They spent their 20s designing by day and partying by night. So how do best friends Luella Bartley and Katie Hillier plan to approach their 40s? With attitude, of course
How does a generation that has never truly grown up deal with turning 40? For Luella Bartley and Katie Hillier, the answer was obvious: set up a fashion label. Last year, when they were 42 and 41 respectively, they founded Hillier Bartley, making the clothes they felt no one else was making, for women who are fine with getting older (well, pretty much) but who most certainly do not consider themselves middle-aged. Fashion for the post-midlife crisis generation, let’s call it. Velvet tailoring in petrol blue; a floor-length hostess gown in mustard silk. Party clothes for women who don’t do party dresses. A little bit Alexa Chung, a little bit Florence Welch. (Both are customers.)
When Bartley founded the Luella label in 1999, aged 25, with Hillier as her right-hand woman, their lives revolved around Shoreditch parties, late nights in Soho members’ clubs with Kate Moss, that sort of thing. Today, she and I are sitting in the garden of the Hillier Bartley studio, and things have changed. Green juice for her, flat white for me. “I got to 40 and thought I had to grow up,” she says. “This was my answer to that. This is something no one else is doing. Because the thing is, women don’t age in the same way any more. Our generation has women like Patti Smith to look up to. Getting older doesn’t mean what it used to.”
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