‘As a luxury fashion label you have to elevate and dream and create beauty’

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, 19th-century apartment – all creamy overtones and choice pieces of mid-century 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 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 and had never met her predecessor, Tisci (who has since moved on to Burberry, replacing Bailey in the merry-go-round 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 20th-century art and antiquities and Louis-something 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 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 she’d arrived, blew everyone away. Simultaneously romantic and laser-sharp, it was all the more remarkable for having been put together in such a short time. She’d 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