Influential designer and creative director Clare Waight Keller on her move from Givenchy to Uniqlo, "re-defining what luxury is today" – and how Seoul street style is predicting what we wear. Last week, Clare Waight Keller flew from London to Tokyo, grabbed some fabric swatches, and decided what millions of people will wear in September 2025. "I don't have a time machine," says the 54-year-old designer, who is now the creative director of Uniqlo, the global fashion chain.
"But at this point, I've fine-tuned my fashion sense to live in the future," she tells the BBC from her home in Cornwall. "It's my job to see what will happen before it does." If that sounds far-fetched, consider Keller's track record as something of a fashion intuit.
She began her career at Calvin Klein during its early 1990s, Kate Moss heyday, then joined Tom Ford's team at Gucci around the year 2000. As creative director of Chloé in 2011, Keller helped develop the pale blush colour – called "millennial pink" by fashion theorist Véronique Hyland – that first appeared in floaty chiffon dresses and their corresponding Chloé perfume boxes, defining the era's more muted take on "girly" style, one that included a wider and more nuanced spectrum of feminine power. In 2017, Keller decamped for Givenchy, where her long-sleeved wedding dress for Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex spawned thousands of imitations just days after debuting in 2018.
Even today, six years later, the boat-necked silhouette i.
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