What with her being French it was all very civilised: when Nicole Farhi, the
fashion designer, picked up her CBE award from Andy Burnham, the culture
secretary, last week, she took along her husband, the playwright David Hare,
and her former lover, Stephen Marks, father of her 32-year-old daughter
Candice. They went “en famille”, as she put it, so she could share the
occasion with Marks, with whom she founded first French Connection, then the
Nicole Farhi label. “We are all very good friends,” she says, shrugging.
“It’s rare, but it works for us.”
Over the past three decades Farhi’s name has become synonymous with a certain
understated elegance. For those of sufficient affluence and taste, there is
not just clothing but a whole Nicole Farhi lifestyle. If you chose, you
could not just waft around in her beautifully cut pants and soft shirts but
also douse yourself in her scent or style your home with elegant mirrors or
vases from her homeware collection. Becoming a CBE, she says, is a “lovely
reward” for having put her faith in Britain: “I’ve had offers to go to
France or America but I stuck to London – I always showed my collection
here. I think it’s a wonderful present to me from this country.”
On the face of it she and Hare make an unlikely couple: she the style queen,
he the leftie firebrand. They met when his play Murmuring Judges was at the
National Theatre and she was asked to dress the leading lady. She was
invited to the first-night party and was instantly smitten: “’Ee is the
wittiest man in England,” she says, still sounding as though she has been in
Britain for 30 days rather than more than 30 years.
Guests at the party to celebrate her CBE award, held at Nicole’s, the low-lit
restaurant beneath her Bond Street store, sipped Farhini, a gin and
cranberry juice cocktail created by the designer – another manifestation of
the “relaxed sophistication that is the Farhi signature” – and listened as
Hare extolled his wife’s virtues as a mother, stepmother and “consistently
brilliant” designer.
Unable to resist a pop at the government, Hare did not stop there. In the 17
years that he had known Farhi, he said, the only slighting reference he had
ever come across was from Alastair Campbell, who referred in his diaries to
Tony Blair “looking like a prat” in a Nicole Farhi suit.
No surprise, said Hare, that the only bad word about her came from “a
Burnley-crazed apparatchik churning out propaganda for a dead political
regime – one whose own name is a byword for bullying and mendacity”.
Phew! Perhaps Hare was just feeling extra-protective of his wife, who was
brutally mugged outside their home in north London three weeks ago (of which
more later), but it’s no wonder that Burnham blanched when he heard that
Hare was writing a new play about the Labour party. It’s the last thing the
government needs on top of the memoirs by John Prescott, Lord Levy and
Cherie Blair.
If Hare is unsympathetic, his wife – a natural conciliator – has more fellow
feeling, especially for Cherie, whom she thought “absolutely lovely” when
she came to choose clothes to wear at Chequers. Cherie admits that the way
she looked was a constant anxiety while she was at No 10; and a number of
her worst indiscretions stemmed from her reliance on Carole Caplin, her
stylist.
“She was attacked, poor woman, all the time for her looks and her make-up and
her hair, and you do become self-conscious if you are the target of the
press nonstop telling you that you look awful,” says Farhi.
“I used to say to her, ‘Why don’t you just wear what you want to wear?’ And
she’d say, ‘Oh, I can’t, I can’t.’ I thought: poor you. It’s such a sad
thing that you have to be so careful . . . and the more careful she was, the
worse mistakes she was making.”
One of the absurdities of modern politics is this obsession with looks or
second-guessing how you should look, says Farhi: “Maybe they all do have to
have their hairdresser telling them, ‘You should have your sideburns a bit
longer’.” It’s hard to imagine Gordon Brown discussing sideburns with
anyone, but she laughs at the thought of Nico-las Sarkozy, president of her
home country, being revamped by the delectable Carla Bruni-Sarkozy: “Not
only the way he looks but his jewellery. He had a very bling-bling watch and
she said no way now, you must have something a little more sober. And the
suits. And she’s taking him to the theatre to try to get him a bit more
cultured. She has wonderful taste and she will be a very good influence, I
think.”
Farhi, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, was born in Nice in 1946, where her
father made a living selling rugs before setting up a lighting company. Her
first love was fine art but as a student she swapped to fashion and design.
“I was a rebel. I didn’t want to do anything that my parents did,” she says.
Paris was a heady place to be in the late 1960s and her attraction to Hare
starts to make sense as she talks about joining in the student protests. “It
was great to be living those times, to be part of it,” she says. “We were
rebelling from everything we’d been taught. I had a social conscience, I
wanted to be free and I’ve always kept that feeling that you think for
yourself, you do not push your beliefs down people’s throats. In my work
it’s the same: I’ve never liked diktat in fashion; I’ve never wanted to do
things because it was ‘fashionable’ to do them.”
Forty years on, many people have been taking a hard look at 1968 and wondering
what was really achieved – not least Tom Stoppard, the playwright, who
debated against Hare at a recent event at the Institute of Contemporary Arts
and argued that it was all, in retrospect, rather self-indulgent.
“Pah,” says Farhi, flicking back her long, curly hair. “It had a consequence.
I became a feminist then and I think we did change things. My generation has
changed a lot; and the kids we’ve had, we’ve taught them a different way.
The generation in between my child and me . . . ”
The Thatcher generation? “Yes! They became much more materialistic, more
conscious of money, where we were not. The Thatcher generation is not very
interesting but the younger generation, our children, I have hope for them.
Life is tougher for them, but my daughter and David’s kids, they have
wonderful values: they are generous, they want to do something for society
and they want to help others.”
Farhi started coming to London as a student, marvelling at the punks who
paraded up the King’s Road and Carnaby Street. We are talking now in her
light-filled studio off Carnaby Street; she has never lost her fascination
with London and says she takes much of her inspiration from the street
fashion she sees on her way to work every day.
“I remember Vivienne Westwood’s first shop and the King’s Road so well,” she
says. “It was the 1970s, very punky, wonderful hair and dishevelled
clothes.” But she was never brave enough for clothes held together with
safety pins. “I was in jeans and T-shirt,” she says, laughing. “I envied the
punks’ clothes but I could never wear them.”
In Paris she met Marks: they fell in love and they founded French Connection
in 1972. But the free-spirited Farhi was reluctant to settle down, even
after Candice was born in 1975. “I never let my flat in Paris, I kept my car
and I kept my clothes in a suitcase. I was a freelance designer with work in
France and Italy, so I would come here and work with Stephen three or four
days a week and go back to Paris with my daughter.”
It sounds hellish to have been commuting with a small child but she shrugs, as
if it was easy. “Yes! She was in a basket and I just took her back and
forth,” she says.
It was only when the time came for Candice to go to school that Farhi settled
in London, sending her daughter to the French Lycée in Kensington. She and
Marks separated when Candice was about 10, but have remained friends.
“Nicole Farhi would not exist without him,” she says.
She still wonders whether she did the right thing in leaving art for fashion
and keeps a sculpture studio at her home in Hampstead, which is her retreat
from the business world. The £3m house, built in the 1760s and filled with
books and objets d’art – outside which she was mugged recently – is her
marital home but also the home she once shared with Marks.
According to Farhi, Hare did not mind moving in “because I had been separated
from Stephen for quite a while and the house had become mine and everything
had my touch.
And I had more space – it was easier to get his family and my daughter and the
dogs and cats into my place”.
She was walking back to the house at about 11pm on a Thursday when she was
robbed at knifepoint by two men, who took a ring, a watch and her money,
before fleeing in a silver car. It was one of several recent attacks on lone
women in the area.
She will not discuss the details of what happened – the police are
investigating – indeed she is not keen to talk about the incident at all,
partly because when friends ring saying, “My God, what happened to you?” it
upsets her and partly because she hates “unnecessary fuss”, as she puts it.
“We live in a country where there are many muggings and robberies. It’s sad
that the police are not protecting us better, but there’s no reason that it
happening to me should make it more important than it happening to anyone
else,” she says, adding that reports that she was so “traumatised” by the
attack that she could not leave the house were untrue. A reporter who spoke
to her housekeeper – who does not speak very good English – had
misunderstood what she said.
“Just say you saw me and I look well,” she says defiantly. “I’m over it. I’m
fine.”
