Famous for transforming both Chloe and Celine, Phoebe Philo walked away from the industry almost seven years ago. She returned under her own name late last year. Photo: The New York Times
The last time Phoebe Philo, who has been called “the Chanel of her generation”, gave a formal interview was a decade ago.
The designer, whose work offered women respite from the limits of the male gaze, has never been all that interested in explaining herself.
“I say most of what I feel, and most of what is worth me saying, through what I make,” she offered recently.
Although she became famous for transforming both Chloe and Celine, she walked away from the industry almost seven years ago and pretty much dropped out of sight.
When she returned, late last year, under her own name, she did so to sky-high expectations and with a succinct, online-only offering of practical pieces for complicated characters who are unapologetic about their idiosyncrasies and inner lives.
Quite a lot like “Phoebe” herself, as she is generally referred to even by people who don’t know her, in part because her clothes make them think they know her (or she knows them, or at least knows what they want).
It’s both her superpower and her curse.
Critics and fashion insiders generally loved her new collection. It almost sold out in hours. And then the complaining began.
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It was too expensive – the average bag price is around US$5,000 (approximately RM23,700); the top end of the collection includes coats for US$25,000 (RM118,500).
It wasn’t surprising. You couldn’t try anything on, and the return policy was impossible.
“I had the absolute worst customer experience,” said Alexandra Van Houtte, the founder of fashion search engine Tagwalk and a Philo fan, who bought a dress on the day the brand appeared.
Which may be why, as the second delivery arrives and what Phoebe Philo-the-brand is really about comes further into focus, Phoebe Philo-the-designer has decided it is time to... well, not exactly explain herself. But at least open up a little.
“I don’t feel that there’s a huge amount of storytelling that needs to be done,” said Philo, 50.
The subject was Philo’s reluctance to talk: about her work, her plans, herself.
“I’m not particularly into that,” she went on.
“I don’t feel myself that I need a lot of that from other fashion houses. I feel that it’s just not necessary. To a certain extent, you either like it or you don’t. Someone telling me a story isn’t going to make me like it more. It is a coat. It’s a pair of trousers. I do appreciate a level of straightforwardness.”
Although famously fine-boned and fragile, she can be immovable when she wants.
It’s tempting to see her tendency to lean on jargony words like “processing” and “learnings”, and her refusal to engage with the usual dance of publicity, as deliberately obstructive, except that her close friends say that this is characteristic of how she interacts with the world.
“I’ve gotten used to how she communicates,” said Bella Freud, a designer who has known Philo since she was at Chloe.
“We rarely talk about fashion. More about thoughts, things to do with confidence, authenticity. It’s almost like she’s exploring a philosophy. I quite like the abstractness of it and not demanding to know what she means.”
Peter Miles, who worked with Philo for 10 years at Celine, and helped create the identity for the Phoebe Philo brand, agreed.
“She has never wanted to give people what they want,” he said.
“Or, rather, she does want to please but not in the way you expect to be pleased.”
When pushed about the groundswell of anticipation and fantasy surrounding her return, Philo sighed and stared at the wall.
“There may have been an expectation that I could have provided everything to everyone immediately,” she finally said.
“And that’s just not possible. It takes time and effort to make most things that have meaning. One has to stand for something.”
This is how Philo describes her own work, which involves loose jeans that unzip to the rear in the back, cave man trousers and coats covered in shaggy embroidery, high-collar almost military trenches and a pillowy silk “scarf” that looks like a cross between a giant padded doughnut and a neck brace.
“It’s very intuitive,” she said of her work.
“A response to what I see around me, how I see women dressing, how I feel myself, my relationship with clothes.”
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Philo views her work as one continuous collection and does not believe in seasons. She prefers the word “edit” and divides those edits into “deliveries”.
Delivery 1 of Edit 2 is on sale now, and Delivery 2 is planned to arrive at the end of March.
When the terminology was first introduced, along with the statement that the brand intentionally made less than the anticipated demand, it was widely misinterpreted as a strategy calculated to drum up extreme consumer FOMO, or fear of missing out.
Philo said that was not her aim. The point was to create a baseline of data to help her figure out how much she would need to produce to satisfy her market without ending up with lots of stuff to liquidate – and to encourage customers to build a coherent wardrobe slowly, over time.
That’s why customers were asked to sign up via email to be alerted about deliveries.
For all her talk about not paying attention to the outside noise around her business, Philo knows some things have to change.
They are working on smoothing out the returns policy, offering more ways to pay and alerting subscribers when a piece they like is back in stock. As the collections get fuller, there will be a greater range of prices, with some jersey pieces that are (relatively) more affordable.
Although she isn’t apologising for the prices.
“The intention, really, is that the pieces stick around for a while,” Philo said. “They have to be made well, and they have to be considered. And that tends to come at a price point.”
By summer, she hopes to open some sort of physical space – maybe temporary, maybe not – first in New York, then in London.
There may even be a show, in time.
But right now and, she said, “In today’s world, where there’s so much fashion, and so much big fashion, I try to remember that most of the big houses started with one human being who had an idea about what they wanted to do.” – The New York Times
