Most fashion designers start out on mass-market brands and, if they are lucky, build up to a stint at one of the big-name, big-bucks labels in Paris, Milan, New York or London. Few decide to go in the opposite direction.
Clare Waight Keller spent nine years in Paris as creative director for Chloé and Givenchy, where she created Meghan Markle’s wedding dress. The simple yet elegant double-bonded silk cady gown with a bateau neckline almost broke the internet and made Waight Keller a recruitment target for every big label.
Yet here she is on a late summer weekday, stepping off the bus to go to her office, not on Avenue Montaigne in Paris but at touristy Piccadilly Circus in London’s West End. She’s wearing trainers, a long polyester skirt and an aubergine men’s Uniqlo merino wool V-neck. That sweater is the clue. She is now global creative director of Uniqlo, part of the Fast Retailing group, the world’s third-largest clothing retailer (after Zara and H&M) with annual sales of $21 billion last year and more than 2,500 Uniqlo shops worldwide. Givenchy and Chloé have barely 200 stores between them.
The 55-year-old Brummie, who grew up watching her mother buy fabric from local markets to make clothes, thinks high fashion has lost its business and moral compass. ‘It is a different industry to 20 years ago. It’s a challenging time,’ she says. She ‘likes to think’ Uniqlo can be part of the solution.
It certainly feels more part of her life these days. She lives in London with her husband Philip, an architect, their twin daughters, who are in their 20s, and teenage son, and says they all like to look good without breaking the bank. Her daughters have eyes on her wardrobe, but she keeps a close watch on her vintage favourites, which include pieces from Helmut Lang, Saint Laurent, Prada, Jil Sander and John Galliano. ‘There are some untouchables,’ she says. ‘I’m like: “No, that is not going to the pub with you on Friday night.”’
Meghan presenting Clare with the British Designer of the Year trophy at the Fashion Awards, 2018
Cost is her biggest gripe when it comes to the industry she used to sit atop. ‘Prices are very high,’ she says. Analysts at the data intelligence firm Luxurynsight confirm that the price of some entry-level handbags sold by big-name brands have doubled since Waight Keller left Paris five years ago.
‘To entice people, you’ve got to have something that feels attainable,’ she argues. She recalls that when she started work in the 90s for the likes of Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren and Gucci, her £30,000-a-year salary was enough to buy ‘a beautiful leather handbag. Now, I’d have to save for a year!’ Few of the clothes she designs today break three figures.
She is still thrilled by celebrity endorsements. Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, recently included a Waight Keller-designed Uniqlo trench coat in her ‘handpicked and curated collection’ on the marketing website ShopMy. She misses ‘the runway shows, the celebrity, the buzz, the theatre’, which she choreographed when she worked in Paris. Uniqlo spends next to nothing on marketing, given its size. She is also likely to be missing the handsome salary she was paid in Paris – probably more than at Uniqlo, whose founder, Tadashi Yanai, is famously frugal.
But she feels the ‘pizzazz’ has gone too far and taken precedence over product at some of the big labels. She mutters darkly about ‘smoke and mirrors’ on the Paris runway. Zut alors!
She also feels that with usually only three sizes – small, medium and large – the big labels exclude far too many women and men who want to look good. Many of her Uniqlo ranges come in sizes from XXS to XXXL. She also makes it easy for women and men to ‘shop across the collections’. The ground floor of most Uniqlo stores is the unisex Uniqlo U range.
Clare adjusting Meghan’s 16-foot train, May 2018. She was commissioned to design the gown while Creative Director of Givenchy
What unites her new approach to style is ‘ease’, which she says is ‘what’s so modern today’. She rejects the ‘dictators of fashion’ – glossy magazines and influencers – who ‘bombard everyone with so much information about what to
wear. “This is the trend. Oh, the trend has gone already. It was two weeks ago!”’ She wants shoppers to walk into a high- street store and find they ‘can pick up this and that and put it all together easily. The T-shirt goes with the skirt, which goes with the trousers.’ Her watchwords are ‘effortless’ and ‘universal’.
Creating affordable basics that can be mixed with posher designer clobber is one half of the secret sauce that has made Uniqlo a go-to brand for everyone from hard-pressed families to diva duchesses. The other is the way Yanai has elevated the brand with edgy collaborations with the world’s best high-fashion designers. It was Uniqlo’s +J collaboration with German modernist Jil Sander in 2009 that piqued Waight Keller’s interest. So in 2020 when the call came from Yukihiro Katsuta, the head of research and development for Uniqlo Japan, wondering whether, since she had left Givenchy, she might be ready to ‘help with our womenswear’, it was an easy yes.
She started small with a 30-piece capsule collection for women in 2023, Uniqlo: C, which endures with two drops a year. The partnership grew quickly and she is now not only the first head of both women’s and menswear but also the first company outsider to hold either of those roles – a rare honour in Japan.
Uniqlo ticks all Waight Keller’s boxes for a modern clothing company, but there is one issue she has to address in her new role that never came up when she worked in Paris: the charge that she is part of the unsustainable fast-fashion industrial complex. She responds that she only designs around 250 styles per season at Uniqlo. ‘That’s super tight.’ By contrast, ultra-fast-fashion player Shein creates thousands of new styles each day.
I point out that Uniqlo uses tons of manmade fibres that are hard to break down and often end up in landfill where microplastics can leach into the soil. ‘Whenever we’re using manmade fabrics, it’s to promote longevity, functionality or practicality,’ she says. ‘The polyester skirt I’m wearing doesn’t wrinkle, so it looks great. Also when I wash it, it’s going to stay good. I’m going to keep it that much longer. The reason why people throw things away is because they look tired after ten washes.’
She makes good points but she is unlikely to convince the critics who say the likes of Uniqlo, Zara and H&M do their best to encourage us to buy more clothes than we need, whatever fabric they may be made of.
Most designers who work for high-street brands pore over data and use AI and algorithms to tweak styles and colours sometimes by the hour to chase the latest trends. Waight Keller insists she’s ‘designing 18 months ahead’. Where does she look for clues as to what will resonate so far into the future? ‘I’ve got my eyes on stalks. The trigger for me is when I see something in New York, I see it in London, I see it in Tokyo, and I see it somewhere else. I’m like: “OK, that’s the thread.”’
Young Japanese men who mix high-street brands with designer pieces are ‘the most stylish in the world’. For womenswear, she turns to Seoul where ‘youth culture is strong, thanks to K-pop, K-beauty, K-drama on Netflix’. She pulls out her phone and shows me images of youngsters she has snapped on the streets of Seoul. Her favourite is a teenager wearing grey trousers with ‘Love Never Felt So Good’ graffiti down one side, oversized boots and a big blue fake-fur coat over a grey hoodie. ‘She’s tiny underneath but everything is massive and visually strong.’
Waight Keller has one immutable rule: if you want to know what trousers everyone will be wearing in 18 months’ time, look at what teenagers are wearing today. She cites skinny jeans. ‘Twenty years ago Kate Moss first wore them and everyone was, like: “No! They’re horrendous. So tight.” Then, for years, everyone was, like: “They’re my leggings.”’ By contrast, today ‘it’s more volume – the big, curved, baggy pants’. If she’s right, we’ll all be dressing like South Korean teens this time next year.
