‘I was the quiet one at school, but worked like a maniac at home’

along the Rue du Faubourg Saint-honoré. Which is, I think, no accident. Waight Keller loves walking; it’s as relaxing to her as gardening was to Hubert de Givenchy. And she likes to assimilate, while retaining a streak of independence. She had to get her head around Paris style when she first moved there in 2012 to head up Chloé. ‘It’s different from the way I grew up, which was, “Let’s buy something cheap and have fun with it.” Parisians are very specific. They never look as though they’re wearing too much make-up. They don’t wear nail polish, or if they do it’s red. It’s all about looking effortless, chic and elegant. If it’s cool, it has to be the right kind of cool.’

Observing is what Waight Keller does. At Calvin Klein in New York – where she was whisked straight after graduation from the knitwear course at the Royal College of Art, thanks to one of her tutors sending in her portfolio – her uniform of androgynous suits and flat shoes (‘I actually looked like a boy, my hair was so short’) morphed into Calvinese: ankle-length skinny skirts, white T-shirt and ballet pumps. She was barely 20; Calvin was still in charge; Kate Moss and Marky Mark had just been signed up for the ad campaigns; Carolyn Bessette (the her mother cut round the edges of her Simplicity dressmaking patterns. But this is what happened in the 1970s, as I can testify. ‘Scraps of material everywhere, iron permanently on the dining table and the sewing machine always out,’ recalls Waight Keller. She had a great time in Birmingham, she says, describing her childhood as ‘very ordinary, very humble, surrounded by flyovers’. On high days the family would come down to London and visit the Commonwealth Institute – a bit unusual, given how many alternative attractions the capital boasts. Later, in the early noughties, when she was working at Gucci, Waight Keller lived in a garden flat one block away, contemplating its melancholy dilapidation. It has since been transformed into the gleaming Design Museum where we’re now having coffee – her choice of venue. She loves architecture and interiors (she can’t resist collecting 20th-century chairs), and has been heavily involved in the Givenchy flagship that’s now finally opening on London’s Bond Street, in a building that dates back to the 18th century.

I think another reason she has a soft spot for the Design Museum is that she likes to see the underdog win. ‘I always had a map of where I was going. I was the quiet one at school, the one who didn’t look as though she was doing anything, but worked like a maniac at home.’ This wasn’t just the normal teenage impulse not to be taken for a swot. ‘I liked working on my own – pushing myself, and proving everyone who thought “she’s not going to do anything” wrong.’

Waight Keller stayed at Ralph Lauren for three years, and just when everything was becoming comfortable and she’d met Philip Keller, a young architect from Chicago, she got the offer to work on Gucci’s womenswear in London, where Tom Ford ruled like a rock star. If her first two jobs had been high-altitude, this one required an oxygen tank.

‘We were a tiny team and we had to fix all the problems. Tom’s forensic. Ten days before a show, he’d decide he wanted everything changed.’ He was equally specific about his team’s image. ‘You’d get the down stare if you didn’t look quite right,’ she laughs, recalling her Gucci makeover. ‘Tight pencil skirts, flared, velvet trouser suits – always a high heel. I wouldn’t leave the Tube station without changing out of my trainers. It was very dressed-up in that office. That was a learning curve in itself.’