Meet the woman planning your wardrobe

If your wardrobe is packed with floral dresses and logo sweatshirts – or you’re suddenly craving a boilersuit – you’ve got one woman to thank Rebecca Lowthorpe meets Natalie Kingham, the most powerful woman in fashion you’ve never heard of…

Three years ago, late one night at Paris Fashion Week, sleep deprived and starving, someone persuaded me to go to the very last off-schedule show of the day. To see a brand I’d never heard of. ‘They’re a design collective. Insanely talented. From Georgia. Ifi!tei’rts’cse something n! YEWOU HAVE TO COME!’

That I obediently followed, jumped in the back of a car and sped off to the outskirts of Paris before I could say ‘Vete-who?’ says everything about the influence of the person demanding my attendance. The show, held in a garishly lit Chinese restaurant, turned out to be Vetements’ unforgettable breakthrough collection. The one that launched big floral dresses, gigantic silhouettes, logoed sweats and neon sock boots – sparking a thousand copies in the process and still going strong as trends today. The person who took me there? Natalie Kingham.

Natalie is the buying director of Matches Fashion – the luxury e-tail behemoth founded by industry heavyweights Tom and Ruth Chapman, who last year sold a majority stake in the business to private equity firm Apax Partners in a deal that valued the company at $1 billion. Natalie, who has worked for Matches since 2010, has been the central driving force behind the covetable list of designer brands, collaborations and exclusive launches that every year brings some 100 million visitors to the site. Her influence is industry-renowned. Her eye for new talent is second to none. But it is her gut instinct and risk-taking that gives Matches its edge over competitors. She knows what we want long before we do. She is, then, the woman behind your wardrobe – or at least the best bits of it.

‘That’s a bit overwhelming,’ she says when I tell her she is the subject of our Big Fashion Issue interview. Up until now, this industry insider – mostly spotted at fashion weeks scurrying from shows to appointments – is not one for thrusting herself into the limelight. She is rarely captured by street-style photographers (presumably because she is moving too fast to stop and pose), despite having brilliant personal style, which she describes as ‘eclectic’. Today she wears a velvet leopard-print dress by Batsheva (one of her latest discoveries), ears full of twinkling gems by Ana Khouri and Raphaele Canot and, on her feet, Chanel’s Teva-style sandals embellished with crystal interlocking Cs. The outfits she chooses to be photographed in are equally telling: bold Richard Quinn florals and a gold sequin suit by Halpern.

We are sitting on a beige sofa in 5 Carlos Place, a five-storey townhouse in the heart of Mayfair, which is Matches’ new retail concept, or ‘journey of discovery’, as Natalie puts it. Billed as a cultural and lifestyle space, there is a mind-boggling calendar of daily events, from brand takeovers, installations and pop-ups to supper clubs, live performances and talks with designers/photographers/chefs/ florists, all of which will be livestreamed or podcast from the ‘creative broadcasting hub’ for those who can’t make it in person. And for those who can, expect next-level personal shopping. ‘You can be in the café upstairs having lunch and these rooms can be dressed for you and your goods can be delivered here within 90 minutes,’ she says. Most exciting for Natalie is the opportunity to work with her favourite brands to create exclusive capsule collections you won’t find anywhere else. Like the neon-lit Prada takeover on the first floor. ‘I felt so privileged. I had to keep pinching myself when I was walking through the Prada archives,’ she says of the new styles in neon and tweed that she’s developed with Miuccia Prada’s team.

It sounds like a glorious, glamorous job. Until she mentions her travel schedule. From now until next September, she will travel for a total of 154 days, including stints in New York, Paris, Milan, Berlin, Seoul, Hong Kong and San Francisco. Natalie oversees the buying of some 335 brands, alongside her seven-strong team, requiring a microscopically detailed timetable that is emailed to me after the interview. In an ‘average’ Fashion Week, in New York or London, Natalie will attend 27 shows over five days and around 15 buying appointments a day, plus any extra scouting of new talent she can squeeze in. Paris is on another level, with 63 shows and appointments over 13 days – ta.ha danaty’ds i1n9mbuilyasn, which is the most complicated because of the brands’ short selling windows, let’s just say she has 17 buying trips scheduled from now until next September. Her show days begin at 7am and finish anywhere between 8pm and 2am, depending on events to attend or host. That’s just the ready-towear collections. Then it’s back to the 

fashion capitals every January and June for the pre-collections, where the bulk of her annual budget is spent. Add to this the small designer brands who sell outside the normal buying seasons – the group she calls The Innovators – which taps into her passion for hand-picking nascent designers and nurturing them to become the Vetements of the future.

‘Basically, we’re constantly buying and creating and looking and discovering, but that’s what’s so exciting,’ she beams. ‘What’s changed is the speed; the shows are up online the next day, the influencers are wearing the collections instantly.’ It’s this buy-now-wear-now attitude, she says, that calls for constant newness – and speed. ‘You have to be very, very decisive, make your mind up straight away. You don’t really have time to procrastinate.’

As well as superhuman speed and stamina, she is intuiting the fashion needs of a global audience of millions – with a budget to match. She gasps. ‘I try not to think of it like that, you know, otherwise I’d have sleepless nights.’ But the responsibility? The pressure? ‘You just have to be extremely clear and confident, which is probably one of the most underestimated parts of the job. You go with your gut and promise [the business] you’re spending all that money because you know exactly what you’re doing and it’s going to work.’ And does it always work? ‘Most of the time, yes, that’s why we have such a strong business.’ You can’t argue with the figures: in January, Matches released financial results for 2017 revealing revenues up 44% year-on-year. With 95% of the business generated online, website visits increased by 36% and 51% of online sales were generated via mobile phone. An average order value (basket) totalled £542.

Aside from the fearsome figures she is know largely accountable for,, how does she her global customers and what they want? ‘Nobody has a crystal ball. It has a lot to do with the power of believing in your convictions, believing in the lifestyles of women and how they want to dress, watching what’s going on around you. I’m fascinated by what women are wearing on the school run, at airports, in restaurants, walking along the street. There’s a lot of that kind of social documentary going on in our heads, all the time,’ she pauses, running her eyes over my boilersuit. ‘Ooh, I love a boilersuit, I knew they’d be a great trans-seasonal item for the Minimalist.’

Her global consumers, she explains, are broken down into six categories: Fashion Pioneer, Curator, Warrior, Romantic, Cult Collector and Minimalist. ‘They’re the driving force when you’re buying. We’re thinking of the stories we want to say to these customers and how to get them excited,’ she says, adding that data shows that the Minimalist (the working woman who buys brands like The Row and Lemaire) is the biggest spender, followed by the Romantic, who laps up femininity in the form of Emilia Wickstead and Luisa Beccaria. But clicks and algorithms can only provide a guideline – trends can change in a heartbeat – so how does she select the winning pieces from a brand when faced with 2,000 options? ‘You have to buy true to that brand’s DNA, because the consumer who loves that brand will want those authentic, strong signature pieces, like the Cult Collector must have the latest Gucci or Balenciaga trainer.’ Her confidence for risk-taking is buoyed when even the most expensive items sell out – such as Kilometres’ embroidered smocks at £2,500, or Yves Saint Laurent’s crystal knee-high boots, at £8000. ‘In fact, we could have bought more of those.’

So how did a girl from South London rise to the pinnacle of fashion buying? Her parents, ‘quite a glamorous couple’, loved clothes. ‘And my grannies, in fact, all the women in my family were really interested 

in grooming, you know, lots of hair and make-up.’ Even at school, she was an early adopter of the latest trends, teased at first, only to see fellow pupils later embracing her look. ‘Friends would say, “Well don’t mock her too much because you’ll be wearing it next year.” It became a bit of a catchphrase.’ Living in Keston gave her easy access to Covent Garden, Soho and Portobello Market, where she’d go on a Friday, skipping school to rummage around vintage stalls and create a look for the weekend. ‘It was the mid-’80s, so it was all about transforming yourself for places like The Wag Club – that transformation really hooked me on fashion.’

Desperate to work as a stylist on a magazine, she sent hundreds of letters to fashion editors every week begging for work experience – only to realise she wouldn’t get paid. ‘I couldn’t afford to work for free, and I couldn’t draw, so studying fashion was out.’ Instead, she went to the King’s Road, walked into every boutique asking for work, eventually landing a job at the Joseph flagship in Brompton Cross. ‘It was a bit of a mecca as everyone hung out there – editors, designers. I loved it. I was the first one in and the last one out, every day.’ Her enthusiasm was duly noted by founder Joseph Ettedgui, who asked her to ‘Go out and find me interesting things.’ She brought back the then unknown Alexander Mcqueen. ‘That’s when I realised I loved selling, I loved boutiques, dealing with Maison Margiela and’ – she gulps – ‘John Galliano’s suits and big juslpolka-iotvaeldl.dotslipdresses,it And then it stopped, quite suddenly!’

She was 23 when she had her daughter, Tiger Lily. ‘But I was very happy to create my own family, even though it felt young, it was definitely the right thing to do. I didn’t think for a minute that I wouldn’t be able to return to work.’ Which she did three years later, at cult independent store Pellicano, on South Molton Street. ‘I’d always had my nose pinned to the windows, it was so avant-garde.’ Around the same time, she launched her own label, Skirt, so called ‘because it was the first thing I made on my kitchen table while Tiger was at school’. She sold Skirt to Barneys in New York and to Matches’ first store in Wimbledon. ‘That’s when I met [Matches’ founders] Tom and Ruth, so when a buying job came up, I asked them to give me a chance.’

Eight years later, fundamental to the success of Matches, I ask her why she’s such a good fit? ‘I love fashion, I love watching women and how they work their wardrobes and what enhances their lives and makes them feel better in what they Somewhere between Laura Ashley and rebel frills lie Batsheva Hay’s fab dresses. Genderless footwear brand from Amsterdam by Jelske Peterson and Jarah Stoop. are wearing, I find that really fascinating.’ And she loves travel, which is handy. ‘You know, I don’t do dinners, and I don’t cook and I don’t do those types of wifely duties, so I feel very blessed that I’m allowed to do and be who I am, because I have a husband and daughter who support me flying in and out.’

And with that, she’s off, whizzing out the door in Richard Quinn’s bold blooms and plastic polka-dot stilettos by Midnight. You’ll find both on matchesfashion.com, of course. Upscale recycling by the master DIY-ER, J J Hudson. The Swiss designer creates glamour out of clothes destined for landfill.