‘The Duchess is a beautiful young woman and she looks amazing in all her outfits. I like her very much’
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DESIGNER TO STARS AND ROYALTY
KATHERINE HOOKER
OPENS THE DOORS OF HER GREEK ISLAND PARADISE AND REVEALS WHY EVERY WOMAN IS A PRINCESS IN HER EYES ack in 2005, Katherine Hooker didn’t realise B the young woman asking her to design a coat would become her most famous client. Nor did she grasp the impact it would have on her fledgling business. The “Kate effect” is now a well-known phenomenon but ten years ago, when she was after an outfit for the Cheltenham Gold Cup, Kate Middleton was just beginning to make her mark as a style icon while Katherine had only recently launched her label. Since then, Taylor Swift, Meryl Streep and Jerry Hall have all joined the Duchess of Cambridge as fans of the designer, who has cornered the market in smart tailored jackets and coats for elegant, sophisticated women. Katherine, however, likes to consider that her traditional-with-a-twist jackets appeal as much to a city student as a lady of the manor. “The elitist thing, the exclusivity thing, doesn’t interest me at all, but quality and a woman feeling . “All women like beautiful does,” she tells to feel beautiful, not just the rich and famous.”
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CHANGING STYLE Like her design appeal, Katherine, 52, doesn’t conform to type. She speaks with a cut-glass English accent but grew up in the US. She didn’t even think about designing until 14 years ago, when she asked a tailor in India to make a copy of a favourite coat. She creates a lot of her outfits in the Greek island of Patmos, in the Aegean Sea, where she now lives for up to four months a year. The gentle pace is a far cry from the frantic 100-hour week schedule she maintains in London. “It’s beautiful. I have to pinch myself sometimes,” she says of the home she built with her partner Dimitri Konstantinidis in 2005. Surrounded by lemon and wild almond trees, vineyards and fields, the stone and wooden property with six bedrooms – and two further cottages – is a five minute walk from the sea. “I wake up and have breakfast, go for a swim, get to work, then stop to have a really
Katherine welcomes to her home on Patmos, where she lives for part of the year. The island in the Aegean Sea offers a better worklife balance for the designer, who clocks up 100-hour weeks in London. It’s this dedication to her business that has seen her win such famous clients as the Duchess of Cambridge (far right, wearing one of Katherine’s ensembles in 2011, on her first Garter Day parade) and singer Taylor Swift (right, wearing the Buxton coat in New York this month)
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‘I want to throw my arms around all the customers who buy something’ nice lunch, then go back to work,” she says. “I’m a hopeless cook and Dimitri likes to go out for dinner so we’ll go out in the evening.” Being away from her business means Katherine spends most of her days on Patmos on Skype, but she appreciates the fact she can lead more of a normal life there. “In London it’s 24/7. If I’m not working, I’m thinking about it,” she tells us. “That’s one of the reasons I got the house in the first place because I knew, for my own sanity and health, I needed to force a balance in my life otherwise I become the most boring person of all time.” She and architect Dimitri, with whom she fell in love while building the house, spend no more than six weeks apart, juggling their schedules to divide their time between London and Patmos. “We’re both quite obsessive people,” says Katherine. “He’s obsessed with his work and I’m obsessed with mine.” It’s this drive and passion, along with some fabulous celebrity endorsements, that have helped her small label grow to have an international profile.
Getting ready for “a really nice lunch” in the rustic dining room. Textiles from Hook Design in London add colour to a bedroom (below left), while stone walls and plenty of light bring the outside world in (below right)
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A MEETING WITH DESTINY The business was still pretty much in its infancy when Kate bought her first coat – a long beige herringbone design with brown velvet trim known as the London Contrast. Katherine was combining her fledgling career with her work in film and TV and had taken a stand at a Christmas fair at Kensington Olympia in late 2004 when they first met. “Kate was going out with Prince William at the time, but I had no idea who she was,” says Katherine. “Later, I was in the process of getting my shop ready and she came along and asked for a coat to be made to wear to the Cheltenham races. Of course, by then I knew who she was, but I had no idea what that meant in terms of my business.” Kate was later pictured on the front pages in the coat and Katherine’s business was put on the international map. The Duchess later shortened the coat to wear for another occasion, “I love that about her,” she says. Kate has since bought five more of Katherine’s designs, including the striking red dress she wore when visiting the East Anglia Children’s Hospices shortly after announcing her second pregnancy last year. “She looks amazing in all of them,” says the designer, who has no favourite Kate outfit. “She wears everything with huge confidence. When she got married, she wore that wedding dress with confidence. “She has an understanding of style and what she’s wearing and how to wear it. She understands her position and its limitations. The Duchess is a beautiful young woman. I like her
normalness – she’s very down to earth. I like her very much.” But, the designer is quick to add, she loves all her clients. “It’s a huge honour if anyone comes in,” she says. “I want to throw my arms around all the customers who walk in here and buy something – I don’t know what that says about me.” Although Katherine hasn’t met her other “really good” customer Taylor Swift – “the busiest woman in the world” – she’s not surprised the singer is a fan. “What’s interesting about Taylor is that she’s very conservative but she’s made it into a thing,” she says. “There’s more of an edge to her. She looks kind of retro-y. When she first approached us, I thought, ‘Brilliant, she’s the bridge from the conservative and traditional.’ With us, it all depends on how you wear it.” By way of example, Katherine tells us how one of her bright-red coats is worn by a 90-year-old customer who lives on New York’s Upper East Side and a bohemian actress in her 20s. Katherine does seem to attract a certain type of clientele, with a fair smattering of royals, including Zara Tindall and the Countess of Wessex, and Kate’s sister Pippa – but not their mum Carole, “although she’s been in the shop a few times”. However, she’s keen to play down the royal connections. “I honestly don’t think about it,” she says. “Elitism isn’t that cool. “That’s what I love about the royals right now,” she adds. “One of my favourite parts of the royal wedding was when Prince William did an unscheduled walkabout the night before. You know he did it because he wanted to, not because of PR, and I thought that was brilliant.” Katherine’s personal story is as interesting as her professional one. Her mother, an American but a
passionate Anglophile, moved the family to the UK when Katherine was ten and sent her to boarding school, where she misbehaved and “came bottom of everything”. She left when she was 16 and went from cleaning houses to decorating the shop windows at Laura Ashley and working with a photographer in New York before “clawing her way up” the art-department ladder in film and TV. Then, at 35, she decided to change careers and “systematically went about to try and discover what I wanted to do”. ORIENTAL DELIGHTS Her journey took her to India, where she asked a village tailor to make her a new coat based on the cut of one she found as a teenager in a junk shop in Israel and had worn out. She liked the tailor’s work so much that she bought some tweed from Saville Row, went back and had another six made. “This wasn’t a lovely, free time. I was anxious, worried and angry. It’s supposed to feel good, isn’t it? Changing your life,” she says, with a laugh. “No. It was hideous. But I was obsessed. I kept going to see him until we got it right.” She kept one coat for herself, but sold the other five. Armed with a pattern, she had another 40 made, this time with a clothing manufacturer she found in London, which she still uses. “I didn’t know anything about business, retail, clothing, fabric construction, pattern cutting, fashion – none of it. But here I was, selling these coats,” she says. She established her business in the US – she had a trunk show in New York, presenting her designs directly to customers, and sold 200 coats in a month – and set up her London shop in 2005. The rest is history.
Although many of her coats and jackets are custom made, her readyto-wear range has grown from six to 85 pieces. “I think the artist in me wants to reach as many people as possible,” she says. “I’m ambitious to grow the company. “I’d love to see Cate Blanchett wear something. Michelle Obama, Carey Mulligan – and I love Cara Delevingne. Just love her. My friend and I want to
start an over-50 fan club. I’d love to see her out and about wearing one of my designs. “Whether they’re beautiful, tall, skinny, fat, yellow, green, purple – I don’t care,” she adds. “I love women and I just want to make them H look amazing.” INTERVIEW: ROSALIND POWELL PHOTOS: TIM BEDDOW
Katherine settles down in the afternoon sun (above), taking in her home’s beautiful views over the Aegean Sea (below). She has explored much of the surrounding region with her architect partner Dimitri Konstantinidis, using an inflatable dinghy they keep on the nearby beach
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