The Family Trees Of Fashion

We trace the impact of the visionary designers who have reshaped fashion, and their bright protégés now carrying on the torch.

- JEFFREY YAN

The school of Phoebe Philo

Few designers were as game-changing in the past decade and a half as Phoebe Philo was, in the sense that she actually changed the way women dressed—much like Coco Chanel did a century ago. Prior to her joining Celine in 2009, fashion was gripped by the questionable taste that defined Y2K dressing—low-riding pants, crotch-baring skirts, bling, cleavage and logos galore. Then the financial markets crashed, and suddenly all that hedonism looked out of touch. Along came Philo, who reset Celine (and the wider industry) with her distinctly grown-up clothes. They were sophisticated, but not stuffy; sexy, without pandering to the male gaze; minimal, but with enough detail and personality to never be boring. By wearing Celine, the Philophiles (as her devotees called themselves) telegraphed that they love fashion, but were not enslaved to it. You could almost hear their collective sigh of relief when she finally launched her long-anticipated, much-delayed eponymous brand late last year.

But before that, when she left the industry in 2017, she also left a giant Philo-shaped hole that a slew of designers then tried to fill. The strongest contenders came from within her workrooms. There was Daniel Lee, who electrified Bottega Veneta with a thumping dose of Berlin-by-way-of-London edge and deliberately awkward proportions—the last quality being something he refined under Philo’s tutelage. Lee blew up the brand’s intrecciato weave, single-handedly made square-toed pumps cool again, and gave Bottega Veneta its first (of many) It bag in years. Now, he’s attempting to do the same for Burberry. There, he has played up (and made playful) the brand’s outdoorsy heritage, as well as distorted its signature check to great effect. Results remain to be seen but already the brand has more of an identity than it did under his predecessor, Riccardo Tisci.