CLARE WAIGHT KELLER
A young innovator at Chloé, the first female artistic director at Givenchy & the Englishwoman behind Meghan Markle’s stunning royal wedding gown, Clare Waight Keller is the designer name on everyone’s lips.
A trailblazer at Chloé and Givenchy, and the woman behind Meghan Markle’s royal wedding gown, Clare Waight Keller is the designer name on everyone’s lips.
It’s a mark of a person’s unflappability how they respond to wailing babies. Clare Waight Keller doesn’t even seem to hear the one near us in the restaurant of London’s Design Museum. Isn’t that the kind of person you’d want designing your wedding dress, as she did for Meghan Markle last May; or resuscitating your brand – a feat she has engineered twice, at Chloé and Pringle of Scotland, and is in the process of pulling off for a third time, at Givenchy?
Today in Kensington, not far from her home in Chelsea – where she lives for half of the week with her husband and three children (the other half she’s in Paris), she looks the quintessence of Anglo-Parisian elegance: vintage highwaisted, navy, flap-fronted genuine matelot trousers, a black Givenchy coat, a black Pringle jumper from when she worked there, and a Pocket Givenchy padded shoulder bag – the latest in a string of hits of which she is the author. Along with the hair, a pale chestnut sweep, like one of those Japanese wave paintings by Hokusai, it’s the kind of outfit (minus the bag) that would look as at home striding the cliffs in Cornwall – where she and her family have a farmhouse – as it would meandering 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 still retaining a streak of independence. She had to get her head around the Parisian 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,” she states. “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 old uniform of androgynous suits and flat shoes morphed into Calvinese: ankle-length skinny skirts, white T-shirts and ballet flats (“I actually looked like a boy, my hair was so short”). She was barely 20, Calvin was
still in charge, and Kate Moss and Marky Mark had just been signed up for the ad campaigns. Carolyn Bessette (the woman Meghan Markle has cited as her “everything goals”) ruled the VIP press department even though, as the future wife of John F Kennedy Jr, she was on her way to becoming the biggest celebrity of them all. Waight Keller would ride the elevator with JFK Jr, and see Bessette at breakfast every morning. “She’d come to the office looking as though she’d just rolled out of bed – hair all over the place, quite often in giant men’s sweaters, cropped jeans, little ballet flats or boots – and then when she had meetings she’d go shwoop and transform herself from super- cool street- casual to the most elegant thing you’d ever seen.”
Yet after four years, Waight Keller left to help Ralph Lauren launch his Purple Label – his most elevated line of bespoke men’s suits. She’d never done menswear or tailoring. No pressure.
Although she comes across as placid, something in Waight Keller thrives on challenges. She thinks she was always ambitious. There were no designers in the family – her mother was a legal secretary, her father an engineer draftsman. But from about eight years old, Clare Waight (Keller is her husband Philip’s surname) spent most of her free time at the dining room table in the family’s semi in Birmingham, holding fabric or pins while her mum cut around the edges of her Simplicity dressmaking patterns.
“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 travel 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 just 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 dating back to the 18th century.
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; high heels. 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.”
Gucci was the hottest luxury fashion player in the world, and Waight Keller found herself working alongside such icons as Christopher Bailey, who would later preside over Burberry’s rise into the stratosphere; Frida Giannini, who took over from Ford at Gucci; and Alessandro Michele, who eventually replaced Giannini with such éclat. She has the down-to-earth charm of Bailey (“We used to get hysterical giggles when things became stressful”), but also his toughness.
She was desolate when he left Gucci to head Burberry. Then, in 2005, came the opportunity to lead her own charge. Pringle of Scotland – a heritage brand that had frittered away most of its fashion credibility – had been snapped up by the Fang family, Hong Kong-based retailers eager to make their mark by turning around a failing luxury label. “That,” she notes with satisfaction, “was another huge lesson in terms of identifying what to focus on when you rebuild a brand.”
Despite her success at Pringle, her appointment to Chloé in 2012 shocked many, mainly because she was still under the radar. Even those who did know of the unassuming Waight Keller didn’t see how she could be a fit
“If her first two jobs had been high altitude, this one [working at Gucci] required an oxygen tank.”
for a French house that, symbolically at least, was still a big deal, even if it was no longer the powerhouse it had been under Stella McCartney and Phoebe Philo, who had arrived together from London in 1997 on a rush of Cool Britannia energy to blow the dust off a sleeping French jewel.
When McCartney left to launch her own label (backed by Tom Ford’s Gucci group) in 2001, Philo continued solo, to even further acclaim, turning Chloé into the go-to for attitudinal Anglo-Parisian femininity – with a formidable string of It bags. However, a revolving door of designers after Philo’s departure left the label with a palpable air of decline, and the job meant uprooting the supportive Philip once more – this time to Paris, with their then seven-year- old twin daughters, Charlotte and Amelia, in tow. Plus, Waight Keller was pregnant with their son Harrison, who’s now seven. “I thought, ‘Well, that’s already a pretty decent strike against me.’ It was changing countries and I thought, ‘Oh my God, how am I going to deal with France?’” But then, typically, her follow-up thought was, ‘Why don’t I just get on that train and see?’
She barely got two months of maternity leave, but a grand, 19thcentury apartment – all creamy overtones and choice pieces of midcentury modern furniture – in Paris’s well-heeled 16th arrondissement, two blocks from the Bois de Boulogne, plus the chance for her children to become bilingual, helped ease the struggle. “I don’t think I’ll ever live in something this size again,” she told the Wall Street Journal Magazine in 2016. Even so, the first couple of years at Chloé were chilly. “By then the Chloé aesthetic wasn’t fashionable. Everyone was obsessed with the minimalism Phoebe was doing at Céline. But I couldn’t go too minimal – that’s not what the Chloé customer wanted.”
A quiet self-belief is the constant throughout her career – ‘keep calm and carry on’ could have been coined for her. She was right not to panic. In 2013, when she produced a collection incorporating lace-up denim boots, Chloé’s sales took off. Then came the Drew bag, which, she says, “everyone else was a bit iffy about, but I just knew”. She followed it up with the Faye, the Hudson, the Nile … It turned out that as well as mastering knitwear, tailoring and le flou (that floaty flow integral to Chloé’s DNA), Waight Keller had a sixth sense for the Next Big Thing in bags. The pattern of allowing herself to be underrated, then surpassing all expectations (and then some) was set.
Then the call from Givenchy came. No- one foresaw that, either – not least because under previous creative director Riccardo Tisci, who left in early 2017, Givenchy had cultivated an uncompromisingly hard-as-nails aesthetic that was part The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, part Kim Kardashian – and about as far from Chloé’s soft femininity as it’s possible to get. Under Tisci, Givenchy had become dangerously reliant on sales of sportswear and T-shirts with pictures of Bambi. There was very little that related to Givenchy’s original codes, and nothing of Audrey Hepburn – Hubert de Givenchy’s own muse and most loyal customer. “I was quite straight with them [the Arnault family, which owns Givenchy]. It was very disconnected from what my view of a woman is. I know trainers are ubiquitous and you can wear them to the office [she herself is wearing little zippered Givenchy ankle boots], but as a luxury fashion label, you have to elevate and dream and create beauty.”
The moment she arrived, she made overtures to Hubert de Givenchy himself, who was then 90 years old and had never met her predecessor, Tisci (who has since moved on to Burberry, replacing Bailey in the merry-goround of fashion appointments), and buried herself in the archives. “Hubert’s Givenchy was very sharp and chic – much more radical and experimental than people sometimes assume, because they only know his classic Audrey look.”
Givenchy invited Waight Keller to his house in Paris three weeks before her first show for the maison in September 2017. “It was mind-blowing. That house was from the golden age of fashion: very opulent, incredible 20thcentury art and antiquities and Louissomething furniture, shots of emerald and animal prints – and pictures of Audrey everywhere,” she recalls. Hubert told her Givenchy was “all about the shoulders, darling”. He was thrilled she was reviving its couture wing, which had been officially closed several years earlier. “There were only 15 seamstresses and tailors left,” says Waight Keller. (Dior, Chanel and the London-based Ralph & Russo all have at least 200 ‘petites mains’ or seamstresses in their studios.) “But those 15 had amazing experience – some of them had been there when Hubert was in charge.”
The purity of her first couture show, barely six months after her arrival, blew everyone away. Simultaneously romantic and lasersharp, it was all the more remarkable for having been put together in such a short time. She had already worked out that it was, indeed, all about the shoulders. “He had such a specific type of cutting. He would drape then cut, sometimes without seams. And the Givenchy shoulder is such an archetype – not narrow like Tom Ford’s, not sloping like Armani’s, not tilting up like McQueen’s, but built out, with a lot of structure on the side.”
All the time Waight Keller was keeping another project close to her chest: before she’d even shown her first couture collection, Meghan Markle, newly engaged to Prince Harry and at that point ricocheting wildly between M&S jumpers and £56,000 Ralph & Russo gowns, had approached her about designing her wedding dress. “She’d been following my work for a while, from what I understand,” says Waight Keller.
The commission was confirmed early in 2018 – interestingly, without Waight Keller having to submit any sketches. “It was a pretty open brief,” recalls the designer, who studied pictures of Meghan to gauge her style. “She had a sort-of-idea, which was about simplicity. And I didn’t want to impose anything on her, so it evolved over various conversations. I knew it had to have a sense of occasion, but also fit with the scale of the chapel – that entrance was quite narrow with all those steps. I knew there would be an immediate moment right there.”
The finished dress was glamorous yet rigorously pared back, in doublebonded silk cady – which is notorious for creasing, but featured the subtle luminosity Waight Keller was after. She didn’t make it easy for herself. “Minimalism is really hard to do in white. You can’t hide a thing.”
The scrupulous lack of embellishment meant Meghan’s wedding dress became an exercise in proportions – “how it sat on the shoulders, where it hit the wrists. That two-centimetre gap at the hem so that you could just see the shoes. I wanted it to seem as if she was floating.” The neckline was adapted from the ‘Sabrina’ – created by Hubert for Hepburn when she starred in the 1954 film of the same name – but with an update at the front, which Waight Keller cut straight across “to make it look more modern”.
“A quiet self-belief is the constant throughout her career – ‘ keep calm and carry on’ could have been coined for her.”
Her other triumph, in addition to how touchingly simple and exquisitely refined the dress looked on the day, was that she managed to keep it a secret right to the end. This was partly because Waight Keller, who’d moved back to the UK with her family in 2016 for the twins’ education, was doing all the fittings herself in London. Remember, she’s a dab hand at pinning.
“At the last fitting, Meghan said she was truly thrilled,” says Waight Keller. The dress went backwards and forwards to Paris to be worked on in the atelier, but no- one in the team knew who it was for, because after the couture show in January, a number of high-profile orders had come in. She didn’t even tell her husband Philip until the day before, or the Arnault family until the morning itself.
“I needed to make the final preparations for the veil and dress, so I was quite focused on checking everything was perfect until the time came for Meghan to get into the dress. At that point, suddenly, reality kicked in. It was an excited adrenaline rush,” she says.
Despite all the Markle family dramas in the run-up to the wedding, Waight Keller says, “Meghan was not nervous at all. She was radiant, serene and utterly stunning.” The wedding felt unexpectedly personal, she adds. “There was something quite humbling in the way they [Meghan and Harry] approached it.”
Waight Keller, neck to calf in dark navy, only emerged from the shadows to place the train just so on those steps. During and after the ceremony there was debate on social media as to whether the dress fitted properly, and a contingent who would have liked to see a bit more bling and bluster. But Prince Harry, standing at the altar, told his bride she looked amazing – and most people agreed. Waight Keller herself has always blocked out unhelpful criticism – largely by not reading reviews.
Has her husband forgiven her for keeping him in the dark, I ask. She laughs again. “I knew some people might be angry that I didn’t confide in them, but I just thought it would be a wonderful thing for [Meghan] and the day to truly surprise everyone, and the only way I could be sure of it staying secret was not to tell a soul. And I was right, because once I started telling people I could see it in their faces – it changed everything.”
That’s an understatement. Twelve months into the toughest gig of her career, Waight Keller has revolutionised Givenchy: repeatedly dressing a duchess and scoring a monumental addition to its archives. On the commercial side, Givenchy – which hadn’t had a hit bag since the Antigona designed by Tisci in 2010 – now has the bestselling GV3, a small, soft-but-structured envelope, and the Pocket, a half- quilted shoulder bag.
“I’m a bag person,” says Waight Keller. “They really help create an attitude when you’re designing a collection. They’re like a manifesto. I wear every bag in the collection. I’ll say if I want it to be softer, flatter, slimmer, fatter. I’ll squash it down … A bag is something that sits against your body. It matters how it feels.”
She makes it all sound extremely straightforward, even the commuting. The grand Hausmann flat has now gone (traded in for the Cornish farmhouse that she calls her “palate cleanser”), and Waight Keller now stays in hotels in Paris. “Not the George V,” she clarifies – even though the five-star accommodation would be handy for Givenchy’s HQ. “Givenchy doesn’t have those kinds of budgets.” Besides, she states, she likes staying in different hotels and discovering new areas.
Behind that polite, easy accessibility, she must be ruthlessly focused. How else, in such a short time, could she have broadened Givenchy’s appeal so that it’s no longer only talking to a narrow cohort of Kardashian and Katy Perry fans? For spring/summer 2019, she has moved on from the archives, introducing an elegant quasiutilitarian aesthetic – lightweight tailored jackets that tuck into highwaisted trousers to be worn around the clock, with those mid-height cone heels. It’s her answer, she explains, to athleisure – of which she really isn’t a fan. Functional elegance with a hefty dose of chic pragmatism.