The new indie label packing a serious sartorial punch
For more than two decades, anyone interested in fashion has known about Marni, an artsy-luxe Italian house that punched way beyond its £150million a year turnover in terms of influence and affection. Sometimes sporty, sometimes conceptual, often romantic and occasionally retro, it provided women with interesting yet kind clothes (for which read garments not primarily directed at the male gaze) to which they returned over and over. COS, Zara and co took note and helped themselves to the Marni aesthetic: for a good 15 years, it seemed almost every pair of cropped trousers and most florals had been copied from Marni’s. They probably had.
In 2015, Only The Brave, the holding group that also owns Diesel, acquired full ownership of Marni. A year later, Consuelo Castiglioni, the elegantly tousled visionary who had transformed her family’s fur business into a soft fashion power, left. A new designer, Francesco Risso, from Prada, was appointed and… let’s just say, Risso’s vision does not seem focused on, nor shared by, those loyal Marni customers.
Last spring, three more key members of the old team left: Molly Molloy, head of womenswear, Kristin Forss, head of menswear, and Lucinda Chambers, who was notionally Marni’s stylist, but had always been far more. Chambers appointed Molloy and hired Future Systems, the architect that gave Marni such distinctive, futuristic stores around the world.
What gives this story extra resonance is the persistent suspicion held by many women that, for all the #Timesup narrative, there’s a lack of urgency – and agency – in the fashion world. The departure of Phoebe Philo from Céline, another label that was designed for women to please themselves, sartorially, puts fashion in danger of seeming out of step.
Mulling this over in Chambers’s kitchen over takeaway Indian food feels somehow apposite; fashion bleeds into all our lives, even on a Sunday night in Shepherd’s Bush. And yes, this is the same Lucinda Chambers who worked at British Vogue as its fashion director for 30 years and who, after she was let go last summer by British Vogue’s new editor, Edward Enninful, gave an incendiary interview about the shortcomings of the fashion industry, which was chomped on by the global media, eventually making its way on to Radio 4’s Today show. 2017 proved quite a year for her.
For a few months, a chastened Chambers kept her head down, learning to live outside the Condé Nast bubble (“I haven’t taken a black cab for eight months – I used to live in them”). She moved from an analogue world (at Vogue, she was discouraged from doing social media) to digital, with surprising ease. “For a while, before I got going on other projects, Instagram was a wonderful way for me to keep creating pictures.”
Later this year, she’ll debut a new digital shopping platform. But first, she threw herself into something colleagues had told her to do for years: launching a fashion label alongside Forss and Molloy. Colville (named after the Notting Hill street where David Hockney lived) is so clearly the antithesis of a focus-group product, its very existence is like a metaphorical fist-pump in an industry increasingly dominated by copycat brands and athleisure. Who launches an indie brand based in Milan these days? For years, the answer was no one. “The tax situation is untenable in Italy,” explain Molloy and Forss. “If you pay someone €30,000 a year, it ends up costing the employer €90,000 in insurance and benefits.”
So can these three, with their idiosyncratic vision, emerge from what they call their Marni “cocoon” and make it? Natalie Kingham, fashion and buying director at Matchesfashion.com, which launches Colville on Wednesday, has no doubts. “When you discover three women with their combined experience are collaborating on a collection, you can’t help being excited. We saw the line drawings and knew it was going to be great. There’s a place in fashion right now for small labels with something new to say.”
The plot highlight is that this is three lifelong employees (aged 43-58) doing something for themselves – and coming up with a collection that doesn’t look like anything else on the market. There’s also something joyous, surely, about an internationally minded label headquartered in two kitchens (Forss’s in Milan, where Molloy and Forss are still based and which I imagine to be as sleek and organised as an operating theatre), and Chambers’s kitchen and dining room, which are a Mrs Tiggy-winkle-onhigh-production-values blur of yellow walls, mood boards, red Aga and wooden racks crammed with vintage china. “I don’t think any of us expected to start our own business,” says Chambers. “But what’s great about this is that we’re a team,” says Forss.
They’ve kept Colville tight: just the three of them, a roster of collaborators and supportive factories with in-house patterncutters. It tilts at the Marni customer, says Kingham, but, they stress, it’s not Marni. It’s bolder, quirkier. Colville earrings (co-designed with British jeweller Vicki Sarge) are
huge, the shoes are a sporty mesh flat, which reveals plenty of toe cleavage, the balaclava hats, designed by Stephen Jones, feature outsize peaks. There are jackets with intriguing sleeve “protectors” made from vintage T-shirts, but there are also more conventional pieces: a wool frock-coat, a beautiful black silk wrap shawl-cum-top, a large calico postman’s bag, a hipster plissé skirt “that does wonderful things when you walk” and a bolero jacket that Kingham has her eyes on for her own wardrobe. “It’s a very interesting piece with bomberjacket sleeves, which you can wear with a tailored coat. It feels very modern.”
Their pleasure in clothes is infectious as is the almost contrary unpredictability. “It may be women for women, but we’re not afraid of sexy,” says Molloy, who remembers being pulled to one side when she first joined Marni in 2006 and told that her low neckline wasn’t in the house spirit.
Their tastes are strikingly different. Forss, a quiet but forceful Swede, is the subversive minimalist. She’s head to toe in navy when we meet, with a lightning bolt and the number 13 tattooed on her arms. Chambers is the eclectic magpie (she often spends weekends cutting up items she bought from Portobello Market on Fridays – a recent hit includes a “crime scene” white parka. “Someone asked if it was from Vetements. I love it when your clothes look as though they could have come from anywhere”). Molloy is the bridge, albeit one whose wardrobe “is an explosion of colour and texture, whereas Kristin’s much more about that one perfect bag or coat”.
Molloy, who claims she has curtailed her shopping habit since leaving Marni, is wearing a vintage Yves Saint Laurent blouse, back to front (“if the blouse or dress isn’t working, try it back to front” is my motto). Chambers, who agrees, is in cream cotton Arket trousers, an & Other Stories Breton and an ethnic belt, the provenance of which eludes her. These are women with a vast bank of clothes and even greater reservoirs of creativity.
Somehow, Colville is the summation of their different tastes – that sweet spot in the Venn diagram where what you wear makes you feel emboldened, youthful but pulled together, and it’s beautifully made, in Italy. “We had to do Colville,” jokes Molloy, “because, frankly, there isn’t that much that’s interesting to us out there. The male perspective in fashion is very strong at the moment – and that feels very retrogressive.”
Living in Milan probably re-enforces that sense, they agree. “They start discussing bikini season there in February. They’d be appalled by my chipped nail varnish,” Molloy sighs, surveying what’s left of the red polish on her fingers. “Even in the supermarket you feel you’re being judged.”
They believe Colville is about not being judged, or pandering to ideas of what’s commercial. “The one thing we’ve learned,” says Chambers, “is that you can market research all you like, but if it’s not authentic you’re lost.”
Colville launches on Wednesday on matchesfashion.com
‘It may be women for women, but we’re not afraid of sexy’