LONDON — Fashion designer Clare Waight Keller on Wednesday night returned to her alma mater the Royal College of Art‘s campus at Battersea, south of the River Thames, for the premiere of her documentary series “Foundations,” followed by an in-depth conversation with Zowie Broach and Freddie Robins, head of fashion and textiles programs at the RCA, respectively.
The documentary, which is being released in parts from Thursday on YouTube, charts Waight Keller’s fashion journey from the beginning in Birmingham, helping her mother making clothes at a young age; studying at the RCA in the early ’90s; landing a job at Calvin Klein in New York, to working as creative director at various brands including Pringle of Scotland, Chloé, Givenchy, and now Uniqlo over the past two decades.
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The designer said she was the “unwitting volunteer” in her mother’s home-based making of skirts, tops and dresses. That experience felt ordinary at the time, but Waight Keller said she later registered it as her earliest training in fashion design.
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“She was a huge influence. I hadn’t really realized that young that it was going to be quite pivotal later in my life. It was the two of us figuring out ways of how to cut fabric, or find a fabric, and then understand what we’re going to make with it. Each time you just get better at doing it,” she recalled.
The streets of Birmingham, a city of smokestacks and car plants, taught her about personal style and the rise of the punk and New Romantic movements that filtered up from London when she was a schoolgirl. Those visual and cultural shocks eventually lured her to study fashion at the RCA.
Her relationship with materials was central to her study at the RCA, where she didn’t just design with fabric, she made it. It was also at the school that she identified what she now calls her “thing,” the niche that would become her competitive edge in a saturated field.
“For me at that time, it was the knitwear, and I think that was really the angle that I felt that I could get some edge. Some unique skill that maybe a lot of other people didn’t have,” she said, adding that today’s new generation should also have a very keen eye on where the real passion and depth of knowledge is in order to rise above the competition.
By the time she graduated in 1993, Waight Keller said because she had spent a lot of time evolving her ideas and honing her craft, she was able to have a strong portfolio and go straight into the fashion business with Calvin Klein in New York.
There, she learned to deal with extreme competition and office politics with guidance from Morty Albert, the veteran colleague who onboarded her into the hidden curriculum.
“He spent probably two or three months taking me to every single meeting that he went to. Afterwards, he would sit down and say: ‘Is there anything you heard you didn’t understand, something you need assistance with?’ He even came in on weekends when I had deadlines and sat with me and helped me with things,” she recalled.
With today’s global landscape, however, Waight Keller encouraged young designers to unshackle their thinking from the usual London–Paris–Milan orbit, and look to Asia, particularly Japan, Korea, and China, where risk, technology, and entrepreneurship intersect in a way that recalls the creative electricity of the ’80s.
“I think you need to think outside the box and go to places that you wouldn’t necessarily immediately think of. Asia right now is really developing quickly. They have really cutting-edge ideas, and they just take a little more risk,” she added.
Looking back at her career so far, she called it a story of continuous reinvention.
“I actually really enjoyed the idea of reincarnating every time. There’s this wonderful thing: when you work for companies, you can leave behind who you were before, and you can become something else. And there’s something actually quite exciting about that,” she said.
“I could go from super minimalism to menswear to jet set to heritage knitwear. I could be anything, like being an actor in a theater in a way. I also felt, for me, particularly, I love learning. Every single time I moved, I learned a completely new skill,” she continued.
Waight Keller said she hasn’t really thought about launching her own brand throughout her career.
“To be successful with your own brand, you need to have a narrow niche. You need to have a very specific approach. You need to have a very strong identity, and you need to repeat that and instill it so that people understand it. And I felt that for me, I just wanted a more winding path,” she added.
During the conversation, she also explained why sustainability, particularly the afterlife of garments, matters to her current role at Uniqlo.
“In luxury fashion, you don’t talk about it. It’s not a conversation, and that’s mostly because we’re using very expensive fabric. The idea is that someone is buying this, and they are probably going to keep it for years because of the cost, or they’ll resell it because of the cost,” she said, adding that she would never start a couture dress by hunting for recycled textiles.
But at the more mass-oriented Uniqlo, material is where the conversation begins. Alongside this, Waight Keller argues that care is also key in prolonging a product’s lifespan.
“I was always taught by my mom to look after my clothes, fold them, and clean them nicely. That idea of caring for something is actually one of the most sustainable things you can do with clothes. I’ve got an archive of clothes that I’ve had for 20 years. I want to hand it down. I want it to have another life, and to have a generational longevity,” she said.
Answering a question from the audience about what one or two things she would change in the world of fashion, she said that the industry needs to support women more.
“I think fundamentally, they see male creative directors as more the poets in fashion. I don’t know where that narrative is coming from, but through history, that has been very much the narrative. If you look at museums, most of the male designers get huge retrospectives, but very few women get retrospectives in fashion. For me, one of the foundational parts of this starts with how women are presented in society, and how women designers are presented,” she said.
“You need that sort of ability to make them understand that as a woman, you can offer something so highly creative, but also that will bring the commercial value as well to what you’re doing. I think there’s still a lot of work to do there, and I hope that some of my other female creative director colleagues and I can also change the narrative on that,” Waight Keller concluded.