admin Clare Waight Keller is the designer behind Meghan Markle’s royal wedding dress. During her three years as the LVMH-owned house’s first female artistic director, she put the likes of Cate Blanchett, Rachel Weisz, and Charlize Theron in Givenchy couture. Her exit was announced in April 2020, just as the world was locking down amidst the first wave of Covid, and she spent the early part of the pandemic with her family at home in the English countryside, not a bad way to wait out the crisis, all things considered. But by early 2022 she was back in London and seriously underemployed, as the feminist sociologists might say, another woman squeezed out of the luxury fashion sphere.
Enter Yukihiro Katsuta. The head of research and development for Uniqlo and the man responsible for initiating the Japanese company’s 2009-2011 +J partnership with Jil Sander was on the phone. “I’ve studied a lot of designers, and what distinguishes Clare is that she makes great clothing with a female essence,” he said on a recent visit to the company’s meatpacking district headquarters in New York. “I believe her wealth of experience and her designs that fully appreciate the modern woman will usher in a new standard of LifeWear for women.”
Would Clare like to talk about working together? Why yes, she would. “It started really organically,” Waight Keller said. “But in the end, it looked so strong as one story that we decided that maybe it could evolve into its own label.” Uniqlo C makes its debut in 1,500 Uniqlo stores around the world, and on the company’s e-commerce site on September 15, and it’s easily the biggest exposure of Waight Keller’s career, after that royal wedding gown.
The fall 2023 launch collection is a distilled lineup of 30 pieces, many of which echo the designer’s work at Givenchy and the six years of Chloé collections that predate it. “I wanted to bring the essence of what I do: fluidity, movement, femininity—those were really key,” she said. “But I also wanted to bring my sort of British sensibilities—the fact that I’ve always loved a little bit of this boy-meets-girl style, and the idea of attitude dressing.”
