Phoebe Philo - Life After Chloe - *Update* Creative Director for Celine

[Thefrenchy]

^I wish I could, but you have to be a subscriber to read the full article on the WSJ

 

[ilaughead]

I would very much enjoy if someone posted it...

 

[LoveLetter]

This one? LVMH Wipes Céline Slate Clean, Opening Way for 'Phoebe Effect'
no need for subscription.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703954904575110010639056770.html

or try this way: google the title of the article, click the 1st link of the search results. you should be able to access it without sub.

 

[Thefrenchy]

^none of this works for me. Does it work for you?

 

[Thefrenchy]

I FINALLY GOT IT Pfiouuuuuu Safari wouldn't let me see it, but it worked with Firefox Here it is...

LVMH Wipes Céline Slate Clean, Opening Way for 'Phoebe Effect'

PARIS—French fashion house Céline is quickly shedding its reputation as one of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton SA's most troubled brands.

After struggling for years to forge an identity and a following, the label is finding influential retailers including Barneys New York, Saks Fifth Avenue and Bergdorf Goodman are clamoring to carry its collection, even as they cut back their portfolios to focus on best sellers.

Credit for the resurgence of the brand—which LVMH bought in 1996 for €412 million ($562 million at current rates)—goes to British designer Phoebe Philo and a decision to make a sharp break with the past.

Céline recruited Ms. Philo 18 months ago. To start fresh, the company destroyed all of the inventory left in the stores prior to her first collection, a move that contributed to the €98 million in restructuring charges LVMH took last year.

Céline also closed all but one store in the U.S., cut ties to less exclusive retailers, stopped producing bags in China and restored the accent to its name, all part of a move to tightly control and elevate the brand.

Despite prices that seem to forget the Great Recession—like $790 platform sandals—Ms. Philo's utilitarian overcoats, pants and blouses have tight-fisted store buyers ready to spend.

Prices are up under Ms. Philo, and less exclusive retailers like Bloomingdale's and e-commerce site Net-a-Porter are out. Céline's plan is to cement a high-end image before ultimately broadening out to include more affordable offerings.

"I felt it was necessary to establish quality to the brand," Ms. Philo said in an interview. "Now that we are establishing that and the top of the pyramid is in place, we can open it out."

Her designs "did not fail to inspire us, which is hard to do—particularly in this environment, where nobody was looking to add anything," said Ron Frasch, president of Saks Inc., which has picked up the line for its Boston and suburban Philadelphia stores.

Ms. Philo's minimalist reinterpretation of the label has struck a chord with retailers, and it was on display Sunday, when the 36-year-old showed her second runway collection for Céline during Paris Fashion Week.

LVMH pursued Ms. Philo intensely. She had spent five years as head designer of French label Chloé, where she created the hit Paddington bag and more than doubled the brand's sales, before taking off two years off to focus on her family.

Pierre-Yves Roussel, chief executive of LVMH's fashion division, traveled to London every other week for nearly a year to persuade Ms. Philo to sign on. The company agreed to build her a design studio in London, where she lives.

LVMH, which also owns Moët & Chandon champagne, Dior perfume and Tag Heuer watches, doesn't disclose sales by individual fashion house. It hasn't set a timetable for the label to make a profit, according to people close to the company. The line is still a tiny part of LVMH, which is dominated by Louis Vuitton.

It's apparent, though, that while retailers have been calling many of the shots with fashion houses, Céline is setting its own rules. The brand managed to get Bergdorf and Barneys to share the rights to Ms. Philo's debut Spring 2010 collection in the New York market, even though department stores normally get exclusives on new brands. Barneys put a $1,050 cotton taffeta top with matching $1,200 canvas pants by Céline on the cover of its new spring catalog—a coup for the niche French brand.

Times weren't always this good. Founded in 1945 as a purveyor of children's shoes that later expanded into women's clothing, Céline had floundered since a brief moment of profitability under the auspices of the American designer Michael Kors, who left in 2004.

The look of the brand "seemed to waffle after he left," says Robert Burke, a luxury goods consultant. "It felt a bit Prada-esque one moment, a little something else the next."

Mr. Kors declined to comment.

Once on board, Ms. Philo and Céline's new chief executive, Marco Gobbetti, who previously revived LVMH's Givenchy house, decided to whittle down the brand's distribution. They closed some 20 out of more than 100 stores around the world, including the flagship in New York, situated inconveniently across from Barneys.

"There were too many stores," Ms. Philo said, dressed head to toe in Céline except for Nike sneakers.

"I really felt that in coming back into the workplace, and in life generally, if you start small and reduce everything to a point that's understandable, it gives you a foundation to grow," Ms. Philo said. "It's all about Céline being brought back to a focused situation."

Ms. Philo unveiled her first interpretation of Céline last June, with a pared down aesthetic. The current "utility chic" look, featuring "clean, interesting, almost military tailoring," is a direct consequence of Ms. Philo's first runway show in October, said Bergdorf Goodman fashion director Linda Fargo. She has linked the constellation of spring trends including wider-leg trousers, leather-as-clothing, and the palette of olive, camel and nude back to Céline, calling it "the Phoebe Effect."

- ONLINE.WSJ.COM

 

[MissMagAddict]

T Style Magazine Article complete...


The New York Times T Style Women's Spring 2010
Phoebe Philo's Third Act
By Alice Rawsthorn

youkioske/nytstyle via Flashbang

 

[Crying Diamonds]

When I watched the most recent Celine collection all I could think of was Philo for Chanel - the simplicity but the elegance, the novelty but wearability - seriously sophisticated and seriously beautiful.

 

[Thefrenchy]

A look at Resort 2011: Phoebe Philo talks Céline

It’s no exaggeration to say that, this time last year, Phoebe Philo swung fashion onto a new path with her resort show for Céline. The proof of that? A head count of the fashion editors who were swishing around in the camel coat from that collection by March—a coat that launched a thousand imitations, not to mention the appetite for the entire beige-to-caramel palette that’s still raging, high and low. Twelve months into the job, which Philo runs between a design studio in London’s West End (she has two young children at home in North London) and the Céline headquarters in Paris, she has not so much emerged as surged forward as leader of fashion’s new minimalist elegance. What she’s evolved for a first-anniversary resort collection—a lot of pants, new shapes, color-blocking, and unbelievably (for an über cleaner-upper) some all-over prints—counts as breaking news. Here, she chats with Vogue about how she arrived at her lighter, slightly more fluid resort collection for spring 2011.

Phoebe, it seems there are a lot of pants in this collection. You’ve always been a fanatic trouser-fitter. Please, can you explain why you feel for them?
“Pants are what I wear every day. They are my uniform, and I feel a kind of feminine androgyny in them. This season we have designed our five favorite shapes that we will keep as the base of future pre-collections. Each style is treated individually with loads of attention to the fit and the way they fall, being that they always have a masculine look—that androgyny—about them.”

One of the signatures you’re developing is the long scarf-tie on blouses. How did that originate, and why do you like it? Are we supposed to wrap it around and play with it, too?
“The long scarf originated from the idea of the tie-bow blouse, which was a Céline classic. I found it too fussy tied up, but undone, falling off the body, it felt more relaxed. Since then we have reworked the idea of the scarf, always designing them so that they can be worn in more ways than one, which I like a lot about them. It gives flexibility to the piece.”

There’s more color appearing here—in the stripes on the flanks of the white T-shirt and trousers; the orange; the color-blocking—are those classic Céline colors from the past . . . or how have you sourced them?
“The idea this season was to create a sportswear section for the collection. I wanted the color to be strong and bold for the sportswear; not one specific thing influenced it—it evolved pretty naturally from looking at lots of sportswear.”

There’s a print! What is it?
“There are two main prints this season, which is a new element for us. One, a man’s paisley on a cotton shirting and, two, a microdot on a silk cloque. The idea of introducing print was for the pieces to be worn together in a kind of sick total-look universe so that they registered as color-blocking, giving depth and texture to the collection, rather than being about the print itself.”

How about the metal choker on the halter-neck top and the two bangles? Is the jewelry integral?
“I like the idea that the jewelry is developed parallel to the ready-to-wear, like the accessories, and is kept separate and not integrated into the clothes themselves. I find it more interesting that way. So far, the jewelry has been my interpretation of the hardware, which is an element that has always been important to the house of Céline. It completes the look.”

It’s no use pretending: Your smooth, rectangular ‘Classic’ Céline bag triggered worldwide desire. What’s your thinking about coming up with new bags—and how do you describe these shapes?
“In general, I am trying to keep the process in terms of the bag developments at Céline an evolution from one season to the next from where we started last year. Our bags have a simplicity and classicism to them, so whilst respecting what we started, this season I wanted to change the fabrications and proportions, exaggerating them, and through that it changes their function, which I find interesting.”

- VOGUE.COM

 

[Flashbang]

If the clothes Phoebe Philo wears shape the clothes that she designs — ‘‘I’ve always had a sense,’’ she said in a recent interview, ‘‘that if I can’t wear it, what’s the point?’’ — then what pieces from her personal wardrobe has she drawn from for Céline? Here, an imaginary peek into the designer’s drawers.



1. We can’t really see Philo wearing Martin Margiela’s see-through number; her take on the full-nude look for spring 2010 is easier to pull off. 2. Philo may be too young to remember Studio 54, but this towering white gown from resort 2011, paired with metallic cuffs, looks right out of Halston’s glory days. 3. Who you calling a minimalist? This patterned sweater from pre-fall 2010 appears to be an homage to the maximalist master Kansai Yamamoto. From Celine; Don Ashby; From Celine; Ron Galella/WireImage; From Celine; Philadelphia Museum of Art/Gift of Hess's Department Store, Allentown, 1974



4. This functional, uncluttered look for fall 2010 makes us wonder if she doesn’t have a dress or two by the ’60s modernist André Courrèges lurking in her closet. 5. Philo’s clean take on military dressing, like this look from spring 2010, recalls Yves Saint Laurent’s safari chic. 6. This sporty look from resort 2011 echoes the work of Helmut Lang, whom Philo has cited as an influence while a student at Central Saint Martins in the ’90s. From Celine; Australian Wool Innovation LTD.; From Celine; John Minhan/Getty Images; Christopher Moore

nytimes.com

 

[Thefrenchy]

The British Fashion Award nominations are in! For designer of the year, Phoebe Philo (pictured) faces off with Christopher Kane and Erdem Moralioglu; for designer brand of the year, it’s Burberry and Mulberry vs. Pringle of Scotland and Victoria Beckham; and for menswear designer of the year, Christopher Bailey, Margaret Howell, Paul Smith, and the Savile Row label E. Tautz. Meanwhile, Nick Knight, Nicola Formichetti, and Rankin are all up for the Isabella Blow award for fashion creator—at least two of whom are Gaga besties. Now who will she root for?

- STYLE.COM

 

[Thefrenchy]

Phoebe Philo at the Céline boutique in Paris during Fashion Night Out - September 07, 2010

VOGUE.FR

 

[sill]

With Carine.

vogue.fr

 

[Thefrenchy]

VOGUE.FR

 

[jasmin5327]

Phoebe is just amazing! But I think she should gain some weight, her cheeks are a bit shocking to me.

 

[missbluejean]

She looked glorious in that event. The first profile shot is absolutely stunning.

I think it's quite obvious that she'll win the designer of the year.

 

[songbirdsel]

i agree its fairly obvious that she will win. The lady just looks so good and calm every time I see a photograph of her.

 

[adorefaith]

she's always impeccably dressed.

 

[missbluejean]

Lunch with the FT: Phoebe Philo
By Vanessa Friedman
Published: October 8, 2010 (FT.com)

Phoebe Philo, the 37-year-old creative director of Céline, is surprisingly frail for someone who a year ago accomplished the Herculean feat of turning the river of trend and washing fashion’s Augean stables clean of decorative bling. A 2010 nominee as British Designer of the Year, she was also behind one of the most heralded collections at last week’s women’s wear shows in Paris.

Medium height, with wispy brown hair and prominent cheekbones, her thin frame swamped by a black leather jacket and a long, man’s shirt over slouchy black trousers, she can seem almost fragile. On the other hand, she has chosen St John, a restaurant in Clerkenwell, London, known for its “nose to tail” menu of offal and other meaty innards, so clearly she has a carnivorous, protein-packing side.

“Well, it’s run by a friend,” she says when she arrives in the stripped-down white space and sits at the paper-covered table. “And it has a straightforwardness that I quite like. It’s very to-the-point.”

To wit: there are “peas in the pod” on the menu. Literally. Undressed, unshelled, peas in the pod, like the kind you get in the market. Or, as Philo says, like the kind that might have “come right from the garden”. She orders some of those with fresh lemonade – the kind they make in America, with just lemon juice, water, and sugar – plus a green salad, some cured mackerel and a roast beef sandwich, because she “rather fancies some white bread”. I opt for lemonade, some cauliflower and lentils, a green salad and a cheese plate. Philo looks at me appraisingly.

“Are you vegetarian?” she says. I shrug.

“I’m so sorry,” she says, twitching her mouth. Because really, we both know my dietary issues are incidental here. “The food is very good,” offers Philo, and we both look around the room. Then she adds: “I’m just not very interested in decoration.”

This is true, apparently, not only with restaurants but also, it turns out, when it comes to conversation. Philo’s speaking manner is as streamlined and plain as the gold bands on her ring finger (one thick, one thin), and when she talks it is carefully, without drama or oration – her voice is modulated, adjectives are sparing. She doesn’t babble to fill space; she’s comfortable with long pauses. She thinks things through, and that goes for the design of a shirt, as well as the place she chooses to discuss that shirt, as well as what she says about the shirt, as well as the decision to start designing that shirt in the first place.

This may seem like reading too much into a venue but I don’t think so. I think Philo knows exactly what she is doing. After all, she has earned her self-consciousness.

Born in France to British parents (her mother is a graphic designer, her father a surveyor), she grew up in London as one of three children, went to Central St Martins College of Art and Design, and famously left fashion four years ago after an enormously successful five-year stint at Chloé. She had joined the French fashion house in 1997 when her art school friend Stella McCartney was appointed creative director and brought Philo along for the ride.

Philo took the reins of Chloé in 2001 when Stella left to open her eponymous house and, for a few years, transformed the brand into a Zeitgeist-setting machine that persuaded a generation of women that they really, really wanted to dress in a combination of Bonpoint-meets-huge wooden wedges, with lacy babydoll tunics and peasant skirts (and pay a lot of money to do so).

Even more, during her time at Chloé, Philo effectively defined the “It” bag, more than doubling sales with totes featuring names such as the Paddington and the Edith. Then, after marrying her husband, art dealer Max Wigram in 2004, and having her first child, Maya, the same year, she decided she could not balance family life in London with work in Paris, which involved constant travel back and forth on Eurostar. So, despite the fact that she also won Designer of the Year at the British Fashion awards that year, she quit her job “to spend more time with her family”. This was another feat, kind of like slaying the Nemean lion, that left the fashion industry with its collective jaw on the floor: walk away from all that success? To stay home with her baby? How could she?

“Pretty easily,” she says now, efficiently shelling peas.

She took two years off, had another baby (a boy, Marlow) and, when she decided she “wanted work back in my life”, also decided it would be on her own terms. In September, 2008, she became creative director of Céline, owned by luxury goods group Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton (LVMH).

What was it about Céline that made her want to return? The house, which had been bought by LVMH in 1996 for €412m, had a revolving door of designers over the years – Michael Kors was creative director from 1997-2004, followed by Roberto Menichetti, who only lasted a year, and then Menichetti’s former assistant, Ivana Omazic – and had yet to establish an identity. It was, generally, regarded as something of a lost cause. No one had any expectations of the brand, because mostly people didn’t think about the brand.

“Céline certainly didn’t mean very much to me,” Philo says, pushing aside the peas to make room for three more plates that have arrived, and forking up some lettuce. Instead of seeing the lack of signature as a problem, however, she saw it as an asset.

“When I was deciding whether or not to take the job at Céline, I didn’t really look at the history of the house,” she says. “I had other offers to come back but they weren’t right, or they wouldn’t let me stay in London, which was non-negotiable. But this would, and I liked the fact the name didn’t stand for anything any more. Yes, the stakes were higher, because everyone was looking at me, and competition is fiercer because of what happened with the economy, but I also felt: it’s really not relevant to me what Céline has been or where it has been. It will be whatever I make it for the time I’m there.”

This is something of a fashion apostasy, as one of the industry’s tenets when dealing with an older house, such as Dior or Givenchy (or Céline, which was founded by Céline Vipiana in 1945), is the extreme importance of a brand’s “DNA”, and what it means, and whether a contemporary product is true to said “DNA”. For a designer to reject that premise is, well, like cutting off the Hydra’s heads.

“I don’t really spend a lot of time thinking, ‘Is this Céline?’” Philo shrugs, finishing her mackerel, and making what is clearly an understatement. You get the sense she thinks, but wouldn’t say, that such philosophising is actually idiotic. That what matters in the end, for fish or for clothes, is not so much where something comes from but how good the final product is. It took her about six months to hammer out a contract she was happy with, one that would allow her control over both her life and her output. LVMH built her a studio in London (Céline formerly had headquarters in Paris, and all its previous designers – an American, an Italian, and a Croatian, had moved to be closer to it, as opposed to the other way around). The company closed a number of stores and destroyed all the old inventory so there was no physical reminder of what had come before. It also gave her aesthetic power.

“I felt quite clear from the offset about what I wanted to do in terms of fashion – or certainly what I didn’t want,” Philo says. “I wanted something that felt honest, that was a mixture of what I want to wear and how I want to live. I felt it needed to be quite simple and very real.”

The result was a collection of camel body suits; high-waisted, perfectly cut flares and A-line canvas miniskirts, often trimmed in black leather; and oversized crisp white shirts. These were so different from what had come before – both from Philo at Chloé and from every other designer in the leopard-spotted, Swarovski-trimmed bubble years – that it sent the industry into yet another orgy of adoration, and once again established Philo as a designer with an uncanny ability to understand what women such as her wanted to wear. (And she does wear her own clothes; the man’s shirt she’s wearing is from her pre-spring 2011 collection. She says “about half her wardrobe” is now Céline.)

Collection number two, which also featured her ingenious way with a knit, was in the same vein, as was collection three, which just made its bow in Paris, in which Philo loosened her own rigorous silhouette to allow for slouchy silk trousers, and replaced evening gowns with black-tie jumpsuits. Her first advertising campaign, which featured a group of models cut off at the chin and neck, and, most shockingly, was not airbrushed or altered in any way, was conceived to “make the product the star. It was not about lifestyle. It was about clothes: Boom. This is it. No smokescreens.” She has never hired a celebrity to be a brand “ambassador”. She doesn’t even like to use the word “brand”, preferring “house”.

“It’s very old-fashioned as an approach, I guess. It was very important to me that with Céline we went step by step, with no giant strategic plan. I feel very much that I am a human being, with human limitations, and I need to respect that.”

Apparently, her limitations also include her stomach. When her sandwich arrives – two large slices of farm bread and one small piece of roast beef in between – she looks at it, sighs and says: “I didn’t realise how filling this would be.” She then dissects the creation and remakes it to her own, more streamlined, specifications, so only one piece of bread houses the beef.

“Time is my biggest luxury,” she says. “Finding time to do things outside of fashion, which I think for a designer is incredibly important.” She takes her children to school, getting to the office at about 10am, and is home to put them to bed. “It never feels easy,” she says.

Away from work, she spends a lot of time watching the news and reading newspapers in bed. In their actual paper incarnation. She does not spend a lot of time hanging out online and has not embraced the virtual world the way so many of her fashion peers have, either personally or professionally. She is not on Facebook. “I couldn’t think of anything worse,” she says. “I’d rather walk down the street naked. I don’t use it and I don’t communicate with my friends like that. I just don’t have the desire to have that much contact with anyone who isn’t my family and friends.”

“I always wanted to do something you could take home at the end of the day,” she says, rejecting coffee and dessert. “My happiest memories at school are of art. This is just an extension of that. I mean, I love the idea of turning an idea into something women wear.”

As transformations go, it sounds almost mythical.

 

[chloehandbags]

The restaurant sounds awful.

I certainly wouldn't pay for the privilege of shelling my own peas (right from the garden-like, or not)...

Actually, I far prefer frozen petit pois! They have a lot more flavour and the fast freezing process preserves the nutrients far better.

Not to mention the fact that you don't have to shell them, at all (in a restaurant, or not).

I kind of get the feeling, lately, that we may think we're cutting through the cr*p, with these (supposedly unpretentious) things, but we're actually just finding a new kind of (even more pretentious) cr*p underneath...

 

[Uemarasan]

As expected, she is a very intelligent woman, and this article has made me even more interested in her work. Thanks, missbluejean! The fact that her work for Celine is so different from what she has done at Chloe is to me something to explore further. I never really paid attention to what she was doing before at Chloe (the aesthetic did not appeal to me at all), but now I seriously can't wait for the next collection!