The Enduring Creative

Lucinda Chambers, former fashion director at british vogue and co-founder of fashion label colville and e-commerce service collagerie, talks about her career and life lessons, her collaboration with weekend max mara and why fashion should always be an experiment

- Andrea Sim

This interview was conducted before the pandemic truly turned the world upside down, before the shutters between countries came down and millions of people woke up to find themselves jobless (including many from the fashion industry and fashion publishing). So it is perhaps at this point that Lucinda Chambers’ multi-faceted career in fashion can serve as a guiding light to those questioning their purpose.

With almost four decades in the industry, Chambers’ experience can be condensed into a handful of roles — most prominently British Vogue’s fashion director and for a brief period, ELLE UK — yet her resultant expertise and point of view can’t nearly be as neatly encapsulated by a name card. Her career has seen her working through the era where print magazines reigned supreme, to the present with the democratisation of content creation; through the rise of fast fashion to the dawning importance of its antithesis — sustainability. She’s served as a consultant to brands like Prada and Marni, even taking on a co-design role at the latter after its founder and designer Consuelo Castiglioni stepped down in 2016. She’s also behind the fashion label Colville (alongside co-founders who were previously also at Marni), and Collagerie, an online shopping platform that aims to cut through the noise of the highly crowded and competitive e-commerce arena today.