Life & Style | Beauty & Fashion
The boho boss Matthew Williamson
Matthew Williamson has walked a proper Billy Elliot-esque rags-to-designer kaftans path. The designer opens up about his meteoric rise to fame
- By Carole Cadwalladr, The Guardian
- Published: 00:00 November 9, 2009
- Image Credit: AP
- Williamson has made his name dressing A-list models and actresses in vaguely hippie, brightly coloured, Ibiza-esque floaty kaftans and dresses.
It's a bit like entering into a magical fairy kingdom, stepping into Matthew Williamson's home. It's a proper chocolate box cottage in London's most villagey village, the wonderfully named Vale of Health in the middle of Hampstead Heath.
With its bowed windows and low ceilings, it's exactly the type of house where you would expect to find Miss Marple baking scones at the Aga, or the Vicar of Dibley in the study, working on her sermon.
Until you go inside, that is, and land squarely on Planet Fashion, a place more likely to have Miss Marple reaching for her heart pills.
Williamson has made his name dressing A-list models and actresses in vaguely hippie, brightly coloured, Ibiza-esque floaty kaftans and dresses. Between them, he and his fashion muse and close friend Sienna Miller virtually created the "boho" trend in 2003 — the look that has dominated the high street ever since, living on in a million wardrobes throughout the world.
And his house is an extension of the Williamson aesthetic — thrift-store-meets-psychedelia chic, or Vicar-of-Dibley-goes shopping-on-hallucinogenic-drugs, perhaps.
Even his dog, Coco, a cocker spaniel, looks like she's been styled to match the decor, with a close cropped haircut and a zebra-skin collar.
And there in the middle of it all is Williamson, in his Wonderland, a slight figure with an Errol Flynn moustache and Kate Moss's cheekbones, although when he opens his mouth and you hear his Mancunian accent, the effect is more Liam Gallagher's younger brother.
He's photographed endlessly with the likes of Sadie Frost and Madonna, but he says he has very few friends — five of them, to be specific — and he has a disconcerting habit of referring to "Matthew Williamson" as if this person, the designer, the company, is somehow not quite him at all.
He loves the "duality" of fashion, he says, its coupling of commerce and creativity. And his house, somehow, is emblematic of it all.
Single-mindedness
One of the nicest things about the Matthew Williamson story (and it is a story, a proper Billy Elliot-esque rags-to-designer kaftans tale) is that right from the beginning he got his mum and dad involved.
He grew up in Manchester, and while all his friends wanted to be car mechanics, Williamson says that he "always" knew he wanted to be a fashion designer. Always?
"Well, from the age of about 11. There was never any question in my mind. I just knew. I remember my sister couldn't decide if she wanted to be a nurse or a teacher, and I was like, ‘How can you not know?'"
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It's a single-mindedness and a determination that saw him get into Central Saint Martins fashion college when he had just turned 17, the youngest on his course; to bring out his first collection three years after graduating to huge acclaim and instant success; and to build what has become one of Britain's biggest fashion brands.
He's become that rare thing, a designer that even people who don't know anything about fashion know. People like me. It's partly the celebrity pals, a factor that's been a key to his success right from the start, but it's also because, I suspect, he's performed that rare trick of making clothes that make women look good.
His frocks might cost £1,500 (Dh9,017) a pop but there's a mainstream accessibility to them. If you Google his name, you'll find that he numbers among his fans not just the likes of Elizabeth Hurley and Helena Christensen but also Arlene Phillips.
He did a sell-out one-off womenswear and menswear collection earlier in the year for H&M, has opened a flagship store in New York, to add to those he already has in London and Dubai, and has designed for everyone from Debenhams to Coca-Cola.
His mother was an optician's receptionist, his father a self-employed salesman of electrical items, and he was, he says, a bit "unusual", although his parents took it in their stride.
He came out to them when he was 16. "I think it probably was quite shocking for a parent to have a son who wants to be a fashion designer, but for them it was a spark of uniqueness and that grew into pride. It was like, ‘Well, thank God he's got a passion.'"
He started reading Vogue with almost quasi-religious intensity and soon realised that this place, the almost mythical Central Saint Martins was where he had to go. He got in aged 16, the youngest on a course of 60.
It was a pivotal moment.
His next great break was meeting Joseph Velosa, his ex-romantic partner, and current business partner, aged 18.
Velosa was studying philosophy at Manchester University and training part-time to become a pilot. He transferred to London, they moved in together, and when, three years after graduating, and having completed a stint at high-street chain Monsoon, Williamson decided to go it alone, it was Velosa who not only supported him, he provided the business know-how, a role that he still fulfils today.
Supermodel quotient
The other key piece of luck can be summed up in two words: Jade Jagger. Right at the beginning, Williamson sent his samples into Vogue, and before he'd even started manufacturing, editors and assistants started placing personal orders.
"And then a skirt found its way into the Tatler office, and Jade Jagger wore it for a fashion shoot, and she liked it so much she wrote me a letter, and we met up and just immediately hit it off."
For a while, he says, it was him, Joseph and Jade. What's more, she offered to model in Williamson's first show. And then suggested her good friend, Kate Moss, should too.
Helena Christensen came on board. The collection was an immediate hit. "And at that point, my mum and dad gave up their jobs and sold their house and moved to London."
After being accepted to Central Saint Martins as the young whizz-kid prodigy, he found that he wasn't one of those touted to be the Next Big Thing.
"My personal aesthetic now, and back then, was probably not in keeping with what they promote. They push forward invention and innovation. And I wanted to make women look really beautiful and pretty and sexy and feminine. It rubbed against the grain of kids who wanted to go in a lunatic asylum and study straitjackets. I wanted to go to Brazil and look at the carnival."
And it's a rub that has come back to haunt him now. Because in becoming the kind of designer that even someone like me has heard of, he's also become too mainstream, too popular, too successful, to be at the cutting edge.
The new collection he presented at London Fashion Week was rumoured to be "darker".
"It's not really. It's really quite a polished collection. But I think the general perception is that when you do a spring-summer show at Matthew Williamson you're going to get Ibiza, hippie, trend-setting, kaftan-wearing girls. And this time, it's all of those things but in a much sharper way."
There's so much more Matthew Williamson to come. He has his ongoing Butterfly range for Debenhams, and there's a homeware line in the pipeline, an art book and eventually a menswear collection. "Joseph has a plan. It's all in there." And his special dream: a hotel.
"How did you know about that?" he says. "It's supposed to be a secret!"
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