Vogue fashion director Lucinda Chambers on dressing the Duchess of Cambridge and her Ab Fab cameo
When Lucinda Chambers was first asked to style a fashion shoot with the Duchess of Cambridge for the June issue of Vogue in conjunction with the National Portrait Gallery, it came as a bolt from the blue. “My first reaction was that I was terribly thrilled for Alex [Shulman, editor of Vogue] because it was very much on her bucket list and she was hugely excited.” However, for Chambers herself, who has been Vogue’s fashion director for 15 years, choosing what the Duchess was going to wear was a big step out of her comfort zone.
“It was obvious from the start that I wouldn’t be able to do my usual ‘ball gowns and Wellington boots’ - as one paper put it - which is my natural instinct,” she says. As the magazine’s most celebrated stylist, Chambers has a reputation for being maverick and demanding, as well as for creating startlingly beautiful if unconventional shoots inspired by art, landscape and the occasional twig or piece of string, as much as by frocks and baubles.
Inevitably, since it was the first shoot the Duchess has ever done for any publication - despite being papped a million times - the whole project had to be shrouded in secrecy; very few people at Vogue knew about it and the shoot had to be scaled right down.
Photographer Josh Olins, with whom Chambers has worked often, was the Duchess’s choice, “based on the fact that he photographs ‘real’ women with incredible warmth and spontaneity”. Everything from the Petit Bateau striped T-shirt to the 7 for All Mankind jeans was chosen with “the main objective being to make the Duchess feel relaxed and comfortable. We talked about specifics, like, she wouldn’t wear a V-neck without a shirt, but she didn’t dictate.”
To her surprise, Chambers, 56, who started as PA to legendary editor Beatrix Miller before becoming [then junior editor] Grace Coddington’s assistant - found herself smitten by the wife of the future king. “She had incredible dignity and graciousness beyond her years; she was thoughtful and intelligent, as well as being very confident in her role and her love for Prince William.”
This weekend Chambers will step out of her comfort zone in a different direction, when she interviews her old boss on stage at the Vogue Festival. “If someone had said to me 30 years ago, ‘You’re going to be interviewing Grace Coddington at a festival’, I’d have just gone, ‘Get out’,” she says modestly. “Grace is sort of my idol. I don’t find her scary but if you didn’t know her you would. I was possibly the worst assistant she’d ever had - as she always says - because I was hopeless at everything except calling clothes in. I’d do anything to get even a whiff of a fabric from Berwick Street into a shoot and never sent any of the clothes back because that was the boring bit. I’d shove them all in a cupboard. I remember Liz Tilberis opening it and everything falling down on top of her and she said: ‘Tell that f****** girl to send some f****** clothes back’.”
If Coddington is the hidden face of fashion - Chambers describes her as “quite a shy person” who was “very reluctant” to be filmed in the 2009 fly-on-the-wall documentary The September Issue - the festival’s other big crowd-puller, Kim Kardashian, is the opposite. “She’s famous for baring all, so you’ve got these two women who are the antithesis of each other, yet fall under the umbrella of fashion - which makes it such a wonderful world.”
The festival, now in its fifth year, was Shulman’s idea. “We’d never done anything like it and at first we made terrible mistakes. But now I love the music-festival atmosphere, especially when you walk around seeing readers en masse and how much it means to them. Alex set out for it to touch people by creating something that would make them feel they’ve experienced something in a way that they don’t by just reading the magazine.”
Chambers has also had to endure - you get the sense that’s the word - her fair share of being in the spotlight for the forthcoming behind-the-scenes BBC documentary about Vogue. Like Coddington, she’s camera-shy. “I know I can come across as pretty dotty and if I looked at me, honestly, I might think, ‘Oh my God, if she’s fashion director of Vogue, I might stop buying it’.”
Still, she enjoyed playing a cameo role in the new Ab Fab movie, which comes out on July 1, in which she had to sit in the front row at a show looking cross. “Joanna Lumley came in as Patsy - plastered and late - and budged up next to me. I had to look annoyed as Lulu then bounced off the edge of the seat. That was it.”
Chambers says it made her think about how outsiders must perceive the world of fashion, “because sometimes I do look at the front row and think we all look pretty mad”. What did she wear? “Oh, a little fur cape, dark glasses, a print-y dress and very high heels - just more of the same old,” she says, shooting me a look and raising her eyebrows.
She is sceptical about whether it’ll go down as well as the original TV series, when fashion was so much about drinking and partying to excess. “What we thought was funny then... there’s a programme for it now called AA, and people might think: ‘I wish she’d get herself into rehab’,” she says, suddenly razor sharp.
When not in work mode Chambers tends to be make-up and high-heel free, happiest in plain T-shirt, jeans and sandals at home in W12 with her now three grown-up sons and husband, Simon Crow, who is a teacher, or rootling at a car boot sale or vintage fair on a Sunday morning. “I don’t lead a Vogue-y life. The only thing that matters to me work-wise is doing beautiful pictures for Vogue,” she says, although she acknowledges that “there is a crazy, obsessive side” to her work. The fashion world remains as pressure-cookerish as ever, particularly for the designers who have to produce up to eight collections a year. But unlike say, John Galliano or Alexander McQueen, today’s rising stars are pretty resilient. Chambers cites Christopher Kane, Erdem and J W Anderson as examples of “part major talent and part business person who know their worth in the workplace, which is very different from my generation”.
Mario Testino, who is possibly her favourite photographer (they did their first shoot together), “didn’t become a photographer to make money, he wanted to pick up a camera and take a picture. Actually, he wanted to meet lots of fabulous people and take pictures of them.” They’ve just shot Cara Delevingne together for Vogue’s September cover and, says Chambers, “we had a bit of an argy bargy”. What about?
“Mario wanted to shoot Cara in a black tuxedo with red lipstick and I wanted to do her poignant and intimate, wearing a pair of Adidas trousers with a Balmain ball dress on top.” Who won? “Me,” comes the crisp reply. “But Mario sometimes gets his way. When we do celebrities together, which I find challenging, he is great with them.”
Why does she find celebrities difficult? “Because they have opinions and aren’t comfortable in front of cameras and I’m suddenly saying ‘I’m going to pop you into this thing I’ve chosen’.”
In Victoria Beckham’s case “this thing” turned out to be an apron saying Too Posh to Wash and a pair of yellow Marigolds. For Emma Watson, it was the fashion assistant’s sweater and Chambers’s sunglasses, after she discovered that the entire collection of clothes for the shoot had been stolen. “It’s all about gaining their trust and confidence,” Chambers says. “You have to make them feel a total surround-sound of love, comfort and joy.”
Lucinda Chambers will be appearing at the Vogue Festival 2016 in association with Harrods on May 21 and 22 at the Royal Geographical Society and Kensington Gardens; vogue.co.uk/voguefestival
Lucinda Chambers on dressing the Duchess and her Ab Fab cameoVogueBritish VogueLucinda ChambersGrace CoddingtonVogue FestivalAlexandra ShulmanDuchess of CambridgeKate MiddletonCara DelevingneVictoria BeckhamEmma WatsonBurberryVogue’s most celebrated stylist reveals what it's like shooting with fashion's biggest names