Emilia Wickstead’s World Growing and Growing

Emilia Wickstead is growing up. Since launching her fashion brand in 2008, the New Zealand-born designer has fostered and found success with an aesthetic that fuses traditional prim-and-proper styles with a certain juvenilia: fit-and-flare silhouettes with matching opera gloves realised in sherbet colours or sweet florals, cast against a backdrop befitting a Hitchcock film. As she settles into her second decade of business, though, Wickstead is ready to embrace a more mature feel, marked by a new London flagship that opens this month, Jessica Beresford writes for the Financial Times.

“Our brand before was quite pink and feminine, but I feel like this store is all-encompassing,” Wickstead, 39, says. “I think we’ve changed so much over the years … it’s like an evolution coming into this space. I always like to think that we’re growing and moving and trying out different things, but that it’s always got our stamp on it.”

Wickstead is not deviating from Sloane Street, home of her existing store and of the affluent residents she’s dressed now for more than a decade, but is moving a few doors down to an address twice the size.

Original article by Jessica Beresford, Financial Times, July 7, 2022.

Photo by Joshua Tarn.