The department store goes mini
Charlie Gowans-eglinton meets Alex Eagle, the woman selling a one-stop kind of indulgence, from clothes to art, to last a lifetime
‘Men aren’t really fussing in the morning. They have this uniform, and it means that getting dressed is easy. They get dressed at 6am the same as they would at 9am or noon. They put things in a suitcase, and they don’t seem to be stressed. Women can be a bit erratic in what we buy, and we might end up buying things in sales. I was turning 30, and then I went off to have a baby: I think I just had even less time. I just wanted to be able to get dressed without the bother.”
For Alex Eagle, the solution was a uniform for women, and a brand that would keep selling the same staples, rather than pulling the rug out from under shoppers every few months with a brand new silhouette. “I don’t like having something for £500 in my shop, and then suddenly it’s 50per cent off. The whole idea is it’s not seasonal, so you’re not fooling your customers. If something’s worth £500, it’ll be worth £500 in two, three, four years’ time.”
In 2015, she started with a simple scarf-neck top in black and white silk, with and without sleeves, sold in her eponymous shop in London’s Soho. “My mum has this Piero de Monzi jacket that she spent a whole month’s wages on when she was in her 20s, that we’ve stolen from each other, back and forth. And that was almost the point of the collection – what are the pieces you wear until they’re threadbare?” And so came crisp cotton shirts, easy silk dresses and lightweight knits, with a focus on quality fabrics and timeless cuts.
“At the same time, we don’t dress like that. I’m never going to make an orange ribbed rollneck, but we sell them by Courrèges, and I love them, I wear them. Isa Arfen makes really lovely dresses: that’s not what the ethos of my collection is, but as a woman, I still want to wear that kind of dress. We try to plug both holes.”
As a result, Eagle’s shop itself is a highly personal edit of both, the wear-forever and the hot-right-now, plus collectable furniture and artworks – an interest that began when Eagle’s father, now an art dealer, would take her gallery hopping as a child. It’s a one-stop shop for the time poor – and, to some extent, cash rich.
“I think that’s what luxury is, it’s saving people’s time.” She has already introduced beauty treatments downstairs. This month sees the store round out its offer with the launch of bespoke suits.
“It’s wearing something smart, but you don’t feel trussed up or try hard. After having a baby, when your body changes, and you don’t feel yourself, you can’t slink – I couldn’t, anyway – into a little sexy backless dress. I still can’t a year later. That’s been really nice to be able to wear something that fits me, and as I shrink, it can shrink with me. The investment of a blazer that costs £1,000, it’s your whole wages in some cases, but it’s pay per wear: buy less and buy better.”
Sitting across from me in a busy café near the store, Eagle looks at ease. Her trouser suit isn’t the stuff of a fashion peacock, even though the colour, a vivid Yves Klein blue, makes it unusual. But Eagle wasn’t always so restrained in her tastes. “There was a fabric shop on Chiswick High Road where I grew up, and I was crazy about it, I would cut things up with no idea how to sew them together. I’d walk past these shops – Tom Ford was at Gucci at the time, and he’d make these incredible jeans covered in feathers and beads, £700 jeans, and I’d go into VV Rouleaux and spend all my pocket money on feathers and all the trimmings, and made a total mess.”
Starting at fashion magazines Tank and Harper’s Bazaar, Eagle cut her business teeth doing a stint in PR for Joseph before launching Alex Eagle Studio in 2014. The last few years have been busy ones: Eagle’s empire now includes two “The Store” outposts, Soho Farmhouse in Oxfordshire and Soho House Berlin. The latter is owned by her husband Mark Wadhwa, a commercial property developer and keen Soho property mogul who owns the Vinyl Factory and both Poland Street and Brewer Street car parks in London.
Eagle’s day-to-day life now centres around one-year-old son, Jack, as well as her two stepdaughters and husband. “Jack’s the best thing to ever happen to me. But I’m so pleased I waited to have him. Some women are obviously superwoman, and hats off to them, but my brain was like a baby’s.”
Eagle’s own mother, a TV and film producer, joined as director of the company two years ago, becoming a driving force in propelling the business forward. “We were washing our own face, but now it’s at another level. She’s used to working with teams, and in TV, if you don’t work to a budget, the show doesn’t get made. Any business run like that can work.” Working with her mother meant meetings could happen at home, or while Eagle breastfed – and it also meant she learned to take a step back and trust that her team, and her mother, could steer the ship. “She was always right, my whole life, but it took me until I was in my 30s to think, why don’t I just enjoy that?”