Kristin Scott Thomas: 'I cannot cope with another film'

Kristin Scott Thomas has had enough. She has been working flat out for 30 years, and made 65 films: having lived in Paris since the age of 19, she effectively has two careers, one in English and one in French. Even her cleaner thinks her workload is insane. Last September, for the first time in her life, she reached a point where she could no longer go on. "I just suddenly thought, I cannot cope with another film," she says. "I realised I've done the things I know how to do so many times in different languages, and I just suddenly thought, I can't do it any more. I'm bored by it. So I'm stopping." Having always been a workaholic, she now likes to think of herself, she jokes, as a "recovering actress".

For the past 15 years, the actor has fashioned a highly respected career out of small parts in biggish English-language films, such as the John Lennon biopic Nowhere Boy, and big parts in smaller French films, such as the prisoner returning home in I've Loved You So Long. But she is tired of working on films whose scripts keep being rewritten at the last minute. "The kinds of films that I do are usually quite rapidly put together, and it always seems to be a little bit of a shambles. I like filming, but what I don't like is having to rearrange things and rewrite scenes. I just can't be bothered."

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She is tired, too, of being cast in films that need her more than she needs them. "I'm often asked to do something because I'm going to be a sort of weight to their otherwise flimsy production. They need me for production purposes, basically. So they give me a little role in something where they know I'm going to be able to turn up, know what to do, cry in the right place. I shouldn't bite the hand that feeds, but I keep doing these things for other people, and last year I just decided life's too short. I don't want to do it any more."

This is the second time Scott Thomas has decided to walk away from work that many actors would kill for. The first was in the late 1990s, when the success of Four Weddings And A Funeral had catapulted her into Hollywood A-list roles in The Horse Whisperer, Mission: Impossible andThe English Patient. "But it was geographically unfriendly, because I just didn't want to go to America." She was married to a Frenchman, had two young children, and the family wanted to live in France or, at the very least, Europe.

But it wasn't just about that. "No, it's also that I can't bear all the kind of rubbish that goes on on those big films. I just can't stand sitting around for hours in a great big luxury trailer, waiting, bored out of my head. I used to do," she offers drily, "a lot of tapestry. Yes, I had a lot of cushions around."

She did have one minor relapse five years ago when she appeared in the airhead comedy Confessions Of A Shopaholic, but at its mention her face freezes in a pantomime of horror. "I thought it would be quite good fun. But I spent my entire time waiting. I hated it, hated it, hated it, and I said that I wouldn't do another one." Grinning, she adds, "Funnily enough, I haven't been asked to."

Actors are seldom this candid. It is an unwritten rule of the profession to speak highly of every film you've ever been involved in – but then, Scott Thomas has always been a singular sort of film star. Very few British actors work in a foreign language, for a start, and when she arrives at the studio in Paris where we meet, she's so out of the habit of speaking English that she keeps beginning sentences in French. She is makeup-free and wearing glasses which, she says, are very useful for deflecting attention: "Because people don't think, oh, who's that old woman with the round glasses?"

There is no publicist in attendance, and she submits to the attentions of the hairstylist and makeup artist without fuss. She has the sort of informality that comes from having done this many times before, and talks freely without appearing to wonder or worry about how she might sound in print. At 53, she is more preoccupied by how she looks.

Scott Thomas is mesmerisingly beautiful, but she refers to herself as an "ageing actress" and keeps saying, "I'm terribly old" or, "I'm positively ancient." In fact, being ancient might make things slightly easier, for she adds, "I'm sort of, as the French would say, 'stuck between two chairs', because I'm no longer 40 and sort of a seductress, and I'm not yet a granny." She got a terrible shock a few years ago when a close-up portrait taken for this newspaper was reprinted in a glossy magazine, without being digitally retouched. "It was a really great picture, and looked fine on a grainy piece of paper in black-and-white," she says now. "But on the gloss of a magazine cover, without being retouched, it was the most terrifying thing. It really brought home to me how the images of women we see are so manipulated." Accustomed these days to seeing faces digitally perfected, anyone who saw the magazine would, she groans, have thought: "My God, Kristin Scott Thomas, she's so ancient!"

As a middle-aged woman, she finds herself increasingly overlooked in everyday life, and has talked a lot in recent years about the unnerving experience of becoming invisible. So it's ironic that her latest film is calledThe Invisible Woman (the title actually refers to its young heroine, Charles Dickens' secret mistress, Nelly Ternan). It is a screen adaptation of Claire Tomalin's biography of the 18-year-old actress, who captured Dickens' heart when he was a married father of nine and more than twice her age. Felicity Jones plays Ternan and Scott Thomas plays her widowed mother Catherine, who oversees the affair with worldly maternal anxiety, part Victorian chaperone and part pragmatic pimp.

It is a slow-paced but beautifully shot and absorbing film. For Scott Thomas, its principal appeal was the chance to work again with Ralph Fiennes, who plays Dickens and also directed the film. Like her, he puts in an electrifying performance – which is all the more remarkable given that he appears on screen in almost every scene and has previously directed just one film. "It's a brilliant performance," she says, "and it was so lovely to work with him again. But it wasn't just that. There was something about playing a woman who has to make decisions about her child and evaluate her child's chances, and I found that very moving, the responsibility of the mother of this daughter. I just wanted to do it."

The only downsides were the corsets and petticoats and bustles. Her waist had to be drawn so tightly that she was physically sick, while the petticoats were so heavy that her arms would ache just to lift them. "I didn't want to wear the wigs and I didn't want to wear the costumes. I don't know how those women did it," she marvels coolly.

Wardrobe discomfort notwithstanding, however, period dramas often seem to provide the most substantial roles for older actresses, raising the disquieting thought that perhaps older women were accorded greater status in Victorian times than they are today. "I don't know," she ponders. "It's an interesting thought. Is it to do with our mania for youth, our kind of addiction to youth?" Then again, she points out, The Invisible Woman is a tale of a 45-year-old man leaving his wife of 22 years in 1858 for a woman not even half his age, so perhaps then and now are not so different after all. If anything, the parallels between the two eras are "more or less literally dramatised by the film – by the fact that Ray is getting to jump into bed with the lovely Felicity Jones". In The English Patient, Fiennes and Scott Thomas played lovers; 18 years later, the 51-year-old actor's love interest is an actress 21 years his junior, while Scott Thomas must play her mother.

I tell her that, for me, the film's most compelling characters are all middle-aged. Alongside Fiennes she co-stars with the magnificent Joanna Scanlan and Tom Hollander, and it's they who bring the screen alive. "Well," she nods, "I don't want to go and see a film about young people. I'm just not remotely interested. When I go to the movies, I'd rather watch people who've lived, who have gone through the mill, who've had their heart broken a million times and are still looking for love. That's what's interesting to me."

She thinks the film industry might just be starting to realise there is a market for films about older people. The population is ageing, for a start – "So they've got to make something to entertain us" – and films now have a commercial lifespan far beyond box-office receipts, making teenagers' dominance of cinema seats less important. "I just think there really need to be stories about people who have been through life and are still hopeful."

She is encouraged by the success of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, and by the rumours of a sequel. Even the recent return to TV of Birds Of A Feather is good news, she thinks, its female stars now being in their 50s and 60s. What about Downton Abbey, I ask. Scott Thomas's great heroine, Maggie Smith, is flourishing in the drama at 79, and so is Shirley MacLaine. Scott Thomas starred in Downton creator Julian Fellowes' first feature film, Gosford Park – another country-house period drama – so I ask if she could see herself joining the cast. She shakes her head.

"I can't do miniseries. Once you've got the characters, once you know who they are, they're going to repeat themselves, aren't they, for the next five years? It just goes on and on and on. I get terribly bored. Series bore me."

She is also rather weary of being typecast, playing quiet despair and heartbreak with the particular strain of dignity first showcased in Four Weddings. Scott Thomas hasn't had to audition for a part in years, but as a consequence gets "asked to do the same things over and over, because people know you can do that, so they want you to do that. But I just don't want to pretend to be unhappy any more – and it is mostly unhappy."

I suspect she is cast in unhappy roles because she has a gift for looking so compellingly beautiful when miserable. "Thank you very much, I'll try and make the most of that," she jokes. She has another theory: "Although I don't really think of myself as a sad person, there has been a lot of sadness. I've known a lot of sadness; I know what it's like to be sad. So I guess I have access to that, and can tap into it."

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Scott Thomas was born in Cornwall in 1960, the eldest of five, to a former drama student mother and Royal Navy pilot father who died in a flying accident when she was five. Her mother married another pilot, who died in an almost identical accident when Scott Thomas was just 11. She was sent to a girls' boarding school, before enrolling at drama school in London, where she was told she would never make the grade and so decamped to Paris to be an au pair. There she studied drama again and was spotted by, of all people, Prince, who promptly cast her as his love interest in his vanity project Under The Cherry Moon. She was, critics agreed, the only decent thing in it, and has been working more or less nonstop ever since.

But, by her own account, she was not a happy young woman, and spent several years in analysis. She has been free of depression for years now, and comes across as conspicuously at ease with herself: grounded, good-natured and unflappable. Her comments about all the things she no longer likes about her film career may make her come across in print as rather grumpy, but her critique seems to derive from a newfound sense of liberation and self-belief. She is no longer the guarded, rather remote character who – as she herself says – invariably used to attract freezing water-based metaphors. In recent years, interviewers have remarked on how much she has thawed, and it would be easy to assume this has something to do with her 2006 divorce. In fact, she says, it was her rediscovery of theatre just over a decade ago that transformed how she felt about herself and her work.

In 2001, she played the title role in Bérénice on stage in France, having not been on stage for more than 15 years. It was a revelation. "I suddenly felt independent. You could walk on stage and you could stand on your head if you really wanted to. No one's going to say stop, don't do that, that's a ridiculous idea. There's this feeling of independence and trust – I could give myself permission to play things in a certain way and see if they worked or they didn't. I could trust myself."

The trouble with acting in films, she goes on, is that "you're constantly being told what to do. 'Move your head that way. Can you cry a bit more? Can you do this, can you do that? Oh, that was lovely, that was amazing, that was beautiful.' And sometimes you think, that wasn't amazing and wonderful and beautiful, it was just a look. But you've got this person saying it was. And then it's taken away from you, and it's all mixed up and made into something else. Basically, when you are acting in a film, you're giving the director the raw material to make the film. But when you're acting on stage, that's it. And that's when you discover that you can really do it. It's this word 'trust' that keeps coming to me. It's not a question of whether one person is conning you into thinking you can do it, saying, 'Oh, it was beautiful.' On stage, if it works, it works."

If Scott Thomas used to come across as somewhat aloof, she thinks this had a lot to do with her own ambivalence about her acting, and self-disdain for the narcissism of a career spent chiefly sitting around in trailers, waiting to be told what to do by a director. Since Bérénice she has starred in five West End plays, including two Chekhovs and twoPinters, won an Olivier award for best actress, and every time she talks about being on stage, her face lights up with excitement.

She says she will still make some films, but only those she absolutely can't resist. For the first time since her 20s, she is getting accustomed to the novelty of choice, for her daughter and eldest son are now in their 20s themselves, and her youngest son is 13, so the financial pressure of supporting her family is beginning to ease. She met her former husband, a gynaecologist, when she was at drama school, but since their marriage ended she has been facing a new freedom she's still not entirely sure what to do with. "I'm starting to think, hang on a minute, soon my youngest is going to go off and do whatever he's going to do. But this is what's quite fun about being me at the moment – making one's own choices, for reasons of one's own, and not trying to please a career person, or make money. I guess that's a sign of maturity, I think."

She and her ex-husband share joint custody of their youngest son, and although that makes life "much more complicated – you have to make appointments to talk to the father of your child, which is a bore", relations are amicable. "I know for so many people it hasn't turned out right, and they can't get the other partner to engage, and that sounds like hell. But I've been very, very lucky. Married the right man, had babies with the right man." She grins cheerfully. She does feel lonely sometimes: "But I think everybody does sometimes. I used to feel lonely when I was married and had three children, you know." The worst times are August, when Paris decamps en masse for the summer holiday. "Everyone's gone, you're on your own, and it's agony. You're trying to book a hotel, but you can't because the hotels are all full of these fucking families!" She laughs.

But the biggest challenge is deciding where she should even be. She has often said she feels more French than English, so I'm surprised to hear her say she is seriously thinking of returning to the UK in the not too distant future. Her adopted country appears to be, she says sadly, in terminal decline. "I think so. Everyone says it is, and it's quite believable. Five years ago, I would have said great schools, great education, great transport, trains are wonderful, roads are great, all that kind of thing – great, great, great. You can't really say that any more. And at the moment I'm really worried about the rise of antisemitism in France, which is just really unbelievable." Someone, she says, has got to stop National Front leader Marine le Pen.

Then again, she confesses, she doesn't actually vote, because she has never got round to getting a French passport. "It's about split personalities – it's about my life already being complicated enough. I'm splitting into a million pieces with this job I do, and I feel like I live in two countries, so having two nationalities as well feels too much. But I feel flaky not voting, I'm sort of ashamed of it."

What does she make of the revelations about François Hollande's private life? "Oh, I would really prefer not to know. In France, we are all shocked that the press has been so invasive, because there is a very strong – and I think quite right – belief that a private life should be private. But where I come a cropper is with this 'first girlfriend' business. I'm rather old-fashioned. This idea of being first girlfriend," she says, beginning to laugh, "is just bollocks to me."

An Isabella Blow Exhibition Opens at Somerset House

Perhaps there’s only one thing missing from the exhibition on Isabella Blow, which throws open its doors in London tonight: The sound of her great, honking laugh. Still, the infectious exuberance of the late, incendiary British editor and her sensual, reveling enthusiasm for fashion pulsates through every nook and cranny of “Isabella Blow: Fashion Galore!” “It’s a trip!” exclaims Philip Treacy, whose career was ignited by her while he was still a millinery student at the Royal College of Art. “It brings back all the things about life with Issy—all the fun, all the fights. She enjoyed fashion and was entertained by it, and I think you feel that here. I’m happy for her. It’s all as she’d like it. It feels like she’s been running the show.”
The show at Somerset House is essentially a loving homage from Isabella’s surviving friends, brilliantly curated by Alistair O’Neill and Shonagh Marshall to tell her story through her wardrobe and work. When Isabella ended her own life in 2007, it was Daphne Guinness who stepped in to buy her friend’s mountain of clothes to save them from being dispersed at auction. There’s Alexander McQueen’s graduate collection (brought to her in bin bags by the designer, who marched her to the ATM to pay in cash), her monumental stash of Treacy’s headgear, her piles of Manolo Blahnik shoes, and dozens of pieces from many more designer protégés.
Her filmmaker friend John Maybury remembers: “Last time I saw Issy, we were sitting together at a dinner, where she was wearing a hat with sort of bull horns, which almost took my eye out. I just remember us laughing our heads off. She had a pioneering belief in designers. She had the most beautiful clothes, but wore them day in, day out like they were overalls.”
Loudly cheering from the front rows in her alarmingly surreal hats, corseted dresses, teetering heels, and approximately applied red lipstick, Blow put McQueen, Treacy, Hussein Chalayan, and Julien Macdonald on the world stage—her massive contribution to the reputation of “Cool Britannia” in the mid-nineties. An introductory gallery, clad in black velvet, is titled “Truffling for Talent,” a phrase coined by her friend Hamish Bowles for Isabella’s drive to discover—and wear—the best designers out of British art college . . . . “She had the conviction to make herself into a walking billboard for all that talent,” says John Maybury. Her eye for picking out and nurturing aristo-edgy girls to model was just as sharply accurate: Stella Tennant, and Honor Fraser owe their careers to her, as a roomful of Steven Meisel shoots attests.
The exhibition wends its way from her cash-strapped upbringing as a daughter of the aristocratic Delves Broughton family, through her career at Tatler and The Sunday Times, and touches on the (literally) rich tapestried-backdrop of the arts & crafts-cum-medievalist lifestyle, she and her husband, Detmar Blow, played with at his Gloucestershire country home, Hilles.
There are discoveries which will stop gallerygoers in their tracks. Blow’s kindling of a generation of fashion-friendship action is replayed on a VHS tape nobody knew existed until curator O’Neill found it two months ago languishing on top of a cupboard at the Royal College of Art—the graduation show of 1990, with Treacy’s hats modeled with haughty hilarity by Blow, Lucy Ferry, and Hamish Bowles.
O’Neill devotes two breathtaking rooms to the events of autumn-winter 1996, when Blow’s incendiary talents as a fixer, stylist, and provocateur were first identified by Amy Spindler of The New York Times as the fuel behind London’s resurgence. That was the season Blow bought a huge tranche of McQueen’s seminal Dante collection—incredible deconstructed lace dresses, a gold-embroidered military frock coat, a mauve hourglass corseted jacket, and a black mantilla cascading from a pair of silver antlers made by Treacy. It all stands in a towering set, which mimics the columns of Christchurch and Spitalfields, where McQueen showed. Up a spiral staircase hung with plastic abattoir curtains (a detail which would have made Blow hoot) is a room containing the history of that following evening, when she styled a fashion show for Treacy.
purple bridesmaid dresses | plus size bridesmaid dresses Treacy’s most poignant commission for Blow is The Ship, the black eighteenth-century galleon that was placed on her coffin at her funeral in Gloucester Cathedral. In the exhibition, it’s sailed to a happier place as the pièce de résistance in a tableau dedicated to her love of the sea, accompanied by Erik Halley’s lobster hat and a Mr Pearl corset.
Ultimately, despite the sad manner of her departure, Isabella’s legacy is an exhibition experience thousands will queue for, and leave motivated to dress up, inspired to design—and smiling. Treacy reflects: “It’s an epic homage. I spoke to Issy five days before she died, and she was saying she felt she didn’t matter anymore. I’m happy for her. Glad that she’s been proved wrong. She does matter.”
Proceeds from the exhibition and a charity auction tonight at Claridges will go into the Isabella Blow Foundation Daphne Guiness set up to fund research for depression and mental illness, and to finance scholarships for art and fashion students at Central Saint Martins.

Miss Dior Has You Covered

This week, Dior will inaugurate an exhibition in tribute to the brand’s original, groundbreaking perfume, Miss Dior, at the Grand Palais, in Paris. Launched by Christian Dior in 1947, Miss Dior was named for his beloved sister, Catherine, and its green chypre blend was a bold break from the powdery fragrances of the day—a gambit, like the New Look, that became an instant hit. For the Miss Dior exhibition, the house gave carte blanche to fifteen female designers from all horizons, whose challenge it was to reinterpret the spirit of the fragrance. In an exclusive preview, spoke with Ionna Vautrin, who took the iconic Dior silk glove and spun it into an architectural feat called Gloriette.

You’ve won two Wallpaper awards (in 2009 and 2011), as well as a prize from the City of Paris, for your creations. Is that why Dior reached out to you for this project?

I don’t think it was because of any one piece. I think it was probably more of a whole. My work is rather feminine and maternal, and I’m guessing that that is what brought me to their attention.

How did the collaboration come together?

It all took shape very simply. When I met with Dior, they presented to me the history of Miss Dior and its codes—the bow, the houndstooth, the dresses, et cetera. Gloves, of course, were a part of the story. I was intrigued by the idea of diverting that shape into a more decorative element that evokes an iconic fragrance.

How did you go about creating Gloriette?

That part wasn’t necessarily so simple! I finally came up with the idea of creating a kind of “micro-architecture” that was somewhere between couture and architecture. I found a very silky technical fabric and had it made into thousands of gloves. Gloriette speaks to a lot of the house codes at once: The layers of gloves that make up the roof create a kind of rosette, or flower; it also suggests a tutu or a dress or a fan, but at the same time, there’s also kind of an animal appeal—it could be feathers on a rare bird. In the end, Gloriette is a giant kiosk, a bit like the luxurious Follies Dior designed to present his perfumes, but in an XXL version.

What does it say about the perfume?

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The roof picks up the Miss Dior color codes of black, white, and pink, of course. But what I find even more compelling is that it stimulates the imagination around the creation of perfume: It is something you pass through. You can linger or not, but it is something that you can use and spend time with. Where this fits in with my work is that you can look at it and see many things at once. Lots of different impressions come together whether you are looking at it from the inside—which is like standing under a crinoline—or viewing it from the outside. That said, I am a designer; I don’t consider myself an artist.

For you, what’s the difference between art and design?

The difference for me is that, as a designer, I am in the habit of creating things that should be useful and functional: A chair should be useful every day. I look at design as sitting at the intersection of what is practical and utilitarian—and technical in terms of production—but also sculptural, because an object should spark desire. I think there’s an earthy quality to design. I love telling a story, but I’m not looking to make a political statement. An object’s first purpose is to be functional.

How does design differ from fashion?

For me, fashion is a separate art. It’s a bit like sculpture. When you look at what Christian Dior was doing, it was very sculptural. Creating silhouettes demands know-how, good taste, precision, and sophistication. You have to have a keen sense of detail. It’s really a very special, specific profession. It really demands that you dedicate your life to it, and it’s reinvented constantly.

Did Miss Dior alter anything about how you see design?

This was a chance for me to have a project that was just a little bit zany. I think I am more known for designing small, domestic objects, and Miss Dior allowed me to explore new territory on a few levels. Because the show is designed to travel, it presented a specific set of challenges. Everything has to disassemble and reassemble easily, like Legos. It made me want to explore scenography and micro-architectures.

How familiar were you with Miss Dior before this project?

Obviously, I knew the bottle, because it’s an icon. Beyond that, funnily enough, years ago I got my start working in a design studio that only did perfume bottles! So I knew Miss Dior’s shape, fragrance, and a bit of its history. It’s amusing to have gone from a time in my life when I was designing perfume bottles—not for Dior, mind you—to finding myself on the flip side, telling a story about a perfume through a decorative piece. For me, Miss Dior is a classic, like any other emblematic object. It’s a reference. And there’s also the fact that, in its day, Miss Dior was renegade. It’s the radical side that I find the most touching.

Melinda Looi: From 2D to 3D

In experimenting with a different dimension, a Malaysian couturier lands a prestigious nomination for her efforts.

THE fashion industry has been somewhat revolutionised by additive manufacturing (AM), otherwise known as 3D printing.

While prints are still very much ‘in’, 3D printouts however, are the next big thing.

From runways all over the world, we see an emerging trend of designs derived from 3D printing technology. These days, sketching is no longer confined to paper and elaborate fashion pieces can be brought to life with exact precision.

Where the local fashion industry is concerned, we have Melinda Looi – always at the forefront of couture – embracing 3D printing. She recently presented what is known to be Asia’s first 3D printed runway show. The theme of the night was Birds, which corresponded with her designs.

An avid lover of nature and the environment, Looi professed to have always been inspired by these beautiful, flighty creatures that are an amazing engineering feat by Mother Nature herself.

She worked with Materialise – a Belgian-based pioneer in AM software and solution, unveiling a collection of avian-inspired creations. The pieces – made of plastic and resin – comprise Face It (headgear), Stand On Me (wedges), Her Love And Strength (necklace), Let Her Shine (skirt), and Open Wings (cape).

Models of the night were clothed in nude bodysuits, with equally minimalistic hair and make-up. This was so that audiences were not distracted from the fascinating details and mechanisms of each outfit.

According to Looi, the process was not easy. In fact, the entire collection took a team of six to eight people to bring to life – including three 3D modellers, two engineers, and Melinda’s own team.

Overall, each piece took months to design, create, and convert into a 3D file, which was then sent to Belgium to be printed at the Materialise headquarters.

Looi, who is also a Star2 columnist (with the fortnightly Mel’s Place), said: “The design process has been a real eye-opener and highly educational experience for me. It was challenging because it involved co-ordinating efforts and technical expertise.”

“On the other hand, it was also great fun to be able to work with such an innovative technology. Creating fashion with technology has always been something I wanted to do, so when Materialise approached me with this opportunity, it was like a dream come true!”

Now, for her gallant efforts, Looi has been nominated in the Fashion Designer Of The Year category in the 3D Printshow Awards, in London. Launching this year and taking place from Nov 7 to 9, the event is slated to be an annual event with a purpose of recognising excellence within the 3D printing industry.

It will help to recognise those individuals who have embraced 3D printing as a new technology within a given field and also to acknowledge those who have worked tirelessly to improve 3D printing technology – making it more adaptable, robust and cost-effective for businesses and creative minds to adopt.

For Looi, the nomination was not expected. “Out of the blue, we found out that we have been nominated for this, in the crazy-cool 3D high tech world,” she commented.

“Thank you to all my supporters, my team, my beloved family, and great friends who have been helping me all this while. Even if I don’t win, I am happy just to have been nominated.”

More than that, Looi is also proud to bring recognition to the country with regard to the innovative use of 3D printing in fashion designing.

She said: “Now, there’s a Malaysian brand name in the 3D world map – I still can’t digest the fact.”

“The collaborative effort involving people from different fields and backgrounds truly reminded me that exciting and beautiful things happen when art and technology meet. It is truly a great honour to be the first Asian fashion designer to create a collection using AM technology.”

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Out to Lunch with Giancarlo Giammetti

Giancarlo Giammetti—for 45 years the power behind the Valentino fashion empire, alongside Valentino Garavani—was unavoidably delayed cruising round the Aegean when I arrived for lunch at his penthouse in Manhattan, which is one of his five homes. But thanks to the wonders of Skype, we enjoyed our lunch together just the same.
“Can you hear me, John?” he asked, inaugurating my first “Out to Skype” from Valentino’s yacht midst windy seas.
“I can hear you,” I said. “How’re you doing, Giancarlo?”
“I don’t see you very well, John.”
He is a man known to leave nothing to chance, however. A computer expert fixed the picture on my end, while no less than three lovely ladies and his housekeeper fussed over me as a selection of William Poll gourmet sandwiches was placed before me, along with cherries, blackberries, chocolates, and a choice of wine.
Mr. Giammetti, strikingly handsome, tanned, and poised, was having a late lunch on the yacht,T.M. Blue One (which has a staff of 11), and he sweetly held up his plate so that I could see it clearly—shrimp salad and a glass of Brunello di Montalcino. He was sailing, he told me, with Valentino and members of their extended family, whom he calls “the tribe.”
Valentino: The Last Emperor, directed by Matt Tyrnauer (a contributing editor at this magazine), presents a remarkable backstage view of their rarefied world, but until I read Mr. Giammetti’s memoir, Private (published by Assouline this month), I hadn’t realized that he and Valentino had stopped being lovers more than 40 years ago. “You became inseparable blood brothers?” I asked.
“I was just 30 when the physical part of our relationship ended, and it was difficult in the beginning,” he explained. “We had to solve problems with jealousy. But we’re all grown up—very grown up—and we know that time solves every problem. We’ve always wanted to be the best for the other. But, you know, from the beginning Valentino and I never lived together.”
“That’s probably why your love for each other lasted.”
“Exactly! We want our freedom. We want to be able to close our doors.”
Giancarlo Giammetti is a man of natural charm whose English has improved over the years. When he first met the supermodel Jerry Hall in Rome (before she married Mick Jagger), she told him that she came from Texas, where she was a cowgirl—which he heard as “call girl.” “I was really shocked,” he explained, starting to laugh. “So I very shyly ask whether she arranged to meet her clients by phone or in person. She say, ‘What clients?’ I say, ‘You say you are a call girl.’ And she say, ‘No, no, no! I am a cowgirl!’ We became great friends.”
In the 1980s, Valentino was among the first fashion houses to license merchandise in Japan. “I can’t resist mentioning this,” I said. “How could such an elegant label as yours sell Valentino toilet seats?”
“Just one word,” he replied. “Money.”
“Were they hard to design?” I asked.
He laughed again. “No, I will say that.”
The licensing deals Mr. Giammetti made in Japan were worth many millions. “But the toilet seat didn’t destroy the name of Valentino,” he added.
Merchandise sales subsidize the haute couture collections, just as museum stores help support the art. But are fashionable clothes—rather than accessories and fragrances—the point any longer in what Giancarlo calls “a corporate game run by luxury titans”?
“It’s true the hot company is the accessories company—but a label like Louis Vuitton is still very important in fashion. And 60 to 65 percent of the profits of Valentino, owned today by the Qatar royal family, still come from the clothes. So I think the combination can exist.”
“But, amidst the ruling conglomerates like LVMH,” I suggested, “only a handful of independent fashion houses like Armani or Ralph Lauren still survive. We can no longer be certain who the designers actually are.”
“Yes, but I think women no longer need designers to decide what they want to wear! Before, they were waiting for Givenchy, Dior, or Valentino to decide the dress, the shoes, the bag, for them. But if they like the dress, they like the dress! I think it’s a good thing. It gives women a lot of freedom.”
“What ever happened to style?” I asked, reminding him of red-carpet disasters and hobo-chic celebs dressing democratically, unglamorously down.
“It’s a different style,” he responded, “and it’s a different—how you say?—moment. You cannot fight it. One of the biggest changes in today’s fashion is the influence of stylists. There used to be much more involvement when a star chose a dress. But today’s superstars and celebrities are offered so many clothes to wear, they’re spoiled. There’s no commitment involved, no work, no fittings. They wear the dress and it has a short life. They don’t have time to love a dress.”
And so my “Out to Skype” with Giancarlo Giammetti came to a close. “Thanks so much for lunch,” I said. “I hope you enjoy the rest of your cruise.”
“Nice talking to you, John. Bye-bye.”
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On your marks

Marks & Spencer is the quintessential British retailer; a one-stop shop loved by all ages, outfitting everyone from baby to grandad and furnishing the entire house, even the contents of the fridge (albeit at a price). It’s safe to say the retailer holds a very special place at the heart of the great British high street. It feels especially appropriate that it should launch a collection in which every element from design board to sewing machine has been made in Britain.

The new range is composed of offerings for both men and women, timelessness and heritage design being the focus. “The idea for the Best of British menswear collection was born from the M&S archive, based in Leeds,” Tony O’Connor, head of design for the menswear collection, says. “The archive contains hundreds of pieces from throughout the decades; naturally it was the perfect starting point for a collection synonymous with British heritage and design.”

The once-booming British textile industry has seen a decline thanks to the economic efficiency of out-sourcing to manufacturers abroad, but these collections have allowed the brand to turn back to home-grown talents. The knitwear company Hawick, based in the Scottish borders, tailoring experts Cheshire Bespoke and outerwear specialist Cooper and Stollbrand are just some of the long-established manufacturers who were involved in creating these pieces.

It’s not just British manufacturing that makes the collections stand apart from the other offerings on the store’s rails; the real selling point is its positioning at the premium end of the high-street spectrum. The considered design, superior fabrics and techniques used all hike up the quality to a level we traditionally associate with the label “Made in Britain”. Of course, this means the range comes with a higher-than-high-street price tag. Some thrifty customers may balk at an £800 suit; equivalent English tailoring at a designer store, however, would come with an extra zero.

The womenswear range sticks close to the heritage theme, but adds an edge. “There’s also a distinct androgynous feel, with several pieces very much influenced by masculine styling,” Neil Hendy, head of design for womenswear, says. Tweed suits in grey and coats in camel shades make up a classic offering, alongside a pop of autumn/winter 2013’s favourite Pepto-Bismol pink.

In menswear, watch out for cashmere jumpers, double-breasted coats, and Prince of Wales check blazers that, suitably, seem fit for royalty. Can’t get more British than that.