Definition of chic

Isabel Marant Fall 2013 collection.

She won’t do eveningwear or work for anyone else. But after 20 years, and with vast queues for her new range at Swedish multinational retail-clothing company, H&M, French designer Isabel Marant has burst her niche.

FRESH off the Eurostar from her home in Paris, the fashion designer, wrapped in fur, takes a seat in her central London Mayfair boutique and sips her coffee. But no, erase that mental image: Isabel Marant may be the buzziest fashion designer of 2013, but she is nothing like that sounds. In flat black suede boots, skinny leather trousers and a grey cashmere crew neck layered over a white T-shirt, she looks less like a Paris fashion week diva than a chic yoga teacher. The fur jacket she is wearing sells for several thousand pounds, but she tugs it around her shoulders as if it were an old blanket; she likes the salt-and-pepper colour, she says, because it matches her silvering hair, which, at 46, she does not dye. On the shopfloor, designer armchairs have been regally placed at either end of the immaculate cream rug, punctuation points intended to emphasise this grand expanse of top-dollar real estate. Marant picks one up, drags it towards the other and sits down, hands around a mug of coffee, leaning towards me between her knees as if we were beside a campfire.