Visibly impassioned by her raison d’être, Knatchbull, whose great-grandfather was Louis Mountbatten of Burma, sees
the lack of tailoring options for women as a pitiful anachronism (“I can wear an Apple watch that can read my heart
rate and tell me if I’m having a heart attack, yet I can’t name more than five tailoring establishments that are
reasonably priced where women can go,” she says). A huge part of her mission, she adds, is the dismantling of
long-established sartorial myths. “So many people assume suiting to be boring, drab, only for working women, and
that you have to be skinny and fashionable to wear a suit — these are all stereotypes I want to break. A mother with
three kids is a working woman. She might be in one of my suits with trainers, running around wiping things, picking
up food off the floor, but wanting to look chic and to feel good.”
Knatchbull’s approach marries adherence to Coco Chanel’s famous rallying cry to sartorial permanence — “Fashion
fades; only style remains the same” — to her belief that tailored suiting for women, as in the world of menswear, is
becoming more flexible. “A suit is an investment piece, because you can wear it a million different ways — with
nothing underneath, with trainers, with heels, with a T-shirt, just the top, just the bottom,” she says. “It’s a
wonderful thing that the macro-trend of quality suiting exists at this point, when there has never been a better
time to be a woman. There has never been a better time for me to launch.”
Visitors to Knatchbull’s Savile Row emporium will find four different basic styles of suiting, named in deference to
the brand name: the Heart, the Spade, the Club and the Diamond. Within these choices clients will encounter a wealth
of options: “Single-breasted, double-breasted, softer, more baggier tailoring, various numbers of patch pockets,
straight leg, cigarette leg, flood leg, wide leg,” as she puts it. “Every suit has a little ace of spades stitched
up the sleeve, [which represents] having an ace up your sleeve. My brand is a fusion between classic elegance and
modern femininity. I like to think of these suits as modern-day armour. They’re for every woman regardless of shape,
size, political views, whatever.” Her style, she adds, blends “a masculine hint with that feminine touch: nipped in
waist but with that strong shoulder. It enhances and highlights the best features of a woman. Every woman has things
they love and hate about their body.”
Since she left Huntsman — where she was Communications Director (before that she worked with the Fashion Director at
The Sunday Times Style Magazine) — setting up her shop has not been easy. “There are so many things to think about,”
she says. “How do I trademark a name? How do I raise money? Who do I go to? How do you start a pitch deck? How do
you hire the right people? Which shipping companies do I use? What about for labels? I needed to understand every
process of the business, from the legals to the financials. There are so many components that go into a business —
I’m a different person entirely to who I was when I started out.”
Then there are the technical challenges of tailoring for women. “One reason why tailoring for women has been such a
challenge is our bodies,” she says. “We lose weight, we gain weight. All different parts of our bodies move around.
Our bums get bigger, our boobs get bigger, they go smaller. Men have easier bodies to mould to.”
Is she daunted by the magnitude of her own ambition? “As long as you have a point of difference for your business and
you believe in it, you’re going to have bad days and you’re going to want to just curl up and not leave your duvet
and whatever, but ultimately, you’re always going to find your way,” she says. “I have full faith we can make it
work. We’ve done a lot more difficult things in life, like get to the moon.”
This article originally appeared in Issue 64 of The Rake.
