India Hicks on How Grandparents Louis and Edwina Mountbatten Inspired Her Collaboration With Penelope Chilvers
LONDON — British designer and businesswoman India Hicks has unveiled a debut collection with footwear designer Penelope Chilvers.
Hicks is the daughter of Lady Pamela Mountbatten, who had been a bridesmaid at Queen Elizabeth II’s wedding and then later a lady-in-waiting to the monarch. She followed in her mother’s footsteps from a young age by serving as a bridesmaid in the wedding of Lady Diana Spencer to the then Prince Charles in 1981.
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Hicks gathered socialites, members of the press and friends at an English pub in London’s Chelsea, The Surprise, to unveil the collection on Sept. 8 — just hours prior to the announcement that the queen had died.
Hicks and Chilvers were connected by their mothers, who are friends, and Hicks’ husband, interior designer David Flint Wood. Chilvers had reached out to Hicks in January for a drink at a pub in the countryside — by the end of their first pint together, “we were sketching on the back of a napkin,” Hicks told WWD.
A self-proclaimed tomboy, Hicks said she couldn’t just dabble in and out of Chilvers’ design codes, so she went with her full instinct and incorporated gold stitching, leopard-print interiors and flashes of metallic. She said it was for the “school gate mothers and old ladies, like myself.”
Her grandmother, Edwina Mountbatten, Countess Mountbatten of Burma, was center stage on her mood board in a lynx coat that inspired the square-toed ballet flats. Another photo is a pair of high-heeled riding boots that belonged to her grandmother that she still possesses.
“My grandfather, who was quite a character, had a fetish for, not boys, but women wearing high-heeled riding boots,” she said half-jokingly.
Hicks accompanied Chilvers on a horse-riding trip in southern Spain to visit the factories that she’s been working with for 20 years.
In the U.K., Chilvers has become a household name among middle-class women. Her long tassel boots have been worn by Catherine, Princess of Wales since 2004. The boots are an obvious bestseller, but Chilvers has built a business that now includes men’s shoes and accessories.
Chilvers is soft-spoken, but outwardly loud about female empowerment within her brand.
Despite the success of the company, it’s still a family-run operation for Chilvers, who has enlisted the help of her daughters. Africa works within the design and production team, meanwhile Gemma is the image architect behind the brand’s campaigns and visual language.
This summer Chilvers read “Brave Hearted: The Dramatic Story of Women of the American West” by Katie Hickman, which she said was important to the luncheon. “It’s a story of strong, intelligent, fantastic pioneering women who managed to cross from the east of America, over the Rockies, to the west at the beginning of the 1800s,” she said.
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