How India Hicks carved out her own style
‘My father refused to get in the ambulance because it was so hideous’
The fact that India Hicks actively enjoyed Gordonstoun – when famously, her godfather Prince Charles was traumatised by his time there – is surely a mark of the woman. She didn’t even mind that girls were referred to as hags – although surely not India, with her perfect, ruffly, blonde hair (it was mousy then, “and I had a terrible haircut,” she notes) and general aura of au natural beachy beauty. No wonder she was, at one point, a Ralph Lauren model. The make-up artist must have laughed and put her feet up when India arrived at the studio.
She still goes for daily runs, a discipline instilled when she was being educated (“and I use the term loosely,” she says) at the Scottish establishment in the Eighties. One might assume the school also taught her stoicism of the grittiest kind, but her parents had probably laid the ground.
Her father, the interior designer David Hicks, was a fastidious aesthete, even by the standards of his profession. “Everything was about style and good taste. Even his Rolls-royce was custom-coloured chocolate brown.” Her father would drive immense distances in it to avoid the country’s more unsightly areas. He had the name of his watch removed because he didn’t think it looked right, and insisted on the whole family travelling with matching turquoise and orange luggage tags – of all his meticulous foibles, this seems to have mortified India most.
“When he had a heart attack and my mother called an ambulance, my father refused to get in because it was so hideous. He designed his own funeral down to the fabric lining his coffin.”
“It was,” she concedes fondly, “perfect. He was a deeply imposing, tricky character. I think it was hardest for my older brother Ashley (who followed their father into interior design).” But they all knew not to sit on the immaculate, plumped-up cushions and to choose the more uncomfortable Louis Quinze chairs instead.
She reels this off with the air of someone who, long ago, came to terms with the relatives. And hers are quite something. Her maternal grandfather, Louis, Earl of Mountbatten, was the last Viceroy of India (he was murdered in 1979 by the IRA). Her grandmother, Edwina Mountbatten, was a noted beauty, painted by Salvador Dali, and an intrepid explorer, who put her fortune to good use helping those in need during the Second World War. Their daughter, Pamela (India’s mother), a great-niece of Tsarina Alexandra of Russia, was lady-in-waiting to the Princess Elizabeth and a bridesmaid at her wedding to Prince Philip in 1947.
See what just happened there? I spent several paragraphs introducing Hicks via her connections. It is the story of her life. At a lunch to introduce the India Hicks brand to some journalists and influencers recently in the garden of Ruth Chapman, co-founder of matchesfashion.com, Hicks goodnaturedly confessed that it’s only recently that she feels she has stepped away from being “someone’s daughter”, someone’s sister and the bridesmaid who got to hold Lady Diana’s 25ft train up the steps to St Paul’s in 1981.
The reason for her emancipation was the US launch of India Hicks Londonharbour Island back in 2015. It is a lifestyle collection to trump all lifestyles, featuring everything from jolly, tasselled earrings in coral (a similar hue I note, to the accent colours in one of the rooms in her Oxfordshire home), vintage style kaftans (the kind I can imagine her mother wearing in the Sixties), scented candles, lacquered boxes, her own natural skin care, simple leather satchels and (I think we can all guess what prompted this) plain black luggage tags…
All of the product descriptions, which have the same light intimacy as her conversation, and are peppered with delicious asides that must make many Americans think they’ve died and gone to the Kingdom of Heavenly Etail. This cartridge bag was based on one her father favoured: a sleek shoulder bag finished with a gleaming gold H is called Lady P. A wooden charm pendant was designed with the help of her son Amory during one of their African adventures.
There is so much that draws on her family and history including the “accessible-luxury” prices. Her mother “loved shopping from catalogues”, says India. Even Edwina was relatively frugal, “despite being able to afford couture. It’s just the way that generation were. My mother was brought up during the war and isn’t the least spoiled. She used to sit on her pink sofa ordering clothes… she was incredibly stylish. Somehow she’d find the perfect shade, although I think she used to consult my father a lot.”
India left England at 19 and never returned. There were mad adventures with “a crazy Greek” she’d met at Gordonstoun (they went bungee jumping on a piece of string, long before bungee jumping was legal – not that the string ever was). Her father directed her to Florence where his friend Emilio Pucci lived. Pucci asked her to model his swimsuits and introduced her to his pool, which, she recalls, had an ice-box in it.
Eventually she pitched up in New York, where she fell into the Ralph Lauren gig. “The modelling never really amounted to much,” she says with characteristic self-deprecation. After a few years she took some time out to decompress on Windermere Island in the Bahamas – her father had built a house there, which India describes as “a Greek mausoleum”. The island could feel quite remote and windswept at times. But it suited her monastic moment.
It was only when she decided to take a diving course on the neighbouring Harbour Island that it ended. This was when she met David Flint Wood, a dashing romantic who’d chucked in his job at Saatchi & Saatchi in London to run a hotel in the Caribbean. Four months later, India was pregnant with the first of their children (they have five, one of whom, Wesley, they adopted after his mother asked them to help out with his education).
The logistics of the next 25 years, as they criss-crossed the Atlantic, making sure one of them was in England for their children’s major school events, while India managed a career that saw her working with Crabtree & Evelyn and licensing her name to Bergdorf Goodman in New
York, make the juggling the rest of us go in for look Very Paltry Indeed.
Just to keep them both on their toes, the couple recently built a house, from scratch, in some fields she’d inherited near her mother’s house in Oxfordshire. America Farm is a white stuccoed paradigm of neo-georgian symmetry, with interiors that are simpler than her father’s – think light walls and one focal colour in each room – but just as pleasing. Even if she did inherit some rather tasty furniture and paintings, God only knows how she and David found time to finish it in 200 years, let alone two. In another era, India, like her grandmother, would have been running – albeit via the conduit of a spouse – a corner of the British Empire.
And, yet, still she had that daughterof-sister-of-bridesmaid-of thing. Until 2015 and the birth of India Hicks London-harbour Island. It isn’t only that the business is hers, rather than a licence, but that it uses “social selling, a model like the one Avon or Tupperware operate”. Vendors are called “ambassadors”, and there are now 2,500 across the US – which is why, in addition to the UK trips, she’s now flying to the company’s Santa Monica offices every month.
“But the number of ambassadors is irrelevant,” she points out. “You could have 50 doing the same amount of business as 4,000.” What’s more important to her is that she’s creating jobs for women, “many of whom may have taken time out to have families and found it hard to get back into work. It’s the ultimate flexible career: they choose how much they want to work and buy the samples from that part of the range they like best.” For India, “who wasn’t really expected to do anything much career wise”, this is the ultimate achievement – along with her family. She is tremendously close to her mother, who occasionally features on her Instagram and website. “Until I was 13, my parents travelled and we were brought up by nannies. But after that, my mother was on hand all the time. She is so stoical and patient and fantastically funny. If ever I find myself losing it in an airport queue, I try to imagine how my mother would behave.” Their royal bridesmaids’ dresses now hang in glass cases, in a bedroom at America Farm. India can remember all the details from that hot July day in 1981, including her mother telling her to wave, “because that’s what people would expect” – and she’s happy to talk about it. Perhaps because it no longer defines her.
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