Whether it's in the colour of a faded bar of soap or the way your mother ironed creases into your jeans, fashion can be found everywhere. But only the dedicated few know just where to look. Tamsin Blanchard meets the secret army behind the world's most influential fashion houses
Lucinda Chambers, fashion director of Vogue and one of the fashion industry's most established stylists, admits that her mother's friends still think she works in a hairdressing salon. When she started out on Vogue in 1980, she didn't really know what a stylist did either. And, back then, it wasn't a career option. At the time, the idea of a fashion editor going to work with a fashion designer was unheard of. But as the industry has become more and more sophisticated, so has the role of the stylist - or, as they are often more grandly referred to, the creative director.
Fashion stylists are the people who decide not so much what we are going to wear, but what we are going to buy. They choose the clothes on the pages of the magazines; they decide that Jennifer Lopez looks great in that Versace dress; they are the ones who select the clothes that will make it on to the runway and into the buyers' order books.
The editor of French Vogue, Carine Roitfeld, began life not as a wordsmith or manager, but as a stylist, working with Tom Ford at Gucci and with photographer Mario Testino. And increasingly, the stylists (and the Brits lead the way in this field) are becoming the fashion designers' eyes and ears on the world - the secret weapon who pounds the streets in search of interesting reference material, be it the collar on a vintage dress or an obscure artist's monograph.
'Stylists are much more in demand than they were even a few years ago,' says one London agent. 'Now that so much of design is so homogenised, designers are relying on them because they know what's going on, what's going to sell, what people are wearing on the streets. A stylist used to be a muse, but now you need more of a brain.'
And a good business brain, matched with a sharp eye, can reap major rewards. Stylists can earn anything from £1,000 to £5,000 a day. For a major company, they will be booked for 10 days to work on the show, and there might be the ad campaign on top. A star stylist can earn more in a good week than most of us earn in a year.
The life of a stylist is a peripatetic one. When they are not attending the twice-yearly shows in Paris, Milan or New York, they are usually on their way to somewhere hot - and remote - in search of the ultimate location, or in a hotel room, looking through fabric swatches.
For Katy England, who works with Alexander McQueen, her job is absolute perfection, but she insists, it is not rocket science. 'I didn't know what a stylist was when I left college,' she says. 'Now, with the celebrity culture we have, it seems as though everyone has to have a stylist. Most people could do the job to a degree. Magazines like Heat and Hello! show you how to do it. You can go into Topshop and put a look together.'
To get to her level, however, there is more to it than being able to get dressed in the morning without looking like a bag lady (although the bag- lady look might well be the one that gets your foot in the door). The seven stylists featured here all work in different ways, but the one thing they have in common is their all-consuming passion for fashion. And that's something you can't pick up along the wayside. You have to be born with it.
Lucinda Chambers
Creative director, Marni
For the past few years, one of the hottest show tickets in Milan has been for Marni, the folksy, artisan collection overseen by Consuelo Castiglioni. Fashionistas go crazy for the label's quirky handbags, as well as the charming mix of hand-crafted prints. The label's secret weapon is Lucinda Chambers, mother of three, textile fanatic and fashion director of British Vogue . 'I've done a lot of consultancies, from high street to designer,' says Chambers.
Her work with Marni, which was essentially a fur house, began when she was asked to work on an advertising campaign. The meeting turned into something bigger. 'I thought, why don't we do fashion fur coats? Why don't we make fur coats for younger people?' It was a meeting of minds. Chambers clicked with the family-run business. 'It was more about a way of life, and a way of wearing clothes. We started doing a relaxed, eclectic collection. Nothing is done from a business point of view. It's really, "What do we want to wear? What do our children want to wear?" We never think, "This is groovy and hip."' Whatever the formula, it has certainly worked. Marni's prints are now more influential than its furs, and the fashion world looks forward to each new collection with bated breath. 'They don't want to be big. We've been very surprised by its success. They feel it should be like a family restaurant you keep to yourself.'
Chambers, 42, began her working life after attending Hornsey Art College, as a PA to Vogue 's then editor, Beatrix Miller. 'I couldn't type or anything,' she says, but she enjoyed dressing up for work, and eventually got to assist the fashion director, Grace Coddington. Apart from a few years when she worked with Sally Brampton on the launch of British Elle , she has worked most of her life for Vogue . She spends about 22 weeks of the year away, shooting on location with photographers including Mario Testino, with whom she works a lot. One of her earlier consultancies was for Prada. At the time, nobody had even heard of the label. Chambers worked with Miuccia on the first collections for the brand and continued consulting for seven years.
It's important to Chambers that she is given room to play. She admits to not being a very good businesswoman. She is far more interested in creative freedom. With Marni, there are few constraints. 'Creatively, I can just fly,' she says. Her own house is full of colour and fun, and her collections of fabrics and trimmings which she has been collecting since she was a child. She never throws any out, and they provide her with a constant source of reference material.
'A collection can start with anything,' she says. 'The last one started with a belt. It was an old belt with chains and gold. Everything was based around this belt.' She found it in Portobello market, and knew it was a good find the minute she saw it. 'It can be anything, from pieces of old fabric to a pair of clogs, bedspreads, pencil sharpenings.'
A true creative genius, Chambers finds inspiration in everything. She even keeps all her slivers of old soap because, she says, 'the colours are so pretty'.
Alister Mackie
Works with Sophia Kokosolaki, Marc Jacobs and Martine Sitbon
Since graduating with a first and rave reviews from Central Saint Martins in 1995, Alister Mackie, 32, has been an influential voice in the fashion industry. He began working with Dazed & Confused in 1996 and assisted Katy England, working on fashion stories for the magazine and developing his contacts and experience. He has collaborated on shows with Ghost, Belgian designer Olivier Theyskens and People Corporation - an experimental collection designed by Roland Mouret in the mid-90s. 'I never really thought I would be a textile designer,' he says. 'As term progressed, I got more into casting, styling, accessories and music.'
These days, he has carved out quite a niche for himself as fashion director at Another Magazine, the brainchild of Dazed & Confused founders Jefferson Hack and Rankin Waddell. He combines his job with consultancies for Marc Jacobs and Martine Sitbon menswear, and with Athens-born, London-based designer Sophia Kokosolaki, one of fashion's brightest young stars.
Mackie has worked for five seasons with Kokosolaki. 'We meet up and look at funny references together and I'll bring fabrics and she'll take them sometimes and reinvent them. We'll talk about the vibe of the show. We don't always agree, but by now we totally understand each other.'
They share an interest in music and history. 'For the last show, we were looking at religious paintings. We wanted to do something ritualistic in the presentation. Sophia is very knowledgeable about religious iconography. I react to that. It's always quite pure, minimal and contemporary. We don't ever do period costume.'
As well as his work with Kokosolaki, Mackie is also a menswear expert, consulting on Marc Jacobs in New York and Martine Sitbon in Paris. Ultimately, he hopes that what he does makes a difference somewhere along the line. 'You'd hope it filters to people on the street, otherwise there's no point. You hope it's not just some insider's secret.'
Venetia Scott
Creative director, Marc Jacobs
In the cavernous, overcrowded basement of Steinberg & Tolkien, Venetia Scott, creative director of Marc Jacobs, is in her element. She has been in the King's Road vintage clothing emporium for three minutes and has already snapped up an 80s suede and knit dress by Yves Saint Laurent and a 60s skirt suit. Both items are part of her ongoing research for the New York designer Marc Jacobs, for whom she is another set of eyes and ears. She is often to be found in one of a whole list of small shops, be it Rellik, Sheila Cook, or the costume-hire company Angels & Bermans, all fertile hunting ground for ideas that might end up in one form or another in the much revered and highly influential Marc Jacobs collection.
Scott, who lives with her five-year-old daughter and partner, the photographer Juergen Teller, has a very keen eye. She has been working as Jacobs's creative director since September 1997. When she met Jacobs, they liked each other and seemed to be on the same wavelength.
'Marc is very exacting - but I am, too. It's very intense emotionally with any designer. We're very honest with each other and I'm really blunt. We have sulked and had tantrums. It's like a marriage.' After just one weekend off after the mainline show in November, Scott began working with the team of four designers on the more affordable, more eclectic Marc by Marc Jacobs collection, which is less analysed and rigorously thought through than the main line. She recently worked out that she had taken 50 flights since the beginning of the year. 'It's a strange life because you don't really settle anywhere.'
The phenomenal success of Marc can be judged by the number of copies currently flooding the high street. 'Topshop seem to have made a speciality of it. It's shocking how similar it is.'
Marc is a collection of individual pieces that somehow come with a history, a bit like the vintage finds Scott might pick up on her travels. It's how she shops for clothes. 'A lot of it is quite vintage based,' she says. 'For example, we found an old frock coat and made it in denim and put it through a wash. The first jeans were inspired by when your mum ironed your jeans as a kid and they got that line down the front. Now everyone's got lines down their jeans.'
Katy England
Creative director, Alexander McQueen
'Lee liked the way I looked,' says Katy England, creative director of Alexander McQueen. 'He said he'd noticed what I wore. I had a fantastic nurse's coat with an amazing shoulder detail.' Superficial though it may seem, it was the way Katy England dressed that first drew her to Alexander McQueen's attention.
She was working as the stylist at the Evening Standard, and he was London fashion's new bad boy. He had just completed his second collection. She began working with him on his third, The Birds, shown at Kings Cross, and has been a part of the team ever since. She works part time, allowing her to do other things, like her work for Dazed & Confused and Another Magazine, but is there at every stage of the process, from researching and picking trimmings, to working on the shows themselves.
'In the early stages of the collection, I'm involved like a design assistant,' she says. They are in the middle of working on the pre-collection, an early delivery taster for the main collection, that is traditionally more of an exercise in commerce than showmanship. By December, they will have started work on the main collection for autumn/winter 2003, to be shown in Paris in March. Part of England's job is to keep her eyes open and soak up inspiration, which might come from anywhere - 'Books, films, walking in the street. Sometimes you dream it.' Her ideas will be mixed up with those of the other designers and, of course, McQueen himself, and come out the other side as a collection.
'Lee is under pressure to keep increasing sales, but I try to keep my relationship with him the same. My job here is to inspire him, and help him achieve what he wants to achieve. I can enable his dreams and fantasies to happen. I try to think instinctively how he feels at the moment. It's Lee's collection, at the end of the day. The spark has to be his spark; I try to get that out.'
In many ways, their relationship is like a marriage. There is total trust and understanding. 'We think the same way,' says England. 'It's a bit telepathic sometimes.' However, she recently took some time out to start a family of her own, with her partner, Bobby Gillespie.
Although England, 35, trained as a fashion designer, at Manchester Poly, she says she never seriously thought she would become a designer herself. 'I think I would be capable of making a collection of clothes that girls would want to wear, but I wouldn't proclaim to being a revolutionary designer. There are only a few skilled and amazing designers in the world and Lee is one of them. I could never cut like him. It's a rare skill he's got.' Their partnership works perfectly. 'We're both pretty spontaneous. It's about making an outfit work for the right moment, which might mean hacking the hem off a skirt.' McQueen is famous for setting to a garment with a pair of scissors backstage, moments before it is due to go on the catwalk.
England's personal style continues to inspire McQueen. Today, she is wearing something of an urban pirate look - a reflection of next season's pirate-inspired pre-collection, with old stripy Westwood trousers, a pair of high-heeled clogs and a McQueen skull scarf tied at the waist. She never wears a designer look head to toe. Ever since she was young, dressing has been about making her clothes personal to her, and she is still passionate about what she wears. 'My style is overall a bit scruffy and a bit eclectic. Now I've got a baby, it's whatever I can find nearest in the morning, but I still enjoy the idea of dressing up.'
This season's must-haves include a YSL two-button jacket which she wanted the minute she saw it on the catwalk, and from spring/summer McQueen 2003 (stylists are always at least one season ahead) the 'Katy jacket', a little Victorian military number which might have been made precisely with her in mind.
Katie Grand
Works with Prada and House of Jazz
Katie Grand, 31, has been described as one of most powerful women in fashion. Her magazine, Pop, published by Emap, comes out twice a year, a riot of glossiness designed to indulge her fashion fantasies, and she hopes, those of her readers, too. The first issue featured her friends Stella McCartney, Phoebe Philo, Luella Bartley and the model Liberty Ross on the cover - half naked, and pole dancing. In between issues, Grand flits between her Clerkenwell office from one advertising shoot to the next. This season, she is working on Miss Sixty with super snapper Mario Testino, Miu Miu with Mert and Marcus, Louis Vuitton, and Hugo Boss. Each campaign will require a different view point, a different set of eyes. Twice a year, in the run-up to showtime, she is particularly in demand, with Miuccia Prada in Milan, and her friends, the fledgling, London-based designers, House of Jazz. She was also hired to relaunch of the Italian luxury goods house, Bottega Veneta, with her friend from Central Saint Martins, Giles Deacon ('If you put two 26-year-olds in charge of a luxury goods house, you end up with something quite extreme') and collaborated with her ex-flatmate, Luella Bartley, on her own collection, although they didn't work together this season.
'Miuccia is very obsessed with fashion being fashion and of the moment,' says Grand. 'She loves clothes.' She began working with her on Miu Miu two seasons ago, but was quickly moved 'upstairs' to help out on the main line. 'I'm kind of there as an additional point of view. It's never a case of: "Here are the clothes; put them together."' Grand admits to being obsessed with fashion, too - 'without taking it too seriously'.
In the weeks leading up to the show, Grand works alongside Miuccia and Prada's design director, Fabio Zambernardi. A lot of the final looks that end up on the catwalk and influencing designers - both at the same level as well as on the high street all around the world - are worked out on a dressmaking stand in the studio. 'Fabio will say, "Let's do it white," and I'll say, "Why don't we try the sleeve like that?". Miuccia is very meticulous about the final look.' A few weeks before the show in October, Grand had a conversation with Miuccia that went along the lines of, 'What are you feeling?' 'I said print looks really right - and flat shoes. I had a feeling about Pucci when we were doing the issue of Pop and I did a story with David Sims. Prada couldn't have done anything but flat after the 11cm stilettos of the previous season. Once you put the flat shoe in, you had to make the skirt lengths shorter.' The result was a silhouette that was straighter and shorter that worked with a flat shoe. 'We looked at some books and pieces of clothing, but it's really abstract. That's why I've got so much admiration for Miuccia. She's incredibly funny and actually very girly. We're quite a bad influence in that we'll go off on a tangent together. She likes my sense of humour.'
Grand's taste is, of course, reflected in the way she herself dresses. On the day of our photograph, she is working at Pop, her skin pale, her dark hair messy, dressed in an odd - and slightly stained and grubby - T-shirt decorated with big clunky beads. It was a first prototype from the collection, an experiment in fusing jewellery with clothing. She is also wearing jeans and a pair of high chunky heels. Her mink coat is slung casually over the back of her office chair.
But what does a girl wear to work with Miuccia Prada? 'I'd worn Prada or Miu Miu all week. But one day I wore a Snoopy nightie and she said, "Katy, I love your T-shirt!" She likes things that are trashy done in a luxurious way.'
Sophia Neophitou
Creative director, Roland Mouret and Warren Noronha
As well as working as a stylist on a national newspaper and publishing and editing her own magazine, 10, an ultra-glossy, fashion-obsessed quarterly, Sophia Neophitou makes time to consult on the collections of two London-based designers, Warren Noronha and Roland Mouret. She is a formidable force. She has worked with Noronha since he set up on his own in 2000, and is just embarking on her second season with Mouret, a Frenchman who makes grown-up clothes designed with women like her in mind.
'He identified me as someone who would buy and wear his clothes and take them through different stages of the day,' she says. Her current favourite outfit is a drapey, silk jersey Callaghan dress, worn with an army Parka over the top, and high heels. She never veers far from what most women might class as evening wear, even when she is working. It is this way of dressing - both formal and casual - that fascinates Mouret, and was reflected in the collection he showed in September at the old Saatchi Gallery in north London. 'He said he wanted a woman's perspective. He was nervous that I would come in and say, "I hate this," or be too heavy handed. But I'll only work with clothes I really believe in. It's a really big trust thing.'
Already they have discussed fabrics and colours for the next collection. 'He comes with swatches and asks, "How do you see colours for next season? How do you see fashion going?"' Fashion editors like Neophitou, 36, have a much more rounded view on the season. Designers often operate in more of a vacuum. As well as being her own little fashion forecasting centre, Neophitou finds inspiration outside fashion. 'You could go to a fab flea market in Barcelona and bring something back, or sneak into St Martins' library and pretend to be a student. People are your best inspiration - students, old people, funny odd things catch your eye.'
For her fashion stories, Neophitou says it is possible to work miracles. But working with a designer on a show is different. It is a delicate process. 'I don't want to overshadow the collection with my styling. It should be cleverly anonymous. Styling a show is a different thing to a consultancy. You have to get into the designer's mind set. You are there for them 24/7. So much energy, time, love and care goes into it. You are 100 per cent involved.'
Charlotte Stockdale
Works with Paul Smith, Dolce e Gabbana and Patrick Cox
'Different designers ask for different things and have different needs at different times,' says Charlotte Stockdale, the 32-year-old stylist and contributing editor to British Vogue and indie fashion mag, 10 . And she should know. This season alone, Stockdale has worked with Paul Smith in London, Dolce e Gabbana in Milan and the lingerie giant Victoria's Secret in New York. On the day we caught up with her, she was preparing for a new advertising shoot with shoe designer Patrick Cox, working with photographer David LaChappelle and model Sophie Dahl.
'I have worked with designers where they have wanted me to help design,' she says. 'But that's not the case with Paul Smith or Dolce e Gabbana.' Both have strong ideas of what their collections are about. 'The clothes are there, but it's how you put them together. Are you emphasising the sexiness? If I put a corset over that shirt and shorten that skirt, that's sexy. My role is much more the putting together of a collection. That will influence the direction it takes. What goes down the runway is what people want to buy.'
Stockdale is the daughter of a baronet and was educated at Heathfield, Ascot, before trying her hand at acting, opera singing and modelling. It was then that she discovered the other world of fashion - behind the camera. 'I have absolutely no training,' she says. 'I'm simply opinionated.' And her opinions have certainly got her noticed. She has worked for The Face and Dazed & Confused as well as Harper's Bazaar and is currently under contract to Vogue .
When In Bed with Madonna director Alek Keshishian was looking for a stylist to work with him on the Max Factor advertising campaign with Madonna in 1999, he got in touch with Stockdale. She commissioned outfits from Chloé and Versace, as well as a mask from London-based jewellery designer Sarah Harmarnee. The job of a stylist is as much about knowing who to contact for what, as how to put the look together.
'I'd do my own collection, but I know what a massive pressure it is. You need backers and you need to sell. It's a business, which is what a lot of people forget. You're not doing an art work, you're doing a collection. It would have to be global from the word go. It's too much of a responsibility.'
THE ORIGINAL RESOURCE: GUARDIAN .CO.UK
Fashion stylists are the people who decide not so much what we are going to wear, but what we are going to buy. They choose the clothes on the pages of the magazines; they decide that Jennifer Lopez looks great in that Versace dress; they are the ones who select the clothes that will make it on to the runway and into the buyers' order books.
The editor of French Vogue, Carine Roitfeld, began life not as a wordsmith or manager, but as a stylist, working with Tom Ford at Gucci and with photographer Mario Testino. And increasingly, the stylists (and the Brits lead the way in this field) are becoming the fashion designers' eyes and ears on the world - the secret weapon who pounds the streets in search of interesting reference material, be it the collar on a vintage dress or an obscure artist's monograph.
'Stylists are much more in demand than they were even a few years ago,' says one London agent. 'Now that so much of design is so homogenised, designers are relying on them because they know what's going on, what's going to sell, what people are wearing on the streets. A stylist used to be a muse, but now you need more of a brain.'
And a good business brain, matched with a sharp eye, can reap major rewards. Stylists can earn anything from £1,000 to £5,000 a day. For a major company, they will be booked for 10 days to work on the show, and there might be the ad campaign on top. A star stylist can earn more in a good week than most of us earn in a year.
The life of a stylist is a peripatetic one. When they are not attending the twice-yearly shows in Paris, Milan or New York, they are usually on their way to somewhere hot - and remote - in search of the ultimate location, or in a hotel room, looking through fabric swatches.
For Katy England, who works with Alexander McQueen, her job is absolute perfection, but she insists, it is not rocket science. 'I didn't know what a stylist was when I left college,' she says. 'Now, with the celebrity culture we have, it seems as though everyone has to have a stylist. Most people could do the job to a degree. Magazines like Heat and Hello! show you how to do it. You can go into Topshop and put a look together.'
To get to her level, however, there is more to it than being able to get dressed in the morning without looking like a bag lady (although the bag- lady look might well be the one that gets your foot in the door). The seven stylists featured here all work in different ways, but the one thing they have in common is their all-consuming passion for fashion. And that's something you can't pick up along the wayside. You have to be born with it.
Lucinda Chambers
Creative director, Marni
For the past few years, one of the hottest show tickets in Milan has been for Marni, the folksy, artisan collection overseen by Consuelo Castiglioni. Fashionistas go crazy for the label's quirky handbags, as well as the charming mix of hand-crafted prints. The label's secret weapon is Lucinda Chambers, mother of three, textile fanatic and fashion director of British Vogue . 'I've done a lot of consultancies, from high street to designer,' says Chambers.
Her work with Marni, which was essentially a fur house, began when she was asked to work on an advertising campaign. The meeting turned into something bigger. 'I thought, why don't we do fashion fur coats? Why don't we make fur coats for younger people?' It was a meeting of minds. Chambers clicked with the family-run business. 'It was more about a way of life, and a way of wearing clothes. We started doing a relaxed, eclectic collection. Nothing is done from a business point of view. It's really, "What do we want to wear? What do our children want to wear?" We never think, "This is groovy and hip."' Whatever the formula, it has certainly worked. Marni's prints are now more influential than its furs, and the fashion world looks forward to each new collection with bated breath. 'They don't want to be big. We've been very surprised by its success. They feel it should be like a family restaurant you keep to yourself.'
Chambers, 42, began her working life after attending Hornsey Art College, as a PA to Vogue 's then editor, Beatrix Miller. 'I couldn't type or anything,' she says, but she enjoyed dressing up for work, and eventually got to assist the fashion director, Grace Coddington. Apart from a few years when she worked with Sally Brampton on the launch of British Elle , she has worked most of her life for Vogue . She spends about 22 weeks of the year away, shooting on location with photographers including Mario Testino, with whom she works a lot. One of her earlier consultancies was for Prada. At the time, nobody had even heard of the label. Chambers worked with Miuccia on the first collections for the brand and continued consulting for seven years.
It's important to Chambers that she is given room to play. She admits to not being a very good businesswoman. She is far more interested in creative freedom. With Marni, there are few constraints. 'Creatively, I can just fly,' she says. Her own house is full of colour and fun, and her collections of fabrics and trimmings which she has been collecting since she was a child. She never throws any out, and they provide her with a constant source of reference material.
'A collection can start with anything,' she says. 'The last one started with a belt. It was an old belt with chains and gold. Everything was based around this belt.' She found it in Portobello market, and knew it was a good find the minute she saw it. 'It can be anything, from pieces of old fabric to a pair of clogs, bedspreads, pencil sharpenings.'
A true creative genius, Chambers finds inspiration in everything. She even keeps all her slivers of old soap because, she says, 'the colours are so pretty'.
Alister Mackie
Works with Sophia Kokosolaki, Marc Jacobs and Martine Sitbon
Since graduating with a first and rave reviews from Central Saint Martins in 1995, Alister Mackie, 32, has been an influential voice in the fashion industry. He began working with Dazed & Confused in 1996 and assisted Katy England, working on fashion stories for the magazine and developing his contacts and experience. He has collaborated on shows with Ghost, Belgian designer Olivier Theyskens and People Corporation - an experimental collection designed by Roland Mouret in the mid-90s. 'I never really thought I would be a textile designer,' he says. 'As term progressed, I got more into casting, styling, accessories and music.'
These days, he has carved out quite a niche for himself as fashion director at Another Magazine, the brainchild of Dazed & Confused founders Jefferson Hack and Rankin Waddell. He combines his job with consultancies for Marc Jacobs and Martine Sitbon menswear, and with Athens-born, London-based designer Sophia Kokosolaki, one of fashion's brightest young stars.
Mackie has worked for five seasons with Kokosolaki. 'We meet up and look at funny references together and I'll bring fabrics and she'll take them sometimes and reinvent them. We'll talk about the vibe of the show. We don't always agree, but by now we totally understand each other.'
They share an interest in music and history. 'For the last show, we were looking at religious paintings. We wanted to do something ritualistic in the presentation. Sophia is very knowledgeable about religious iconography. I react to that. It's always quite pure, minimal and contemporary. We don't ever do period costume.'
As well as his work with Kokosolaki, Mackie is also a menswear expert, consulting on Marc Jacobs in New York and Martine Sitbon in Paris. Ultimately, he hopes that what he does makes a difference somewhere along the line. 'You'd hope it filters to people on the street, otherwise there's no point. You hope it's not just some insider's secret.'
Venetia Scott
Creative director, Marc Jacobs
In the cavernous, overcrowded basement of Steinberg & Tolkien, Venetia Scott, creative director of Marc Jacobs, is in her element. She has been in the King's Road vintage clothing emporium for three minutes and has already snapped up an 80s suede and knit dress by Yves Saint Laurent and a 60s skirt suit. Both items are part of her ongoing research for the New York designer Marc Jacobs, for whom she is another set of eyes and ears. She is often to be found in one of a whole list of small shops, be it Rellik, Sheila Cook, or the costume-hire company Angels & Bermans, all fertile hunting ground for ideas that might end up in one form or another in the much revered and highly influential Marc Jacobs collection.
Scott, who lives with her five-year-old daughter and partner, the photographer Juergen Teller, has a very keen eye. She has been working as Jacobs's creative director since September 1997. When she met Jacobs, they liked each other and seemed to be on the same wavelength.
'Marc is very exacting - but I am, too. It's very intense emotionally with any designer. We're very honest with each other and I'm really blunt. We have sulked and had tantrums. It's like a marriage.' After just one weekend off after the mainline show in November, Scott began working with the team of four designers on the more affordable, more eclectic Marc by Marc Jacobs collection, which is less analysed and rigorously thought through than the main line. She recently worked out that she had taken 50 flights since the beginning of the year. 'It's a strange life because you don't really settle anywhere.'
The phenomenal success of Marc can be judged by the number of copies currently flooding the high street. 'Topshop seem to have made a speciality of it. It's shocking how similar it is.'
Marc is a collection of individual pieces that somehow come with a history, a bit like the vintage finds Scott might pick up on her travels. It's how she shops for clothes. 'A lot of it is quite vintage based,' she says. 'For example, we found an old frock coat and made it in denim and put it through a wash. The first jeans were inspired by when your mum ironed your jeans as a kid and they got that line down the front. Now everyone's got lines down their jeans.'
Katy England
Creative director, Alexander McQueen
'Lee liked the way I looked,' says Katy England, creative director of Alexander McQueen. 'He said he'd noticed what I wore. I had a fantastic nurse's coat with an amazing shoulder detail.' Superficial though it may seem, it was the way Katy England dressed that first drew her to Alexander McQueen's attention.
She was working as the stylist at the Evening Standard, and he was London fashion's new bad boy. He had just completed his second collection. She began working with him on his third, The Birds, shown at Kings Cross, and has been a part of the team ever since. She works part time, allowing her to do other things, like her work for Dazed & Confused and Another Magazine, but is there at every stage of the process, from researching and picking trimmings, to working on the shows themselves.
'In the early stages of the collection, I'm involved like a design assistant,' she says. They are in the middle of working on the pre-collection, an early delivery taster for the main collection, that is traditionally more of an exercise in commerce than showmanship. By December, they will have started work on the main collection for autumn/winter 2003, to be shown in Paris in March. Part of England's job is to keep her eyes open and soak up inspiration, which might come from anywhere - 'Books, films, walking in the street. Sometimes you dream it.' Her ideas will be mixed up with those of the other designers and, of course, McQueen himself, and come out the other side as a collection.
'Lee is under pressure to keep increasing sales, but I try to keep my relationship with him the same. My job here is to inspire him, and help him achieve what he wants to achieve. I can enable his dreams and fantasies to happen. I try to think instinctively how he feels at the moment. It's Lee's collection, at the end of the day. The spark has to be his spark; I try to get that out.'
In many ways, their relationship is like a marriage. There is total trust and understanding. 'We think the same way,' says England. 'It's a bit telepathic sometimes.' However, she recently took some time out to start a family of her own, with her partner, Bobby Gillespie.
Although England, 35, trained as a fashion designer, at Manchester Poly, she says she never seriously thought she would become a designer herself. 'I think I would be capable of making a collection of clothes that girls would want to wear, but I wouldn't proclaim to being a revolutionary designer. There are only a few skilled and amazing designers in the world and Lee is one of them. I could never cut like him. It's a rare skill he's got.' Their partnership works perfectly. 'We're both pretty spontaneous. It's about making an outfit work for the right moment, which might mean hacking the hem off a skirt.' McQueen is famous for setting to a garment with a pair of scissors backstage, moments before it is due to go on the catwalk.
England's personal style continues to inspire McQueen. Today, she is wearing something of an urban pirate look - a reflection of next season's pirate-inspired pre-collection, with old stripy Westwood trousers, a pair of high-heeled clogs and a McQueen skull scarf tied at the waist. She never wears a designer look head to toe. Ever since she was young, dressing has been about making her clothes personal to her, and she is still passionate about what she wears. 'My style is overall a bit scruffy and a bit eclectic. Now I've got a baby, it's whatever I can find nearest in the morning, but I still enjoy the idea of dressing up.'
This season's must-haves include a YSL two-button jacket which she wanted the minute she saw it on the catwalk, and from spring/summer McQueen 2003 (stylists are always at least one season ahead) the 'Katy jacket', a little Victorian military number which might have been made precisely with her in mind.
Katie Grand
Works with Prada and House of Jazz
Katie Grand, 31, has been described as one of most powerful women in fashion. Her magazine, Pop, published by Emap, comes out twice a year, a riot of glossiness designed to indulge her fashion fantasies, and she hopes, those of her readers, too. The first issue featured her friends Stella McCartney, Phoebe Philo, Luella Bartley and the model Liberty Ross on the cover - half naked, and pole dancing. In between issues, Grand flits between her Clerkenwell office from one advertising shoot to the next. This season, she is working on Miss Sixty with super snapper Mario Testino, Miu Miu with Mert and Marcus, Louis Vuitton, and Hugo Boss. Each campaign will require a different view point, a different set of eyes. Twice a year, in the run-up to showtime, she is particularly in demand, with Miuccia Prada in Milan, and her friends, the fledgling, London-based designers, House of Jazz. She was also hired to relaunch of the Italian luxury goods house, Bottega Veneta, with her friend from Central Saint Martins, Giles Deacon ('If you put two 26-year-olds in charge of a luxury goods house, you end up with something quite extreme') and collaborated with her ex-flatmate, Luella Bartley, on her own collection, although they didn't work together this season.
'Miuccia is very obsessed with fashion being fashion and of the moment,' says Grand. 'She loves clothes.' She began working with her on Miu Miu two seasons ago, but was quickly moved 'upstairs' to help out on the main line. 'I'm kind of there as an additional point of view. It's never a case of: "Here are the clothes; put them together."' Grand admits to being obsessed with fashion, too - 'without taking it too seriously'.
In the weeks leading up to the show, Grand works alongside Miuccia and Prada's design director, Fabio Zambernardi. A lot of the final looks that end up on the catwalk and influencing designers - both at the same level as well as on the high street all around the world - are worked out on a dressmaking stand in the studio. 'Fabio will say, "Let's do it white," and I'll say, "Why don't we try the sleeve like that?". Miuccia is very meticulous about the final look.' A few weeks before the show in October, Grand had a conversation with Miuccia that went along the lines of, 'What are you feeling?' 'I said print looks really right - and flat shoes. I had a feeling about Pucci when we were doing the issue of Pop and I did a story with David Sims. Prada couldn't have done anything but flat after the 11cm stilettos of the previous season. Once you put the flat shoe in, you had to make the skirt lengths shorter.' The result was a silhouette that was straighter and shorter that worked with a flat shoe. 'We looked at some books and pieces of clothing, but it's really abstract. That's why I've got so much admiration for Miuccia. She's incredibly funny and actually very girly. We're quite a bad influence in that we'll go off on a tangent together. She likes my sense of humour.'
Grand's taste is, of course, reflected in the way she herself dresses. On the day of our photograph, she is working at Pop, her skin pale, her dark hair messy, dressed in an odd - and slightly stained and grubby - T-shirt decorated with big clunky beads. It was a first prototype from the collection, an experiment in fusing jewellery with clothing. She is also wearing jeans and a pair of high chunky heels. Her mink coat is slung casually over the back of her office chair.
But what does a girl wear to work with Miuccia Prada? 'I'd worn Prada or Miu Miu all week. But one day I wore a Snoopy nightie and she said, "Katy, I love your T-shirt!" She likes things that are trashy done in a luxurious way.'
Sophia Neophitou
Creative director, Roland Mouret and Warren Noronha
As well as working as a stylist on a national newspaper and publishing and editing her own magazine, 10, an ultra-glossy, fashion-obsessed quarterly, Sophia Neophitou makes time to consult on the collections of two London-based designers, Warren Noronha and Roland Mouret. She is a formidable force. She has worked with Noronha since he set up on his own in 2000, and is just embarking on her second season with Mouret, a Frenchman who makes grown-up clothes designed with women like her in mind.
'He identified me as someone who would buy and wear his clothes and take them through different stages of the day,' she says. Her current favourite outfit is a drapey, silk jersey Callaghan dress, worn with an army Parka over the top, and high heels. She never veers far from what most women might class as evening wear, even when she is working. It is this way of dressing - both formal and casual - that fascinates Mouret, and was reflected in the collection he showed in September at the old Saatchi Gallery in north London. 'He said he wanted a woman's perspective. He was nervous that I would come in and say, "I hate this," or be too heavy handed. But I'll only work with clothes I really believe in. It's a really big trust thing.'
Already they have discussed fabrics and colours for the next collection. 'He comes with swatches and asks, "How do you see colours for next season? How do you see fashion going?"' Fashion editors like Neophitou, 36, have a much more rounded view on the season. Designers often operate in more of a vacuum. As well as being her own little fashion forecasting centre, Neophitou finds inspiration outside fashion. 'You could go to a fab flea market in Barcelona and bring something back, or sneak into St Martins' library and pretend to be a student. People are your best inspiration - students, old people, funny odd things catch your eye.'
For her fashion stories, Neophitou says it is possible to work miracles. But working with a designer on a show is different. It is a delicate process. 'I don't want to overshadow the collection with my styling. It should be cleverly anonymous. Styling a show is a different thing to a consultancy. You have to get into the designer's mind set. You are there for them 24/7. So much energy, time, love and care goes into it. You are 100 per cent involved.'
Charlotte Stockdale
Works with Paul Smith, Dolce e Gabbana and Patrick Cox
'Different designers ask for different things and have different needs at different times,' says Charlotte Stockdale, the 32-year-old stylist and contributing editor to British Vogue and indie fashion mag, 10 . And she should know. This season alone, Stockdale has worked with Paul Smith in London, Dolce e Gabbana in Milan and the lingerie giant Victoria's Secret in New York. On the day we caught up with her, she was preparing for a new advertising shoot with shoe designer Patrick Cox, working with photographer David LaChappelle and model Sophie Dahl.
'I have worked with designers where they have wanted me to help design,' she says. 'But that's not the case with Paul Smith or Dolce e Gabbana.' Both have strong ideas of what their collections are about. 'The clothes are there, but it's how you put them together. Are you emphasising the sexiness? If I put a corset over that shirt and shorten that skirt, that's sexy. My role is much more the putting together of a collection. That will influence the direction it takes. What goes down the runway is what people want to buy.'
Stockdale is the daughter of a baronet and was educated at Heathfield, Ascot, before trying her hand at acting, opera singing and modelling. It was then that she discovered the other world of fashion - behind the camera. 'I have absolutely no training,' she says. 'I'm simply opinionated.' And her opinions have certainly got her noticed. She has worked for The Face and Dazed & Confused as well as Harper's Bazaar and is currently under contract to Vogue .
When In Bed with Madonna director Alek Keshishian was looking for a stylist to work with him on the Max Factor advertising campaign with Madonna in 1999, he got in touch with Stockdale. She commissioned outfits from Chloé and Versace, as well as a mask from London-based jewellery designer Sarah Harmarnee. The job of a stylist is as much about knowing who to contact for what, as how to put the look together.
'I'd do my own collection, but I know what a massive pressure it is. You need backers and you need to sell. It's a business, which is what a lot of people forget. You're not doing an art work, you're doing a collection. It would have to be global from the word go. It's too much of a responsibility.'
THE ORIGINAL RESOURCE: GUARDIAN .CO.UK
