Louise Trotter: the influencer
She’s the inspired designer who reinvented Joseph’s working wardrobe. So, how did she do it? And what exactly does this force of fashion wear to the office?
FIRST OF ALL, I’m curious to see what the woman who reinvented Joseph is wearing – I mean, exactly, what she’s wearing and how she’s wearing it. Not just because I personally want to wear almost everything she sends down the catwalk every six months but because it’s the one question every friend and colleague demands to know when they find out I’ve interviewed her, as in: ‘Oh, I love what she does, she’s so cool, what was she wearing?’ So desperate is everyone to know what Louise Trotter wears on a casual day at work, I feel like I’m in possession of sacred fashion intel that could cure us all of our personal style defects. For the record, then: a pair of cream trousers – not just any old cream trousers, mind – these are wide-legged ‘super-heavy weight’ silk acetate numbers that retain their crease down the front as she flops on the sofa next to me and, as she points out, are softly boned like a corset around the middle ‘to hold everything in’. They appeared in her pre-s/s’16 collection and have, sadly, all sold out (because of course I checked). And then there’s the fine cotton shirt she’s got on in just-the-right-shade-ofn-ude-pink. ‘I collect vintage nudes,’ she confesses as she rolls up her shirt sleeves just so. She also wears the most ginormous gold aviator frames – the kind of specs worn by only the most confident of creatives. And on her feet? Gently scuffed Stan Smiths that say ‘I don’t have time for heels because before I got into the office at 8.30am to finalise the spring/ summer ‘18 collection I was racing around
at home after my three children Gaia, aged three, Milo, four, and Coco, seven.’
Her look is worthy of analysis because it pretty much sums up the kind of on-point, easy-to-wear, style-over-trend designs she’s been doing at Joseph these past eight years. She started without fanfare at first, in 2009, quietly retuning the Joseph archives and re-nosing its foundations. Back then you’d see a woman in a pair of clever workwear trousers or an oversized Shetland sweater and in silent recognition just nod your head and think, ‘Joseph’. And then, BOOM! In 2014, she showed her first catwalk collection, and the secret was out.
‘Joseph was a bit of a sleeping giant when I joined,’ she says in her Sunderland lilt – it’s comforting, but also a sharp reminder of how few, if any, Mackem (not to be confused with Geordie) creative directors there must be in the world of high fashion, particularly working in Paris, where we are right now, in her mezzanine office that looks out over a bustling design studio. ‘So when I decided to show, it had to mean something,’ she says of her debut catwalk in London, which came as the brand celebrated its Brompton Road flagship’s 25th year. ‘And then, well, I sort of pushed it, like, really pushed it.’ Cue last year’s winter collection that looked as if she’d ripped up the rule book, subverting the Joseph tailoring with inside-out seams, hook-and-eye corsetry and sweaters that looked as if the giants of Brobdingnag had been enlisted to knit them. After that, there was no putting the genie back in the bottle. Her follow up last summer could be summed up as athleisure on acid – all flyaway parachute silks, glossy wrap skirts, sportswear brights and flyaway drawstrings. And for this season (the clothes in-store now) she made her most convincing case yet for modern workwear – great trouser suits, midi-dresses, easy coats and brilliant slouchy sweaters. Needless to say, her instinct for feeding hot trends into wearable designs is becoming very much her thing.
She is to the Noughteens what the late founder Joseph Ettedgui was to his eponymous
brand in the 1990s. Back then she, like many of us in our forties, had her nose pressed up against the window of the Brompton Street store, figuring out how to pay the rent and buy something, anything, from Joseph. ‘For me, it was his trousers. To own a pair of Joseph trousers was everything. It was a wardrobe milestone, a rite of passage.’ Now steeped in the brand she once yearned to wear, her design credo echoes that of its founder: ‘Joseph loved and respected women. He saw it as his job to create a covetable uniform that every woman could wear and that spirit is still embedded in everything we do.’
That, together with gut instinct for what women want to wear and sheer hard-graft, has brought her to this point. She always wanted to be a fashion designer – not the norm in 1980s Sunderland, ‘It was a bit like saying I want to fly a rocket to the moon’ – and so she started out, as many wannabe designers do, by attacking her school uniform, scissoring herself a ra-ra skirt and being sent home for her efforts. Luckily, Louise’s grandmother was a seamstress who encouraged her to take down the curtains and make tops out of them – her first designs. By her teens, she was making all her own clothes, ‘it was a form of escape, using fashion to set yourself apart’, albeit heavily influenced by music culture gangs and whatever band she was listening to at the time – New Order and The Jam. Single-minded in her pursuit, she chose to study fashion at Newcastle Poly ‘because even then I was pragmatic and it offered merchandising and I was like, “This is going to be my career.”’ It will come as no surprise to those of you who love her style to learn that when she graduated it was with a collection of beautifully cut men’s tailoring for women.
Her first job was with Lucille Lewin, founder and then owner of Whistles and the Ab-fab Edina of her day, mostly minus the Bolly and bad behaviour: ‘People were terrified of her and warned me, “Do not go and work for Lucille,” but she trusted me and I adored her; she’ll always be my fashion mother.’ Still in her twenties, Lewin made her creative director
IT WAS A FORM OF ESCAPE, USING FASHION TO SET YOURSELF APART
and gave her the task of launching Whistles’ own label. By the time she left, seven years later, it was clocking up 80% of Whistles’ turnover. From there, she was hired by Calvin Klein himself and became, as she puts it, ‘Calvinised’: ‘You arrived at your office and everything was black, including the Post-it notes. You had to write with a silver pen. You couldn’t have anything but a white orchid on your desk and they were literally painting the office white all the time. After that, she went to Gap – in its heyday, with Emma Hill of Mulberry fame on bags – and learned ‘how to create something covetable for 50 bucks’. ‘At Gap they’d ask, “Do you really believe in this, because we’re going to buy half a million of them”; the pressure was immense and I’ve never worked harder in my life, but I learned everything about how a really big business operates.’ Stints at Tommy Hilfiger and Jigsaw followed before settling at Joseph.
‘I’ve been so lucky,’ she sighs, ‘each city has come at the right time in my life. The ’90s in London was amazing for fashion and music, New York offered me everything that I needed, I’d just got married, it was so much fun and those jobs really accelerated my career. And then I was able to have my children in Paris and, you know, it’s a much slower pace here,’ she muses. If Louise Trotter considers her life slow-paced right now, I dread to think what fast-paced looks like. While the Joseph design studio is in Paris, all other operations of this global company (with 100 stores everywhere
from Beirut to Beijing) are based in London – if only a Eurostar platinum card existed, she’d have one. She regularly shuttles her family between two homes – a snug townhouse in Holland Park where the walls are festooned with taxidermy and a breezy apartment in Saint Germain. She credits her Japanese husband, Yuske, a former banker, for shouldering much of the childcare when he’s not working as a photographer. ‘It’s handy him being Japanese because he helps me navigate the, erm, dynamics of a Japanese company,’ she adds diplomatically of Onward Kashiyama, the Japanese manufacturing and distribution giant that owns Joseph.
Oh, how times have changed! To be writing so often about designers’ challenging childcare needs says it all about who’s ruling high-end fashion these days. Louise now joins a generation of celebrated working-mum designers that includes Stella Mccartney, Phoebe Philo at Céline and Clare Waight Keller at Givenchy – but those women haven’t been around that long. Before they came along, apart from the untouchables – Chanel, Rei Kawakubo and Miuccia Prada – fashion was full of white noise that largely belittled the efforts of women designers. Men, some sneered, not trapped by all that boring practical stuff, like how comfortably clothes fit or feel to wear, could let their imaginations run rampant and therefore only they could truly move fashion on.
‘Yeah, I’m the opposite of that,’ says Louise, frankly. ‘I do wear my own designs and I’m constantly thinking about how to refine them, what worked, what didn’t. For me, clothes are not art, they’re to be worn and enjoyed. There’s nothing worse than buying a piece of clothing that I never wear – the older I get, the more I don’t want pieces like that, they’re a waste of money, they annoy me! It’s those subtle changes that I see in all the women around me, I watch the nuances of how friends dress all the time, how they’re putting things together, their own sense of style, dressing for themselves and I’m trying to learn that every single day, because it’s never just about what looks good. It’s got to feel right, too.’ Amen to that.
FOR ME, CLOTHES ARE NOT ART. THEY’ RE TO BE WORN AND ENJOYED