“Everything we make is designed to go somewhere - not just to the beach, but somewhere that matters to you. A place you've been looking forward to, a hotel you saved up for, a coastline you discovered and haven't stopped thinking about since. The clothes are the companion to that feeling. They have to be worthy of it,” she explains. Whether it’s a tennis-inspired collection celebrating English summertime with Four Seasons Hampshire, a nautical-themed capsule with AREV St. Tropez, or a frosty après ski wardrobe with Six Senses Courchevel, Philippa and her team craft stories worth telling and tales worth remembering long after the holiday ends. Woven within that story is a commitment to sustainability, a mission that Paper London undertook as a five-year research partnership with Notting Trent around Lycra recycling.
“What the research ultimately showed us was both humbling and galvanising,” explains Philippa. “The biggest competitor to textile recycling isn't a lack of technology or innovation, it’s the black bin bag. It's habit, and that means the solution is partly ours to own: make things so good that women can't bear to throw them away and make it easier for them to return them when they're finally done. That's the whole philosophy, really.”
What's your favourite piece in the current collection?
The Maldives Swimsuit. It has been with us almost from the very beginning and it still stops me. There is something about that silhouette, the way it sits - the way it moves, the way a woman stands differently when she puts it on - that I find genuinely hard to improve upon. We keep trying. We keep coming back to it. I think that's what an icon does. It doesn't need you to keep reinventing it. It just needs you to trust it. With it being the 10-year-anniversary of the silhouette we are launching Return of the Icons this Summer - bringing back our most iconic prints for this silhouette.
Are there any aspects of your career as a corporate lawyer that help you in your current life as an entrepreneur?
More than I ever expected. Law trains you to hold a position under pressure, to read the evidence, back your argument, and not be moved by noise. Running a brand requires exactly that. When the entire industry is telling you to go smaller, go skimpier, follow the trend, you need the confidence to look at the evidence and back yourself instead. Ten years of 100% sell-through on the Maldives swimsuit is a pretty compelling closing argument. It also means I am not remotely romantic about the business side of things. I love what we make, but I know how to read a contract.
What has been your biggest learning curve since starting your business?
Ignoring the noise. The fashion industry is extraordinarily good at making you feel like you're doing it wrong. When the micro bikini moment hit and every brand pivoted, there was enormous pressure to follow. We didn't. We stayed in our lane. And I won't pretend that was always comfortable, but the customers never wavered and eventually, the industry caught up with where we had been standing all along. But if I'm really honest, the biggest learning curve is understanding that building a brand is not a straight line. It is snakes and ladders, and the snakes are longer than you think and the ladders are shorter than you'd hoped.
Tell me more about your hotel collaborations and why they're so important to the brand.
The hotel world is everything for us - it is our distribution channel and our editorial universe, simultaneously. When a woman discovers Paper London through a hotel she loves - Four Seasons, Six Senses, AREV in St Tropez - she isn't just buying a swimsuit, she is buying back into a feeling. That emotional connection is worth more than any campaign we could run. There is also something very specific about the woman who stays in those hotels. She travels with intention, she has a considered wardrobe, she is not interested in fast fashion or disposable swimwear. She wants something she'll take on every trip for the next ten years and still feel brilliant in. She is exactly our customer, and she was going to find us eventually, the hotel partnerships just make that introduction earlier, and in the most glamorous settings in the world. That is exactly where these clothes belong.
In your opinion, what is driving the shift in consumers wanting to buy less, but better?
Exhaustion, honestly. Women are done being told they're already out of date. Done with the volume, the churn, the relentlessness of an industry that profits from insecurity. There is a growing intelligence, particularly among the women we design for, about what things actually cost - to make, to wear, to dispose of. Our customer is someone who has stopped shopping as a hobby and started shopping as a decision; she is not looking for something new, she is looking for something right. She wants to put it on, feel extraordinary, and not have to think about it again for a decade. We have been making that “thing” for ten years. It's gratifying that the rest of the world is finally asking the same questions we started with.
Is there a particular business skill you're currently working on?
Delegation. Properly, not just in theory. I care enormously about the details, which is an asset in design and a liability in management. The business is at a stage where the best thing I can do is build the conditions for excellent people to do excellent work and then get out of the way. I'm working on the getting out of the way part.
What's the one task you always do yourself and the task you always outsource?
I choose every single print. Always. It is the soul of what Paper London is and I couldn’t, with a clear conscience, hand it to anyone. The prints are where the brand lives. Everything else I have learned, sometimes painfully, to let go of. Starting with my inbox.
Where do you see the brand in the next five years?
I want Paper London to be the brand that meets a woman at the most glamorous moments of her life - by the poolside at a hotel that took her breath away when she arrived, on a terrace in St Tropez as the sun goes down, at a resort in the Maldives where the water is so blue it doesn't look real. That is where our clothes belong and that is where we are building our world, through hotel partnerships that put the brand exactly where the right woman is, at exactly the right moment, feeling exactly the way she wants to feel.
I want to have genuinely made progress on Lycra recycling; not just talked about it, but solved something real. And I want the Maldives swimsuit to still be selling out. Because some things don't need reinventing, they just need more women to find them, in more of the most beautiful places on earth.
Instagram: @paperlondon
