2 1GT Monday August 10 2020 | the times

times

I

f ever British fashion has had

an It boy it’s Henry Holland.

The linchpin of the second-

generation Primrose Hill set,

the gang of beautiful young

north London dwellers that

included the socialite Pixie

Geldof, the models Alexa Chung,

Daisy Lowe and Agyness Deyn and

the Radio 1 DJ Nick Grimshaw that

ruled London roughly from 2007

to 2017, Holland appeared to be

present at every party, liking and

being liked by everybody.

What’s more, his fashion business,

House of Holland, was flourishing,

with his multicoloured wares selling

all over the world in outlets such as

Selfridges and Net-a-Porter, and

affordable ranges in Debenhams

and Habitat.

But, inevitably, over the past few

years headlines featuring Holland’s

millennial crowd — the last

generation to become famous without

the push of Instagram and YouTube

— diminished as a new gang of Gen-Z

influencers hogged the spotlight.

Then in March, just weeks before

lockdown began, after years of

struggling to raise funding, House

of Holland went into

administration with a

new buyer being

sought. Coronavirus

wasn’t the sole

reason for its

demise, but it

was the final nail

in the coffin,

causing a

Chinese backer

to pull out of a

big deal. “After

that it became

untenable,” says

Holland, 37.

So Holland began his

lockdown having just said

goodbye to the brand he’d worked

tirelessly for 13 years to build. Yet

rather than being devastated, Holland

says that his main emotion was relief.

“I’d come to the end of my time

with House of Holland. I’d come to

the point where my energy and spirit

were a bit broken,” Holland, dressed

in a Hawaiian shirt, tells me, his

notorious affability and charm still

evident over Zoom.

He’s talking from his house in the

hipster heartland of Victoria Park in

east London (ousted from Primrose

Hill by bankers) that he shares with

his husband of two years, David

Hodgson, the creative director for

Lulu Guinness, and their French

bulldog (“I know, Frenchies are so

Hackney, but she’s seven so we

were trendsetters”).

“The label was my baby. I was so

passionate about it, but I always said

the minute I was no longer enjoying it,

it would have to stop. I’d felt the

weight of that company on my

shoulders for a long time; there was

always worry about how we were

going to do the next project. I’d be

ringing up people to raise money. If

you have a brand that carries your

name and it’s struggling financially,

or is not the raging success you would

have hoped it to be, it’s really hard

to separate your self-worth from that.”

One of the main burdens from

which Holland was released was

“impostor syndrome”. It had haunted

him ever since, armed with a

journalism degree, he began working

on teenage magazines such as Bliss

and Smash Hits, which he had

devoured while growing up in

Ramsbottom, Lancashire, the son of a

solicitor father and a mother who

teaches positive thinking. “I couldn’t

believe you could have so much fun

and get paid for it,” he says.

His luck peaked when, in 2007, aged

23, he designed an updated version of

the 1980s Katherine Hamnett slogan

T-shirts, paying cheeky homage to

up-and-coming British designers with

slogans such as UHU Gareth Pugh

and Get Your Freak On Giles Deacon.

With his famous friends modelling

them, sales on his Myspace page

rocketed. Within a few months

Holland was meeting the US

Vogue editor Anna Wintour,

being photographed

with Agyness Deyn

by Steven Meisel

for Vogue Italia,

fulfilling huge

orders for shops

such as Barney’s

in New York

and designing

British fashion

week collections.

Yet this flukey

rise to fame left

him feeling guilty.

“I always had an

uncomfortable anxiety

about being called a designer.

I never professed to put myself in the

same arena as those people that I

idolised, but inevitably people

compared and contrasted us and I

found it very tough.

“There’s a very British self-effacing,

self-deprecating sensibility where

we’re much happier having the

piss taken out of ourselves than

saying, ‘I am big, I am’ — that’s

especially true if you’re a northerner

from Ramsbottom.”

His fellow designers never carped

at him. “At least not to my face,

maybe behind my back — that’s

how it works in this industry.”

Holland laughs, then contradicts

himself, saying: “There were a

couple of snide remarks in the early

days, and the fact I hadn’t got a

fashion degree was often mentioned

in show reviews.

“But I always had an incredible work

ethic that I inherited from both of my

parents and a real competitiveness,

so if I felt there was negativity around

my origins or the way I came into the

industry, then my drive was there to

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W

hat about

that heat,

eh? Unreal.

It’s enough

to make

you want to

run outside,

strip your

clothes off and lie naked on the

ground. At least that’s what you do if

you’re Ulrika Jonsson — or me. She

did it recently (and, sigh, posted

the results on Instagram, tastefully

shot, from over the shoulder)

because, she said, she wanted to

experience “the uncomplicated

feel-good moment every woman

should feel free to enjoy’’. I did it

for my health.

No, really. I have a neighbour

who is a nutritionist, and at the

start of lockdown she said that

part of building up my immunity

to Covid-19 should involve

topping up my vitamin D

stocks, preferably by spending

20 minutes whenever possible

lying naked under the sun. Plus, I

believe that she has a top-of-the-range

telephoto lens and an unobscured

sightline into my garden.

Reluctantly, tentatively, I followed

her instructions. On the first sunny

day of lockdown I skulked out through

the back door with a grey camping

mattress under my arm and searched

for the one spot that could provide me

with inviolable privacy. I was never

great at trigonometry in school, but

it’s surprising how accurate you can

be with angles, vectors and distances

when your modesty depends on it.

Spot chosen, I stripped off speedily

and gingerly, and flopped down on the

mattress to absorb the health-giving

properties of our sweet solar mother.

I briefly enjoyed that warmth, and

was momentarily pacified by picturing

the photons from the surface of the

sun (I am a closet physics nerd)

travelling across space at 186,

miles per second for more than

eight minutes before finally making

reassuring contact with my skin, and

therein triggering the creation of

coronavirus-fighting vitamin D. But

mostly I was freaked out.

On that grey mattress I felt like an

undignified collection of chicken limbs

on a Sainsbury’s Styrofoam platter.

Self-respect evaporates. Noises from

the house become terrifying. I kept

Kevin Maher

Imagine if

I had been

your baby

Parents are such

completists. According

to a new study from the

University of Michigan

that examined birth

statistics in the UK

and the Netherlands,

parents generally don’t

tend to stop having

babies until they have

both sexes in the bag.

I can’t relate to that

as a father (we had

a boy, immediately

followed by a girl, so,

you know, job done —

and then we had

another boy!), but my

parents definitely kept

going until I appeared. I

have three older sisters.

And when I finally

arrived the hospital

telephoned my father at

3am (he was at home, it

was the Seventies, give

him a break) to tell him

that, yes, it was the

news he was waiting

for and that he was

now the father, finally,

of a real live boy.

He went back to

bed, fully satisfied.

But when he awoke

the next morning he

phoned the hospital to

double-check because

he was sure that it must

have been a dream.

And let’s face it, if I

came into your life as

a child, that’s basically

what you’re looking

at. A dream.

Gwyneth

is doing

it again

magazine, has revealed

that she is embarrassed

by the words “conscious

uncoupling”. The

landmark phrase was

used by Paltrow and

her former hubby Chris

Martin to describe their

split in 2014.

Paltrow now realises

that, yes, the expression

is “a bit full of itself ”,

and she understands

the power of words

and reveals that, in

fact, the phrase came

courtesy of a therapist,

who, she added,

“helped us architect

our new future’’.

Oh, for the love of

God! She has gone and

done it again! Architect

our new future? I know

(or at least I know now

that I have checked)

that you can use

architect as a verb.

But, really? Architect

our new future?

Come back,

conscious uncoupling,

all is forgiven!

Finally, she’s admitted

it. Gwyneth Paltrow,

in an article for Vogue

triggered from lightly burnt privates?

Had I been pranked?

I’ve gone the other way in extreme

heat too, and that’s not pretty either.

I flew out to the Dubai Film Festival

a few years back and arrived into an

air-conditioned terminal building, was

driven to a hotel in an air-conditioned

car, went up to my air-conditioned

room in an air-conditioned lift, then

quickly changed into a tux for that

night’s opening premiere.

I looked up the venue address and,

miracle of miracles, it was only half

a mile down the road. There was a car

booked, which I disdainfully dismissed,

preferring instead to walk and enjoy

the Dubai evening ambience.

I took the air-conditioned lift down

to the air-conditioned lobby, passed

through the air-conditioned doorways

and — holy shit! — I walked smack

bang into a fiery wall of 44C heat. Too

embarrassed to make a fuss, I pressed

on. After 20 paces I was sodden.

By the time I reached the red carpet

my tux was wet through, as if I’d just

been pulled from a swimming pool.

Once inside, I was blasted by, yes, air

conditioning (sub-zero this time). My

teeth chattered all the way through

the premiere. Like watching a film on

a glacier. It could’ve been worse,

I suppose. I could’ve been naked.

I tried getting naked in

my garden like Ulrika. It

was my neighbour’s idea

t

s

a

l b t i tes?

picturing the kids running through the

kitchen and out the back door with a

friend in tow. “Oh, don’t mind that. It’s

just my dad. He’s a big sleazy pervert.”

I tried it one more time before

the end of lockdown, but found it

equally discomfiting. I ended with

a compromise by wearing a pair of

tennis shorts and wondering why the

vitamin D effect required full nudity.

Is the sun kinky? Is vitamin D only

His fashion designs and famous friends

made Henry Holland a star — then it

all fell apart. By Julia Llewellyn Smith

My A-list set