Lauren Indvik

There has been a Phoebe Philo-shaped hole in fashion since the designer stepped down from Céline in 2018. For a decade at the LVMH-owned label, the British native served up an evolving wardrobe of polished ease — of mannish “Crombie” coats, generous trousers and sculptural accessories that women, particularly those who worked in the fashion industry, coveted and felt empowered by. And where Philo went — lining sandals with fur, pairing neons with muted colours, reviving the once-dowdy midi-lengt…

Glossy: Ambition, Beauty, and the Inside Story of Emily Weiss’s Glossierby Marisa Meltzer (Atria/One Signal Publishers) Glossier founder Emily Weiss has built one of the most successful beauty start-ups of the past decade, valued at $1.8bn in 2021. This enthralling and fast-paced chronicle offers a play-by-play account of Weiss’s rise and eventual stumbles, and the combination of talent, money and matchless ambition that has made her both one of the few female founders to date to build a “unico…

My dad is one of 12 children, so growing up there would be about 50 people for Christmas. Back in those days, we’d be at our grandparents’ hotel in Northamptonshire. The adults would get drunk, sing, have fun. Our grandpa would dress up as Father Christmas, and the children and teenagers would queue up to get presents. Of course, we knew the presents were from our parents. I think even when I believed in Father Christmas, I knew that it was grandpa pretending. Two years ago, we stayed [at home]…

I grew up in New Zealand, so it’s very much summer at Christmas. We’d get together as a family either on the farm, where I grew up, or at some cousins’ houses. We’d go swimming, play ball games, or go water skiing. We’d still have a Christmas tree and everything like that, but food-wise it would be salads and yams and cold meat because it was 30 degrees. Now in England I’m into winter Christmases. [My husband, interior designer Ben Pentreath, and I] normally have Christmas at home, in Dorset, j…

Bally is a brand that just about everyone has heard of but few really know. A survey of my acquaintances yields “men’s shoemaker”, “high street shoe shop” and “shoes, quite good quality”. A colleague is surprised to learn the company is Swiss and not British. Bally chief executive Nicolas Girotto knows this all too well. When the French-born former retail exec was promoted from chief operating officer to chief executive in mid-2019, customers told him “you have a well respected brand, a brand t…

Chanel is bracing for a “tougher” 2024 as the luxury industry grapples with slowing growth amid a global economic slowdown. President of fashion Bruno Pavlovsky said that the economic situation was difficult “everywhere, in every single country”, echoing warnings made by executives at LVMH and Burberry in recent weeks. “Luxury is not protected from the economy,” he told the Financial Times ahead of Chanel’s Métiers d’Art show in Manchester, where the company welcomed international clients and…

At a Christie’s sale in Paris late last year, a painted “Etruscan” armchair that once adorned Marie Antoinette’s apartments at Versailles, still retaining its original blue and grey pigment, hammered down at €906,000 (€1.1mn with fees) — wildly surpassing Christie’s mid-estimate of €150,000. Demand for antique painted furniture is on the rise as interiors evolve from what Alix Melville, junior specialist of decorative arts at Christie’s, describes as the “cream neutral walls and floors of the e…

Late last year the Hot or Cool Institute, a Berlin-based think-tank researching the intersection of culture and climate, published a study looking at what a “sustainable” wardrobe would look like — a wardrobe that could live comfortably within the 1.5-degree pathway set out by the Paris Agreement and still allow developing nations to increase their consumption to middle-class levels. To achieve that, the study’s authors concluded that people in wealthy countries should be buying no more than fiv…

For the €362bn personal luxury goods sector, 2023 may go down as the year that the post-Covid bubble finally burst. Despite the reopening of China at the start of the year, demand for personal luxury products slowed to 8 per cent at constant currency rates according to Bain, narrowly outpacing global inflation and marking a significant deceleration after three consecutive years of 20 per cent sales growth on average. Investors took note: for the first time in seven years, luxury stocks did not…

In October, I snapped up two matching pairs of Dutch floral striped curtains, with a “bonus” set of almost equally lovely embroidered curtains, at a local auction house for a mere £110 (with fees!). They were lined and in wonderful condition, with little in the way of fading and stains, and of the kind of fabric that would probably be priced at £200 a metre or more new. They were about 30cm too short to be hung up in the rooms I had in mind, but I figured I could have two of the matching pairs j…