The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
The unstoppable Clare Waight Keller
A game changer at Chloe, the first female artistic director at Givenchy, the Brit behind that royal wedding dress… Lisa Armstrong talks to the designer about becoming a household name this summer
Lisa Armstrong meets Givenchy’s artistic director – the woman Meghan Markle trusted to make the wedding dress of the year
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 next to us in the restaurant of the Design Museum. Isn’t that the kind of person you’d want designing your wedding dress, as she did for Meghan Markle in 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 World’s End in Chelsea, where she lives for half 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. What with the hair, a pale chestnut sweep, like one of those Japanese wave paintings by Kanagawa, 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 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 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 supercool street-casual to the most elegant thing you’d ever seen.’
Yet after four years, Waight Keller left to help Ralph Lauren launch 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. 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
Gucci was the hottest luxury fashion player in the world, and she found herself working alongside 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 to 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, self-effacing Waight Keller didn’t see how she could be a fit 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, Tisci, who left in early 2017, Givenchy had chiselled out an uncompromisingly hard-as-nails aesthetic that was part Lisbeth Salander from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, part Kim Kardashian – and as far from Chloé’s soft femininity as it’s possible to get. Tisci had inherited a shell of a house in 2006 and willed it back to life, but it had become dangerously reliant on sales of sportswear and T-shirts with pictures of Bambi. There was 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
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 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 very 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 double-silk cady, which is notorious for creasing, but had the subtle luminosity Waight Keller was after. She didn’t make it orders had come in.’ She didn’t even tell Philip until the day before – given that she was about to drive down to Cliveden House to stay the night with the bridal party, she didn’t have much choice – 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 adrenalin rush.’ 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 a bit of debate on social media as to whether the dress fitted properly, and a contingent who would have liked to see more bling and bluster. But Prince Harry, standing at the altar, told his bride she looked amazing – and most people agreed. Waight Keller has always blocked out unhelpful criticism – largely by not reading reviews, or at least getting Philip to filter out the more useful comments.
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: dressing (repeatedly) 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 straightforward, even the commuting.