London’s Coolest Design Duo Luella Bartley and Katie Hillier Unveil Their New Line
Photographed by David Sims, Vogue September 2015
“For the first time, I feel I’ve done something that is wholly me.” Luella Bartley’s blonde-haired head is cocked as she considers a tuxedo suit with a cropped jacket, a pair of trousers that end in an ankle tie, and a crisp white shirt with a cravat. “It’s dapper and rakish, but with a kind of rock-’n’-roll femininity about it,” she says. “The fabric is the sort Savile Row tailors use—you don’t feel it until you wear it, but then you understand the quality. It feels like it’s time for something authentic, with longevity.”
Then she grins, wrinkling the corners of her blue eyes. “But if you’d told me ten years ago I’d be basing something on this, I’d probably have said, ‘Ugh—how middle-aged!’ ”
Katie Hillier, Bartley’s longtime friend and codesigner in arms, nods and laughs. She’s come over to Luella’s to talk about their brand-new joint venture, Hillier Bartley. Light is streaming through the kitchen windows of the Georgian town house in London that Bartley shares with the photographer David Sims and their three children. Hillier, meanwhile, perches at the kitchen counter. “This is an intimate, quiet sort of label,” she carefully stresses. “Calm and modest—no excess and no fuss.”
To those who haven’t been following the latest ins and outs at the top of fashion, this might come as rather surprising news. Bartley and Hillier were last seen in the noisy glare of New York Fashion Week in February as they took their bows as creative directors of Marc by Marc Jaobs—which was then promptly absorbed into the main Marc Jacobs collection (to which Hillier still contributes).
So here they are, doing just about the opposite of what you might expect from the girls known as ace channelers of quirky, youth-culty trends. Bartley couldn’t look more blissfully relieved as she spells out the differences. “I still have moments of being an indie kid, but I’m 42! I want to be feminine—or womanly. I wanted to work out what that meant,” she says, pointing out a long satin 1930s-ish dress trimmed with pearl buttons. “I can’t remember when I last wore an evening dress! But this feels real to me.”
To be clear, Hillier and Bartley aren’t abandoning their very British instincts for the eccentric generational subtext—they’re simply imbuing them with a classic sense and working with beautiful fabrics, along with shapes they want to keep repeating and refining. There’s a melton greatcoat, a camel-hair dressing-gown coat complete with silk-tasseled tie-belt, an army-surplus khaki sweater with green velvet shoulder patches, a gray tailored tweed suit with wide, cropped pants.
These are clothes they imagine being lived-in with a bit of “loucheness and insouciance,” Bartley declares. “I love that thing of people who wear very good clothes carelessly. I was reading a biography of Lucian Freud and came across a page that describes him as walking a line between vanity and vagrancy—and I just jumped about, shouting, ‘That’s it!’ ”
Though there’s always room for sparky humor in the Hillier Bartley world, there’s no mistaking the fact that this is an enterprise they’re taking very seriously: It’s their own investment, their own chance to speak directly to like-minded women without the machinery of a corporation around them. Hillier, for her part, says it means she can go to town with the construction and quality of the bags. “I didn’t want to be restricted,” she says. “I’m really just enjoying that freedom to do exactly what I want.”
