They included a pair of covetable cargo pants in a botanical print, showing just the right volume; skirts splashed with artsy, vibrant florals, which were worn with crisp white shirts; a charming viscose dress with a lived-in effect, and playful knits in lively color blocks.Get all the top news stories and alerts straight to your inbox. I enjoyed the jobs I did without feeling defined by them. “You plough your own furrow when you wear Colville,” she adds, inviting comparison to the duo’s confident approach. Molly Molloy, Kristin Forss and Lucinda Chambers presented a great collection, perfectly combining the conceptual and the easy-to-approach. You recalibrate and question everything. Combine the talents, experience and sheer hard graft of these three, dare one say, industry veterans (Molloy and Forss are in their mid-40s, Chambers is in her late-50s), not to mention the fusion of forceful personalities, and you have extraordinary alchemy. She is also known to work as a fashion director at British Elle. Lucinda Chambers (born 1959) is a British fashion director, designer and stylist. But being a disruptive challenger sounds swanky, so, yes, why not, we’ll take it.’Are you sure you want to mark this comment as inappropriate?Are you sure you want to delete this comment?Today they’re all dressed in Colville, yet look quite unalike. Two months after the collection was unveiled, we were mid-pandemic.From London to Lombardy, luxurious label Colville finds inspiration in collaboration and creativityIn what has become the norm for interviews of late, this one was thrown out of context immediately after it was conducted in Colville’s HQ in Milan one sunny Sunday morning at the tail end of fashion week in February. ‘But we don’t pussyfoot around. The self-confessed “chatterbox Charlies” would enjoy breakfast meetings over coffee, and long lunches. It’s such a monster once you start, it’s financial tyranny,’ says Molloy. “It makes you focus,” agrees Chambers. “There isn’t one designer sitting in an ivory tower.” They also heap praise on their assistant, Danny, who works remotely from Amsterdam, and their co-founder, Kristin Forss, who stepped back from the business earlier this year but remains a part of the Colville collective.While they continue to WFH as best they can, Molloy declined an offer from their Brescia factory to create digital 3D representations of their SS20 fashion designs using an avatar so they could push ahead. We know we’ve got to do it our way. Change is a good spur to make you do something totally different.’ Likewise, she has moved on from the fallout following her headline-grabbing interview that came out after she’d left Vogue with the fashion journal Vestoj, in which she spoke candidly about the industry, calling fashion shows ‘all about expectation and anxiety’, fashion ‘cyclical and reactionary’, people ‘greedy’ and criticising big companies for pressurising designers into producing so many collections that they could end up with drink or drug problems and doing bad designs.The trio met at the Italian fashion house Marni, where Molloy and Forss were heads of women’s and menswear respectively, and Chambers worked as creative consultant. ‘It’s not about what’s in season or trending; it’s about organically building a series of clothes you’d keep forever.
Lucinda is known for working for almost 36 years with Vogue and also become a fashion director. They also postponed their SS21 June launch to September or “until the world is ready again and wants to see things,” says Chambers.Catching up on FaceTime in late April, the pandemic was the first thing we talked about.
The poetry is lost,” she explains. Why would you do that? I’m a mixture of inbetweeny,’ adds Chambers. It’s an interesting dynamic, because you have three such strong identities, but somehow Colville has forged an identity of its own, like a fourth person.’ If Forss, who is Swedish, is the meticulous one with a beady eye for fabrics and detail, and Molloy is the multitasking butterfly, then Chambers brings inspiration from outside and puts it all together. ‘I’ve started two new businesses [Chambers has also set up Collagerie, an online fashion platform, with former Vogue colleague Serena Hood] that I’d have never considered if I’d stayed at Vogue or Marni. November 2019 saw the partnership of Lucinda Chambers and Serena Hood in their creation of Collagerie – a global online retail proposition.
If you don’t have that fixed point in the calendar, you feel so free. Molly wears a lot of print. ‘Kris doesn’t wear masses of colour. The current spring/summer 2020 collection juxtaposes relaxed tailoring with asymmetric cuts, chunky knits with ruched silk and delicate ruffles with crunchy anoraks made from recycled boat sails.The design duo, known for their niche fusion of fashion, art and craft, had just hosted a series of intimate appointments to unveil their collection for autumn/winter 2020 and share details of upcoming projects with textile artisans around the world.