Fileophilia: How Phoebe Failo Became New Coco Chanel

The philosophy of most brands that make girls throw a dress from last season, bought for three thousand dollars, and run for even less accessible from the new, can be described in the words of Miuccia Prada: "I want to work on things that will drive you crazy. After all, women deny yourself such pleasures as lace, sequins or animal prints. " It seems to be nothing bad: the economic process, fashion is cyclical, everyone wants to make money, designers are people too. But here you sit, reread, and there remains such an unpleasantly stabbing feeling: "I was counted."

Phoebe Faylo graduated from Central Saint Martins College a year later, Stella McCartney, and in 2001 she takes her place as creative director of Chloe. At a time when Britney Spears lowers her jeans lower and Paris Hilton sparkles with gold stilettos and a disco bag under her arm, the designer shows on the catwalk that the public is shocking: wide pants with a high waist, shoes on a wooden platform and a voluminous hobo bag that instantly disappeared from counters all over the world. Sales Chloe make a sharp jump up. Critics say: "File made Chloe the time lawmaker, Chanel of the XXI century", "Here's who have real talent, Stella McCartney has only a name." The designer is modestly silent and continues to make the clothes he wants to see in his wardrobe: well-tailored clothes that you can wear from season to season and look great.

2006 Chloe basks in success when Phoebe Failo suddenly leaves the house. She is not going to accept a better offer or open her own brand, she just returns to England to stay with her family. Businessmen do not understand the decision, the Guardian writes: "Phoebe has always sought to lead a life much simpler than her glamorous work implies."

Having disappeared for three years, it would seem that you risk losing everything, but in the case of Fileo this does not work. In 2009, she returns to the role of the creative director of Celine, who is unprofitable at that time, making a real revolution not only inside him, but also in the industry as a whole, and falls in love with anyone who could doubt her previous decision. Celine President Marco Gobetti is nervous about working with a designer, for which the family will always come first. The file does not disappoint either him or the thousands of girls, for whom she becomes not only a designer number 1, but also an example to follow. "I am inspired by the example of a strong woman who attracted the attention of millions to her business, she worked successfully from London, where she went because of her family, and was not afraid to cancel the show because of pregnancy," says Another Magazine fashion editor Agata Belsen.

The secret of charisma Failo must be in humanity. Humanity is that which is lacking in the industry, which turns into a farce of feathers, flashes, and self-promotion. Humanity is what Raf Simons is so cute to us, smiling humbly from behind the scenes of the greatest French house, or Suzy Menkes, leaving first to show a report. Phoebe Faylo never wanted to be seen, she speaks little with journalists, and everything that is known about her personal life is told by her friends and colleagues. While Prada wants to dress the whole world in a uniform, Filelo doesn’t want to make screaming clothes at all: “I won’t even try to describe my client. I think she would like to remain anonymous, and I try to make clothes that will help her in this I would not like it myself if I were put in a row with other women, but I thought: "Are we really the same?" ".

It is ironic that people around the world want clothes designed according to the children's principle of “making what I’m going to wear myself”. Collections are sold out, having only entered the boutiques, for every thing Celine on eBay there are bloody slaughters, the designers of the highest league unwittingly copy the “wings” of the famous Filelo bags in their models, and there’s no need to talk about the mass market. Everyone wants to buy something with which he will look modern now and in ten years: a perfectly tailored coat, well-fitting trousers, metal-heeled shoes and a bag not clogged with logos. Everything comes to the point that even fur slippers, a thing that anyone except Failo could have done to an ugly one, they want just as much, saying to themselves: “Why no one thought of this before, I finally have the official right to go outside in slippers” .

What is Phoebe Failo's secret? It seems, in the most simple: possessing impeccable taste and sense of time, it makes the most practical things desirable. When she graduated from college in the 1990s, when Chalayan was thinking about new technologies, and Alexander McQueen devoted his collections to the crazy, she said: “I don’t care about my clothes being sent to the Holocaust or anything else. I just want to sew pants in which my ass looks good. " And damn it, with all the love of intellectual design, I want the same from the trousers. Does anyone need anything else?