Women of a certain age are finding themselves with Phoebe Philo

Washington Post

3 days ago

At any given moment, fashion has a main character. For the past few years, it's been the bookish but seductive, slightly frazzled woman of Miu Miu, with trends such as chipped nails, bag charms and miniskirts emanating from the brand's runways to TikTok and the streets.
It felt right to have that young, intelligent but not quite together young woman as a guiding light in a moment when pop culture became dominated by 20-something female pop stars pushing the boundaries of freedom and music, and festooning everything with bows felt like a somehow silly feminist statement.
Well, move over, girlies! There's a new woman in town: She's in her 50s, at least. She's busy — very, very busy. She does not look perfect — but she looks amazing. Not overdone, but strange, special, elegant. She is the focus of novels such as last summer's must-read novel, Miranda July's 'All Fours,' and age-gap fantasy films such as 'Babygirl' and 'Last Summer.'
And in fashion, she is the brainchild of the British designer Phoebe Philo, who on Tuesday released the images of her fourth collection from her eponymous brand — called in the brand's parlance Collection D, a seasonless, trend-less slate of pieces that will be available in six months' time.
The fashion world's Instagram feeds snapped into a frenzy, sharing pictures of her sandals with a series of rib-cage-like extra-long buckles and a fluffy but sharply shaped shearling bomber. Substackers joined in: 'Natural hair. Embracing age. Skin texture. Perfectly undone styling. And big aura. The Phoebe Philo woman!' wrote Zoë Yasemin Akihary. 'Something off in an otherwise perfect look: that's when chic happens,' wrote Edward Kanarecki.
For this woman, putting on clothes, no matter how little time she has to do it, is a personal ritual. 'When I get dressed in the morning, I have my 15 minutes, and it's an act of self-care,' said Samira Nasr, the editor of Harper's Bazaar. 'And [Philo's] clothes allow me to feel cared for when I get dressed.'
Philo invokes a mania more akin to a cult leader than a fashion designer. And it is safe to say that wherever Philo's eye goes, the world follows.
It's almost impossible to overstate her influence — especially when few of the ideas of luxury designers are accessible, pragmatic or novel enough to permeate throughout the rest of culture. (The old cerulean sweater trickle-down paradigm of 'The Devil Wears Prada' is ancient history.)
Women who call themselves the Philophiles still seek out the pieces she made during her time at Celine, from 2008 to 2017, on resale platforms. The language that Philo created at that brand, of oversize tailoring and fluid dresses with a boxy or blousy top, all done with a subdued sense of mischief, remains everywhere today.
Its understated appeal was the building block of 'quiet luxury,' and this is still the predominant way that working women younger than 40 dress, as a look at Instagram or TikTok, or a walk around a white-collar office, will show you. Brands such as Frankie Shop, Favorite Daughter and Zara have iterated relentlessly on her Celine designs, making it accessible to a wide array of women even if they are unaware they're wearing a Philo-inspired garment. (And, as some of these knockoffs demonstrate, it is easier to make an oversize blazer than one that fits perfectly.)
Perhaps that's because, although she speaks rarely publicly and lives quite privately, Philo designs autobiographically. The little pleasures and obsessions and annoyances and inconveniences of a woman's life are her lived experiences and the meat of her creativity. Few designers offer this mix of pragmatism and oddness (perhaps because there are so few female designers these days).
Philo, who is now 51, is making clothes for her peers, making the 50-something woman, with all her eccentricities and anxieties and well-earned confidence, fashion's trendsetter, or even soothsayer. 'I'm a grown-ass woman, and her clothes make me feel like a grown-up,' said Nasr.
Actress Tracee Ellis Ross, one of the most fashion-fluent women on the planet, let alone in Hollywood, has a ravenous dedication to Philo's clothes. 'I was online, waiting,' said Ross, who is 52, of the moment the brand launched in fall of 2023. While she often wears borrowed clothes for the red carpet, as many actresses do, 'everything [by Philo] that I've worn is stuff that I purchased.' She has brown trousers and an asymmetrical jacketlike top, fringy footwear she calls her 'horseshoes.'
'I have a rule about social media,' Ross said. 'I don't do anything for social media — it's what I'm already doing and what I am wearing. So I don't put on outfits to take a picture for social media. And Phoebe's clothes work for my sensibility and also how I live my life.'
'I can't wear certain things anymore,' said Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, the founder of the New York gallery Salon 94, who is in her mid-50s. 'And I don't mind. I had a great time in them, but they are just not for me anymore. They're not for my age. And I feel my age in her clothes, and I feel good in my age. And that is something that distinguishes her clothes from many other designers.'
While the brand launched less than two years ago, retailers are already seeing other designers taking notes from her work. 'She seems to have no intention to set trends and yet the impact of her work is immediate,' said Yumi Shin, chief merchandising officer at Bergdorf Goodman. 'When we launched Collection A as the brand's first physical retail experience, we saw the industry quickly embrace the crop bomber jacket, the slouch jeans, high-neck collar detail, leather jackets and trenches with detachable scarves. In Collection B, the overdyed T-shirts and denim also inspired others to follow suit and continues to do so.'
While Philophile brands (and their cousin, the Rowdents) have diluted Philo's Celine concepts into something partly tasteful, the designer has adapted a naughtier attitude: one that embodies how women think about aging today. These are extraordinary but wearable clothes for adult women, and Philo is letting her freak flag fly with clothes that are not obviously flattering or cloying — a slightly radical act in an industry that lionizes youth.
Philo's colors are not brown or pink or white but 'sludge,' 'floss pink,' 'apricot shearling' 'chewing gum,' 'salt.' Shirts have tails; jackets appear to have spines.
These are not simply meant to be kooky ideas but real clothes to wear. Several of her customers described Philo's clothes as 'solving problems.'
'She's grounded in a very real world: I've got to actually wear these clothes and get from point A to point B, and things can be designed and can be beautiful, but they have to serve a function,' said Nasr, who has worn Philo's garments since the designer's days at Chloé in the early 2000s. 'And they're not necessarily here for male gaze. They're here for me to feel great and empowered in.'
'What's so remarkable about her thinking is that these are clothes that are meant to be worn every day,' said Shin. A T-shirt dress, or long ball skirt made of tiers of silk, might at once seem like an overly casual or overly formal idea — but her way of building clothes makes them wearable in a multitude of ways.
And notably, they are different from a common but sometimes condescending romanticism of aging, that celebrates the graying woman in big jewelry and patchy fur. Philo's heroine is powerful and extraordinarily confident, and most of all, cool.
The ferocious independence with which Philo operates her label has helped it maintain a cult status. While some in the industry have groaned that she mostly sells her clothing online and has not done a traditional runway show, that has kept her work from getting sucked into the social media pipeline that overexposes much of fashion. 'There is an element to the way Phoebe is dropping her clothes that allows for an allure that I love because it's not a thing that everybody has touched and grabbed and commented on,' said Ross. 'It's something that's like you either know or you don't.'
Younger woman are now taking up the look. Lotta Volkova, who helped invent the Miu Miu girl as the brand's runway stylist, recently shared a picture of herself in a gorgeously odd skirt with a sculpted crest of jersey at the waist. The girl is all grown up.