“This is a very personal take. Of course, it’s all you can do. You come in with your own feeling and intuition.” So says Frances Howie, the new creative director at the barely three-year-old New York label Fforme. “I am a woman who loves things. I love print, texture, and color, and I want to bring that to the conversation because, ultimately, if you are designing as a woman, you are designing to make the things you want. When I engage with other brands, the joy is that there’s something to delight in.”
As Howie walks me through the new collection at the Fforme studio in Nolita, that joy is palpable as she picks up a pair of trousers with hand-shredded panels, unzips a dress to show the impeccable construction underneath, or shows off what she deems the “trophy coat” of the season, made from a wool cashmere so soft and luxurious that she almost comes across as guilty for having created something so nice. “This is one of the few things that might be unaffordable in our showroom,” she reveals, her voice suddenly conspiratorial. “We might potentially end up producing this in one of the other fabrics because this is a little bit prohibitive.” But as a desirable object, its presence is important because it says something about what Howie values as a designer while also highlighting a core feeling in the world of luxury: You do extraordinary things simply because you can.
She grew up one of four siblings, with a doctor for a father. “He’s a very articulate, well-read, intelligent academic person,” she explains. “He was probably an artist who was not encouraged, as the only son of the family of his generation.” At one point, he instituted a no-TV rule in the house, which resulted in what she described as “this prolific culture in our household of making everything. My sister and I could use a sewing machine probably by the age of six—which is quite young now that I have a son who’s about to turn six.” Continuing with a laugh, she adds, “We would make our own clothes, anything we could possibly think of, and we would compete with each other in that way.” Her love for making things by hand can be traced back to that time. In the new collection, many pieces have hand-frayed details, and one particular jacket has a gorgeous hand-twisted detail.
Her first taste of doing something extraordinary might be how she got to Central Saint Martins to pursue her MA. With her bachelor’s degree in fashion at Auckland University in New Zealand, she came across the Smirnoff International Fashion Awards, a country-based two-tier design competition in which you first had to win in your country and then faced off against the winners from other countries. The winner was automatically accepted into Central Saint Martins’s master’s program. “I entered three years in a row, and finally I won,” she says. “By the time I arrived, I was probably the most driven person on that course because I had fought so hard to get there and I had no money. If I failed, there was no going back.”
At Saint Martins, Howie studied under the famed professor Louise Wilson, who would eventually connect her to Alber Elbaz, the widely beloved Moroccan designer who was the creative director at Lanvin at the time. “After I had met with him, she called me and said, ‘Frances, I think you should get that job,’ and I said, ‘I don’t think I’m going to get that job,’ and she said ‘No, no, I think you should get that job,’” Howie remembers. “I think what she was saying was, Don’t think that just because you’re the underdog that you are not as eligible.” Howie didn’t speak French, but it didn’t matter because she could draw. She worked as Elbaz’s assistant for three years. “He really allowed his team members to bring forth concepts for all ranges of things, and he would actually take that concept, and we would work on it. By the time I evolved in my career, I had already worked across many different categories.”
In 2006 she moved to London to work in Stella McCartney’s studio, where she remained for 11 years. She started as a design team member before eventually becoming the design director. “What I did there successfully is channel what she needed,” Howie notes. “It was almost like being a vessel for her to express the very Stella-ness of what she was trying to say.” If at Lanvin she had gotten the real master class on the art of softness and flou, she learned all about tailoring with McCartney. “There were a couple of tailors from Savile Row that always worked on the tailoring with us,” Howie explains. “[That was an] absolutely impeccable education in how to make a jacket and the Savile Row tradition. I really didn’t have that in Paris.”
Now in New York, she is able to merge those things into her vision at Fforme. “Being a design director, you provide the people you’re working with with what they need, but you suppress yourself at the same time, and starting on this collection made me realize the uniqueness of my own voice,” Howie says. She seems surprised at her own penchant for the more feminine, dressier side of things. “The starting point for us was thinking about the female body,” she explains when I first walk into the studio. She’s referring to the way the tailoring is softly sculptural to mirror the curves of a woman’s body and to the more bodycon fully-fashioned knits—but also the fact that her first print, in collaboration with the artist Blue Farrier, is of a female nude. “I just thought the idea of bringing in quite literally a print about the female form was a nice way of starting with print for Fforme.” Cheeky!
Actually, the real first thing she does when I walk into the studio is introduce me to her design director, Alan Lee, and her head of knitwear, Georgia Keepax. It seems slightly unusual until we reach the end of the conversation. “I love collaborating—I’m not a person who thinks, This is all just because of me,” she says, gesturing to the collection on the racks. “This is because we have hired an absolutely A-grade team. It’s a collaborative effort. I love the way that [Martin] Margiela took the spotlight off himself, and he talked about the clothing, the hands, and the makers. I think, Who really cares about me? What is interesting is the feeling of finding something in a beautiful color and fabric that’s going to last a long time and can be passed on.”
