."
Yet Jasper Conran will always be defined by his inordinately famous surname; as the son of Terence - the businessman who unleashed revolutions in furnishing and food - and Shirley "Superwoman" Conran. Surely such illustrious parentage must have roused curiosity in his first faltering endeavours - even if it didn’t actually open doors? "It might well have. I’m not saying it didn’t. My father was doing Habitat at the time, and my mother was a writer. But I do also think people will be spiteful. Perhaps you’ve got a level of spite on one extreme and a level of door-opening on the other."
Wasn’t his father, the mighty Terence, always on hand with astute advice? "Hmm. I think he spent a lot of time telling me what a useless businessman I was." Was he right? "Well, in the long run, not really."
Some business commentators suggest that Conran junior is now turning in a more impressive business performance than his father. "Every business has its ups and downs. I had to learn as I was going along, but I learned from my mistakes - I think it’s the learning from mistakes that’s important. In the crash of 1989, Bloomingdale’s took Chapter 11 [US bankruptcy protection which allows a business to restrict payment to creditors], Macy’s took Chapter 11, Barneys took Chapter 11 - my business was nearly decimated because I wasn’t getting paid. I presumed that these would be companies that wouldn’t go into liquidation or bankruptcy - oh, how wrong I was! I learned always to buy freehold, because it’s half as expensive as renting. I learned that you have to cut your sails according to your cloth ... I learned that cash is king ... These are not things that my father taught me."
Conran’s success today surely reflects an ability to make good business decisions. Equally, it also bears testament to the enduring appeal of his signature refined look.
"I tend to make clothes that will flatter people and make them feel comfortable. I don’t like waste. I like a black dress, you know - a nice, long-running, useful thing. However, I do have this problem where people come up to me and say, ‘I’ve got the best black dress!’ and I bet they’ve had it for 15 years too.
"Actually, there’s a lot of satisfaction even when someone says something like that, because what I think I do is design the friend in your wardrobe - the one that you know you can rely on in moments of weakness. I think women feel confident in my things. I think that’s my factor X."
Although his face freezes into a mischievous grin, Conran really could not seem more self-assured. But then he is, of course, dressed in clothes of his own confidence-boosting design.
