Stepping out of the shadows of Stella McCartney
SARAH MOWER
THE RAPHAEL gallery at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London was stuffed to the rafters with anyone who is anyone in the fashion world last Tuesday, when Phoebe Philo, eight months pregnant, walked up to accept her award as British Designer of the Year.
Cutting the prettiest picture of pregnancy in a black sequined chiffon frock (her own design, of course), she thanked her team, her boss at Chloe for believing in her, and laughed: "Whoah, my baby’s kicking like mad!" Then she ran back to her table to fall into the arms of her new husband.
This has been an incredible year of life-changing, talent-confirming events for the 31-year-old. As if it weren’t enough to be one of the most successful young designers in Paris - who has turned Chloe’s pretty, sexy dresses, perfectly-cut pants and swishy bags into objects of desire - Philo is also half of one of London’s coolest "It Couples". The fact she has been voted British Designer of the Year marks a symbolic homecoming for a girl who has worked in Paris for nine years, even though she has always spent her weekends in London.
"I’m really proud to be recognised in London," she says. "I left college and went straight to Paris, but I’ve always felt a bit in a bubble there."
She has kept coming back because of her unbreakable attachment to her family, her horse, Toby, who lives with her parents, and her long-term boyfriend. This July, Philo finally married 38-year-old art dealer Max Wigram in a simple ceremony at a Register Office. She had found out she was pregnant in April, an event she’s been looking forward to for most of her life. "Since I was 13, I’ve known I wanted to be a relatively young mother," she beams. "I designed my own wedding dress - in a creamy silk cotton, very long, with pintucks at the bodice. The lady in the Chloe atelier sewed a bra into it, so it showed off my boobs, which are my main asset at the moment," she giggles. "I had a circle of silk flowers in my hair. I couldn’t face a big do and a fuss. But it was very romantic."
Wigram, who owns a gallery, MW Projects, is currently hitting his own professional peak as a central figure in the London art scene. Money, let’s say, cannot be a problem in this marriage. Still, their low-key wedding says a lot about their too-cool-to-be-flash style. The pictures never appeared in the press, and even in the fashion world, word hardly got around. Celebrity doesn’t figure in the Philo-Wigram list of priorities.
PREGNANT AND calmed down she may be, but for those who spied Philo running around with gold teeth and six-inch nail extensions in the 1990s, she was the most notable "wild child" on the scene. No one who saw her then (myself included) would ever have suspected that "Pheebs", clattering around in impossible heels after Stella McCartney, of possessing an ounce of seriousness. She and McCartney had met as students at Central St Martins art college and, in 1996, when they went off to Paris together to work at Chloe, I had her down as one of London’s more annoying fashion flibbertigibbets. How wrong I was.
Ever since Philo was appointed head designer after McCartney left in 2001 to start her own label, she has gone on to prove herself over and over, producing results that pushed sales figures almost off the scale this year. There are plans to open 25 shops all over the world and to branch into babywear, eyewear, lingerie and perfume. Chloe’s chairman and CEO Ralph Toledano says: "A few weeks ago, we thought this year’s sales were 50 per cent up, but now it’s 60. There is not a store in the world that can keep our Bracelet bag in stock for more than a couple of weeks."
What makes Chloe so great? It’s those trousers (which Philo and her all-female team work on with forensic attention to the perkiness of the bottom), the frilly tops, the gorgeous silky dresses (as worn by Kylie Minogue, and replicated by Tesco), and the bags (as copied on every street market from Brixton to Bangkok). It’s a source of some amusement that the Bracelet bag actually started life on a street market - inspired by a cheap ethnic bangle Philo picked up on her travels. It now retails at £700.
What Philo does is pretty and populist - without being high falutin. As far back as her St Martins days, when British fashion - excited by the likes of Hussein Chalayan and Alexander McQueen - was at its most abstractly aggressive, Philo stubbornly stood up for what she believed in. "I just wanted to make a pair of trousers that made my bum look good," she says, "rather than a pair that represented the Holocaust or something."
When it came time to take the reins at Chloe, she’d learned a lot, but the corporate responsibility of being in the top job - she is rumoured to be on a six-figure salary - was something else. "When you’re at St Martins, you think it’s all Ab Fab," she says, "and I realised I have poor management skills - that English Hugh Grant thing of piddling round the point. I’m having to curb that."
Her appointment, as a complete unknown (albeit McCartney’s right-hand woman), was a surprise to many in the industry, especially as much bigger names were touted for the job. Others gossiped that it was Philo who had come up with some of Chloe’s best ideas all along. That innuendo got whipped up into stories that she and McCartney had some major falling-out when the two parted company professionally.
Both have refused ever to say a word to each other’s detriment in the press. All Philo will say, with a sigh, is: "I’ve decided it’s just because the papers like the excuse to put in the name of a Beatle whenever they can." To judge by the sight of them nattering tête-à-tête at Helmut Newton’s memorial in Paris in July (sharing girl-talk about their pregnancies), if ever there was a strain between them, it’s well and truly over.
THAT DOESN’T ALTER the fact that things at Chloe changed dramatically the minute McCartney left. The cheeky, brassy, "ghetto fabulous" clothes she and Stella sent down the runway disappeared overnight. "God, yes," she laughs. "I’m so over the trashy 1980s thing." Instead, she makes glamorous but easy-to-wear pieces that spring directly from what she wants to wear. "It is hard to imagine any young woman who wouldn’t have salivated," wrote Suzy Menkes in the International Herald Tribune, of the latest collection.
"I changed the direction," Philo admits. "The older I get, the more driven I am by real style and beauty. I think that’s much more important than ‘a look’. For me, fashion is really about the way you wear it, the person rather than the piece."
Philo has achieved all this while commuting on the Eurostar, working at Chloe headquarters in the Faubourg Saint Honoré during the week, and returning to Wigram at weekends. No amount of success, she says, will ever divert her from being a home-girl at heart. The couple bought a large detached house with a garden, which, Philo says fondly, "reminds me of the houses I was brought up in".
Family is what she cares about more than anything. "Having a baby is a serious, serious priority," she insists.
She is finishing work next week, and will stay in London until the baby is born. "I want to enjoy having a newborn and to protect my time in those precious first few months," she says. She has already given her team direction for next season.
PHILO WAS BORN IN Paris in 1973, when her father, Richard, a chartered surveyor, and her mother, Celia, a graphic designer who worked on David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane cover, were working there.
Celia, ever-present in the front row of her daughter’s shows, was herself a fashion-mad young woman. "She was very sexy," Philo remembers. "When she turned up at parent evenings at school, male teachers would swoon. She’d be wearing Saint Laurent and Ungaro in suburban London."
Aged 14, Philo asked for a sewing machine for her birthday, the better to run up PVC boob-tubes to go clubbing in. She kept up her party-animal reputation through her early years at Chloe - she was once photographed pole-dancing with McCartney and fellow designer Luella Bartley - and scarcely a party page was without a snap of Pheebs with a *** in one hand and a glass of bubbly in the other. It’s not how she wants to live now, though: "I definitely feel a lot older, in a nice way. I’ve really grown up."
But what will happen next? Living and working in two different capitals can’t be ideal for any new mother and baby. She and Chloe boss Toledano are in discussion about that. "But I do believe we will work it out," she smiles serenely.
