It’s here! The momentous Monday morning when Phoebe Philo opens her online shop has finally arrived‚ after surely the longest tease in fashion history. It wasn’t just the three interminable months’ wait since untold thousands signed up to her website on July 27; it was also the nearly six-year-long endurance of the Philophiles after she left Celine in 2017. It’s impossible to exaggerate the level of anticipation over the reappearance of this leader of women. Even more so, at a time where there are more female creative directors leaving the scene than joining it.
At first viewing, she has delivered what we’ve hoped for: a powerful punch of imagery and silhouettes to set your mind whirring; the Phoebe Philo tang of oddness, eroticism, and humor she so cleverly secretes amongst clothes that are just perfectly wearable. The thrill of her attitude radiates from her pictures with an uncompromising confidence: strong women, who are basically looking down on the viewer.
On an appointment at the company’s brand-new headquarters, all of her female-gaze understanding of fashion—and much more—became vividly apparent. In the showroom behind the anonymous frontage of a building in London, it was very clear: Phoebe Philo is born not just as a complete collection, but as a new luxury fashion house. It has its own in-house atelier and perfectionist standards to equal the best of Paris (which Phoebe obviously knows all about), and already, what you see encompasses everything from tailoring to leather jackets (a lot of leather), great coats, casual-ish pieces, a suggestion of after-hours wear, shoes, bags, sunglasses, and jewelry.
But it’s also, crisply and very intentionally, about her economy of style. The genius of Phoebe Philo—the element so long missed by her faithful—is how she puts her concise stamp on new proportions and provokes new ways to wear things. With this collection (she isn’t calling it that, but we’ll get to that in a minute), her equation is thus: a big, rounded shoulder line, trousers, and always, with everything, high heels.
New varieties of very specific heels, that is—ones that are high-vamped just-off-classic loafers with heels sculpted to be solid and wide at the back, yet sliced thin in profile; madly funny fringed ones; and seriously sexy stiletto pumps.