I feel sorry for women today: they have to do it all and look ravishing! As he launches his new range, Diana’s favourite designer Jasper Conran on his comeback at 62, and how he’s mended his rift with mum Shirley
- Jasper Conran, 62, who lives in Wiltshire, is estimated to be worth £33 million
- Princess Diana was one of his best customers when he launched brand aged 19
- He made history in 1990s by collaborating with High Street store Debenhams
- Spent lockdown launching an independent clothes and accessories line
Designer Jasper Conran couldn’t be any chirpier when I meet him. It’s a huge relief to find him so ebullient.
Like his father, the late Sir Terence ‘Habitat’ Conran (his mother is Shirley ‘Superwoman’ Conran), he has long enjoyed a reputation for not suffering fools. And, after all, the past couple of years haven’t been easy for him.
Having launched his luxury label aged just 19 (Princess Diana was one of his best customers — more of which later), in the 1990s he made fashion history by making his smooth, chic outfits available to the masses via his Debenhams’ J by Jasper Conran, the first High Street designer collaboration and one that has been widely copied but arguably never bettered.
The deal made him millions. But after years of decline, last year the final Debenhams store closed. ‘It was so sad,’ Jasper sighs, dapper in his trademark black poloneck and white trousers.
Jasper Conran, 62, who lives in Wiltshire, spent lockdown launching an independent clothes and accessories line. Pictured: Jasper with models in silk dresses from jasperconran.com
‘It had been a great, stable company that just had billions of pounds ripped out of it and left to rot. I was there for a long time and you saw that the customer wasn’t going to be getting what the customer should be getting.’
He refuses to expand, pursing his lips and adding, ‘That’s all I’m saying.’
Having seen the writing on the wall, Jasper, 62, had long since devised a back-up plan of launching an independent clothes and accessories line. Lockdowns were spent finessing the details.
‘God,’ he says, eyes rolling. ‘All the stuff to do with shipping and building websites and warehouses — everyone’s like, “Did you have a lovely pandemic?” and I’m like, “Er, I was working.” ’
The 31 frocks in the resulting collection all share the classic Conran hallmarks: elegant, beautifully tailored, with fabulous detailing (all with pockets, many with sleeves!). Some are plain, some patterned but not fussily so, and they’re available from today via his website jasperconran.com, while a selection will be on sale at Next online from Wednesday.
Over the years, Jasper’s unfussy aesthetic has never changed. ‘I think I have some sort of arrested development,’ he says. ‘I still feel the same way, quite strongly, that the clothes I make are not about dressing dollies.
‘These are real-world things. I think very carefully, “Can you wear a bra with it, where can you go in it, what’s the point of what I’m making?”
‘I can do very feminine things but that’s not the centre point of my thinking, I’ve never been interested in theatricality. I think like a woman would in terms of what she’s designing — about practicality and ease and comfort. A woman wouldn’t —unless she was [eccentric 20th-century designer Elsa] Schiaparelli — make idiot clothes.’
It’s unusual for a man to have such female insight — or to be interested at all. ‘Well, I grew up among women. My mother was a heightened feminist. But from my observation, women have been sold a bit of a pup. They have to be mothers, wives, have full-time jobs and be lovers — they’re busy. And they always have to look ravishing and sexy and, and, and . . . I’ve always felt sorry for them.’
Jasper didn’t speak to his mother for years, but she attended his 2015 wedding to 37-year-old Irish artist Oisin Byrne. Pictured: Jasper with his husband Oisin
Even though Shirley, now 89, was ‘Superwoman’? ‘Well, she wrote it,’ he corrects me, laughing. ‘But I saw her with two children, no job, no house. She had to create herself out of nothing.’
Mother and son have had a difficult relationship, apparently not speaking for years, but she did attend his 2015 wedding to the 37-year-old Irish artist Oisin Byrne. Now, after she had a brain tumour the ‘size of an orange’ removed two years ago, he says, ‘We speak very often.’
Still, I am not entirely sure why he decided to spend his lockdowns so hard at work. Jasper is estimated to be worth £33 million already and, although he won’t talk about his inheritance, it seems unlikely he received nothing from Sir Terence’s estate, valued at about £85 million.
After a lifetime’s graft, why not now enjoy the fruits of his labours with Oisin at their 17th-century manor house in Wiltshire, or their Greek villa, or the riad he has transformed into a hotel in Marrakech?
‘Conrans work until they drop,’ he says with mock grandeur. ‘The notion of retiring is anathema to me. Work is what I do. I love it.’
Is he romantic, I wonder? ‘Yes! Very! But I got married on my birthday, so I never forget my anniversary. Very smart.’
I have the impression that this venture has given Jasper a new lease of life. ‘I’ve been around as long as Methuselah,’ he says with one of his snarky grimaces.
‘But now we’re in a whole new way of doing business that is quite empowering. The pandemic means everybody’s mother knows how to use the internet, so you’ve got a seismic shift in shopping habits. And because I’m now selling directly to customers, it means I’m the designer, the manufacturer, the retailer and wholesaler. It’s exciting.’
His eyes sparkle behind his round specs. ‘It really takes me back to the very, very, very beginning of my career when I was doing almost everything myself. I had a table, scissors, a sewing machine and a dummy, and cut and sewed everything myself. It was all quite simple — I wasn’t a good pattern drafter.
Jasper’s parents divorced when he was two, after which he lived with first his grandmother then his mother. Pictured: Jasper with parents Shirley and Terence in 1993
‘Luckily, now I’m not doing it all myself, but it does give me a much tighter grip on what the end product is going to be, how it’s going to be marketed, what its quality will be, the pricing structure. My life has been one long adventure and this is just another one.’
Certainly, Jasper’s life has been quite the ride. His parents divorced when he was two, after which he lived with first his grandmother, then his mother, who started out as a journalist, later hitting the big time first with Superwoman, the guide for beleaguered working mothers, with its immortal maxim Life’s Too Short To Stuff A Mushroom, then with quintessential 1980s bonkbuster Lace.
Life was also clearly too short for Shirley, who divorced and remarried twice, to spend much time with Jasper and his older brother Sebastian. They were largely brought up by their new stepmother Caroline, mother of his half-siblings Sophie, Tom and Ned, although much of the time they were in boarding school — where they were despatched when they turned seven.
At the mention of this, Jasper’s cheeks hollow so deeply it looks as if someone has Hoovered out his insides. ‘I’m against boarding school,’ he says archly. ‘But I lived to fight another day.’ He was bullied for being fat, so when he moved to secondary school at 13, he dieted down from 14 st to 7 st, but was still unhappy.
He found his feet when, aged just 15, he moved to New York to study art at the prestigious Parsons School of Design. Was he nervous about moving so far from home, alone? ‘Not for a minute. Finally, I felt free.’
A regular at the infamous Studio 54 nightclub, he hung out with the legendary Andy Warhol, though, as a teenager, was unimpressed.
‘Andy was just very monosyllabic. Dinner with him wasn’t exactly laugh-a-minute.’
He affects a bored, robotic voice: ‘ “Yah, that’s great. Yah.” I’d be like, “OK, fine. Come on!” ’
Jasper’s elegant new dresses have both Diana and Kate inspiration. Pictured left: Patterned dress £220, right: Red dress £200 both jasperconran.com
As for Truman Capote, author of stories such as Breakfast At Tiffany’s: ‘It was only when I read his short stories I realised what else he was — the beauty of them. The man I knew was a dribbling mess.’
Wasn’t he intimidated by these luminaries? ‘Well, I’d grown up around David Hockney, Mary Quant, Francis Bacon,’ he says, raising an eyebrow. ‘So it wasn’t my first time at the rodeo.’ That confidence came into its own when, having established his own label back in London, he started regularly dressing Princess Diana.
‘It was heady stuff. I loved her; we had a great time. There was a lot of laughing. Her skin was so beautiful, and she towered over me. She was one woman who changed the face of our nation.’
He hasn’t dressed her ‘yet’, but he’s clearly equally impressed by the Duchess of Cambridge’s style.
‘She’s really good at what she does. At Prince Philip’s funeral, she looked sensational, absolutely the most elegant woman ever. She’s got that job of having to be who she is but also be very careful not to overstep the line, which reduces her somewhat to work with, but she does it beautifully.
‘She’s a very nice woman, very hard-working and polite. I’m full of admiration.’ You can certainly see both Diana and Kate in Jasper’s elegant new dresses. What about Meghan? ‘I wouldn’t like to be her,’ he says, referring to the flak the Duchess of Sussex attracts on social media.
Jasper’s new dresses cost between about £160 and £220, as he aims to make things that are not out of the realms of possibility. Pictured: Patterned dress £220 jasperconran.com
As a younger man, relations were often tense with Sir Terence, who — despite his wealth — gave his children very little in the way of financial support. Yet many assumed Jasper was a spoilt little rich boy. That must have been annoying. He zips his lips. ‘Very.’
The lack of cash, however, informs both Jasper’s work ethic (‘I used to wait tables. If push came to shove, I could always go back to that. I was bloody good’) and his pricing.
His new dresses (later this year he will launch a range of perfumes, bedding and coats more affordable than Max Mara) cost between about £160 and £220: not cheap but, if you budget for a blow-out, affordable to a middle-class audience. ‘I know what it feels like to have no money, so I have empathy for that.
‘In my business a lot of things are put in front of people that they can never afford, but I have always wanted to make things that are not out of the realms of possibility.’
It sounds remarkably like the mission of Sir Terence, who, with Habitat, was intent on making sure not only the super-rich enjoyed life’s finer things.
For years, Jasper has dodged discussing the pair’s strained relationship. Now he says: ‘My father was an utterly brilliant man. What he did for this country was amazing. He was a Churchillian character. So I think our personal relationship is less important because he belongs to the nation. But I definitely have his democratic approach — I want everyone to have a share.’
He’s ‘extremely close’ to his four siblings, who also all seem driven to bring beautiful things to as wide an audience as possible (Tom is a restaurateur, Sophie has a flourishing homewares line, Ned is an artist and Sebastian a furniture designer). ‘We talk all the time. But I refuse to have a WhatsApp group because it would ping at 3am when I’m in Los Angeles.’ He could turn off the pings. ‘I wouldn’t know how! I can’t do tech.’
Energy crackles around Jasper. ‘I like fun, I like joy, I like naughtiness, but I’m a sybaritic Puritan. I have to be grounded too,’ he says. He works out every day via his phone with a personal trainer. ‘It sounds miserable but if you don’t want to be a bloated old fart and have a hideous old age this is what you have to do,’ he says cheerily. After all, Conrans work until they drop.
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