Wednesday's Woman: Phoebe Philo of Celine
LOVING the boy meets girl preppy attire.
Phoebe Philo born to British parents working in Paris. Her father is a surveyor and her mother is an art dealer and graphic artist (who had a hand in creating David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane album cover). Phoebe will be raised in Harrow-on-the-Hill, London.
“At age four, I used to have absolute tantrums if I couldn’t dress myself,”[4] Philo will later tell Vogue writer Sarah Mower.
Starts customizing her clothes after receiving a sewing machine as a birthday present from her parents.
After a year-long foundation course at Wimbledon School of Art—where she saves up for a pair of pink satin Vivienne Westwood platforms, “the ones Naomi Campbell fell off”[5]—enrolls at Central Saint Martins to study design. Rooms with shoe designer Olivia Morris in Notting Hill and affects a street look. “I had gold teeth,” she will later tell The New York Times, “and I wanted to marry L.L. Cool J.”[6]
Graduates with a final student collection that The Guardian will later describe as having a “Latino influence and huge gold jewellery.”[7] After working briefly for designer Pam Blundell, starts working with Stella McCartney on the short-lived Stella line.
Moves to Paris to be Stella McCartney’s first assistant at Chloé. She spends most weekends in England, seeing her friends or riding her horse, Toby.
Pop magazine’s inaugural issue features four pole-dancing cover girls: model Liberty Ross and designers Luella Bartley, Stella McCartney, and Philo.
April: Richemont, Chloé’s parent company, offers Philo creative directorship of the label after Stella McCartney decamps to the Gucci Group to launch her own line. July: Philo introduces See by Chloé. August: “I believe the best thing I’ve got is my talent,”[8] she tells Vogue’s Eve MacSweeney. October: Presents first solo collection for Chloé, inspired, she tells The Irish Times,“by what Karl Lagerfeld, who was one of Chloé’s previous designers, did in the seventies. I wanted to capture the fluidity and energy of the time.”[9]
Philo has her first hit accessory with the Bracelet bag, selling 28 pieces at between $500 and $1,000 a pop. Singer Kylie Minogue wears Chloé in her “In Your Eyes” video. March: Vogue runs Mario Testino’s photograph of the designer with her mother and posse. September: Vogue counts her among 100 glamorous women to have appeared in the magazine in the past 25 years.
January: Philo’s “effortless edge” earns her a spot on Vogue’s best-dressed list. May: She wears an ivory gown from the Chloé archives to the Met Costume Institute gala. October: The high-waisted, flared jeans she shows for spring will sell out in a day when they arrive in stores.
June: Vogue columnist André Leon Talley describes Philo as a “master of the imperfect perfect. Of the modern vintage. She blurs the lines between the hippie-comfortable and the hippie-sexy.”[10] July: Pregnant, Philo marries Etonian gallerist and one-time Bruce Weber model Max Wigram in a “long cream silk dress with a pin-tucked bodice and . . . a garland of vintage silk flowers in her hair.”[11] October: Introduces the must-have padlocked Paddington bag for spring 2005. November: Roxy Music rocker Bryan Ferry presents Philo with the British Designer of the Year award. December: Philo’s daughter, who is named Maya Celia Sally—“after Maya Angelou, Phoebe’s mother, and Max’s mother, in that order”[12]—is born, Voguereports.
March: Back from maternity leave, Philo watches the fall Chloé show, executed by her assistants, from the front row. October:Launches a trend by showing wooden wedges for spring 2006.
Resigns from Chloé to spend time with her family.
Her son, Marlow Wigram, is born.
May: Philo wears a thirties dress to the Met’s “Superheroes” gala. June: Focuses on what she calls “fundamentals” for her first Céline resort collection, which will be shown in 2009. “It was just about something that was not disposable,” she will later tellVogue. “And I think that to offer women something that feels more about investing in something and less about being disposable is a complete corrective to the world we’re in.”[13]September: Named creative director of Céline, an old French house owned by LVMH that began its history as a maker of children’s clothes. She will work from a studio in London that LVMH creates for her.
October: Profiled by Vicki Woods for Vogue. Makes her runway debut for Céline in Paris, starting a craze for the house’s new Classic Box bag. “I felt it was time for a more back-to-reality approach to fashion,” Philo will later explain to Vogue’s Mark Holgate. “For clothes that are beautiful, strong, and have ideas, but with real life driving them.”[14]
January: “I’m making it about fashion—about fabrics, proportions, volumes, and attitude,”[15] she says of her approach to Céline.
