If you were casting a British version of The Devil Wears Prada, you could do
worse than Katie Grand — the nearest thing the British fashion industry has
to Anna Wintour, the all-powerful and widely feared editor of American
Vogue, on whom the story is rumoured to be based.
Grand is the editor of Pop magazine, a tri-annual superglossy famed for its
talking-point celebrity covers but is little known outside fashion circles.
Yet her influence spreads way beyond her niche magazine. She styles the
catwalk shows and campaigns for Louis Vuitton, lends her talents to Mac and
Shiseido advertising and serves as a creative director for Giles Deacon, the
newly crowned British fashion designer of the year. She is also a retailer,
having opened Pop Shop, a jaunty concession in the hipster shopping mecca of
Dover Street Market. Naturally, everything there, from the studded black
Katie Hillier hair scrunchies to the furry Miu Miu iPod covers and Giles
minidresses, is very fashion forward and very limited-edition.
But then it would be. Grand is currently the grande dame of London cool. All
that’s left to wonder about — in a notoriously competitive industry
populated by tall blonde thoroughbreds and bitchy queens — is how she got
there. The comparisons with Wintour go only so far. Yes, Grand lives in a
world of £10,000 Vuitton handbags, but she can do “normal girl” in a way
that would send Wintour running for the hills. At the moment, she’s working
with Deacon on his capsule collection for New Look, which will hit the shops
next year. The campaign will be fronted by none other than Drew Barrymore,
herself a former Pop cover girl. A-list Hollywood stars don’t normally pose
for British high-street chains, but Grand is very, very hard to say no to.
Her fiery personality is the stuff of legend. Fashion folklore is awash with
stories of her waking up hapless assistants with 4am phone calls — time
zones be damned — or getting them to move house for her because she was too
busy jetting round the world to do it herself. She persuaded Liz Hurley to
pose in a swimsuit and S&M shoes just weeks after giving birth; and for
the latest issue, Courtney Love, aged 42, appears topless. Whether the
fearsome rep is earned or not, it all feeds into the Grand mythology. “Some
of the work placements can seem a little nervous when they arrive,” she
admits, although she says she only blows a gasket when someone isn’t as
committed as she is to the job in hand, however menial their role.
In person, though, there is none of Wintour’s unnerving iciness. Grand claims
she hasn’t seen the film version of The Devil Wears Prada yet, though she
confesses that her boyfriend, the former Pulp bassist Steve Mackey, once
caught her reading the book in bed, wearing Prada pyjamas — and that they
both got the irony. But you would never hear Wintour proclaiming her primary
fashion influence of the season to be “a load of drag queens in Hoxton”.
That’s very Grand. She has a little shonkiness to her. And for all the
expensive designer fabulousness that surrounds her, it is this that’s the
key to her success. She is the only woman in the world who can make coming
from Birmingham cool. She has a black-or-white sense of certainty — you
either get it or you don’t. When she was growing up, her icons were Lucy
from Peanuts and Patsy Kensit. “Basically, all I ever wanted was to be a
teenager for ever,” she says, and you believe her.
Naturally, the girl knows how to bust a look. On the arm of Deacon at the
recent British fashion awards, she was a hot gothic bride in strappy Alaïa
shoes (to which she admits she has a mild addiction), an above-the-knee
black Giles frock and an elaborate Vuitton tiara and clutch. You’d guess the
whole look to clock in at somewhere around the £2,000 mark, if she was
paying for it (although she did pay for the shoes: “£450, I think”). “It’s
just nice to have the opportunity to make an effort sometimes,” she says of
her look, one that she had planned 10 days in advance.
Yet, even when dolled up to the nines, it is Grand herself, and not the
clothes, that carries the magnetism. She never wears make-up, and appears
never to brush her unruly curls. She also has a gap in her front teeth to
rival the Wife of Bath from The Canterbury Tales. Remember Chaucer’s
affirmation that the gap was the symbol of sex appeal? That’s Grand — though
she says that, given the choice of being beautiful or sexy, she would take
“a bit of either, to be honest”.
Grand understands loyalties, and her grown-up, makeshift fashion family is
tight knit. She says she couldn’t even begin to imagine a Pop cover without
it being shot by her long-term collaborators Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott —
“geniuses”. And her relationship with Deacon — whom she met 16 years ago
when she arrived straight off the bus from Birmingham as a fashion student
at Central Saint Martins in London — is very much for life. “We’re kind of
saddled with each other, really,” she says.
She remembers how a friend spread a rumour around college that they’d had sex
in the toilets at the nightclub Venus. “It wasn’t true, but it got me to
meet Giles, who was the college’s ‘best boy’. A straight boy at Saint
Martins was like gold dust, anyway,” she says, with a wry cackle. “It’s
lovely to have one or two people who have been with you since the start, and
who you know will never, ever f*** you over. It’s a bit like a marriage,
really.” I ask her if she wanted to marry Deacon when they were girlfriend
and boyfriend. “I don’t think that’s something I’d like to see in print,”
she says, with another cackle.
She’s in love with Mackey now, and has been for nine years (“Nine years?
Aargh!”). “Steve doesn’t want to marry,” she says, with a note of bluff
reconciliation. It seems a shame, if only to miss out on the sheer visual
spectacle of it all. Grand describes what she does as “sprinkling a little
fairy dust on stuff”. Imagine that at her wedding. She doesn’t want kids,
either: “Never have done. I am the only child of an only child of an only
child. The Grand line stops here. I didn’t even like being a child. Life
only began to make sense for me as a teenager. I had my first age issues
when I hit 17 and thought it was all over.” In truth, it was just the start
of her fashion odyssey. If the Grand line is indeed stopping with Katie,
she’s giving one hell of a curtain call.
The new Kinky (Gerlinky) issue of Pop magazine is out on Wednesday
