Interview Henry Holland
We meet the designer to talk celebrity friends, white van men and screwing up with Lady Gaga
Interview: Henry Holland
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“We piss around. I work with my two best friends; everything gets done and we’re all very professional, but the conversation’s filthy!” Henry Holland doesn’t sound like your typical fashion designer. I doubt, for instance, that ‘pissing around’ is even part of Karl Lagerfeld’s vocabulary, let alone that he would share a sofa with me for an hour-odd in the personal shopping room of the White Rose Shopping Centre.
Holland is in Leeds to launch the Spring Summer range of his collaborative Debenhams collection H! by Henry Holland. The celebrated London designer is touring Britain’s Debenhams during which, alongside GMTV stylist Mark Heyes, he talks shoppers through his new designs and welcomes photo and autograph opportunities. Again, not your top-selling designer’s average behaviour, but then, Lancashire-born Holland was never going to be stereotypical.
“I didn’t go to [fashion] college and I didn’t sweat and toil and do the whole tortured artiste crap because I can’t be arsed with it,” he says.
Holland’s route to fashion fame began with a joke between friends. Alongside his previous career as a fashion editor on teen magazines, Holland would make slogan T-shirts for friends, one of which – ‘Get Yer Freak On Giles Deacon’ – was worn by designer Gareth Pugh at the close of his second London Fashion Week show in 2006. Deacon responded with ‘UHU Gareth Pugh’ and Holland’s T-shirts became more than just an in-joke among his fashion peers.
Since then the 27 year old has shown five full collections for his House of Holland label, co-presented Channel 4 style show ‘Frock Me’ with Alexa Chung and, with his celebrity friends Pixie Geldof, Agyness Deyn, Nick Grimshaw and Chung, has become fair game for gossip columnists and fashion critics alike. He remains philosophical – “some people get what I do, some people don’t get what I do” – and abides by the rule when reading online articles, “never read the comments” in order to avoid unnecessary criticism.
Holland’s speech is peppered with affectionate references to ‘my friends’, with whom he spends most of his free time, including a monthly book club. He is keen to point out that, contrary to media suggestion, they haven’t orchestrated the ultimate London cool gang to further their careers.
“I met Pixie and Alexa and Grimmy all before I was at uni, Agyness when I was 12, Pixie when I was an intern at Sneak magazine. Alexa used to assist her boyfriend when he used to shoot for me at Smash Hits and she was a model, so we all just met, our lives crossed over before anyone was doing anything in the public eye so it worries me that people think that we’re friends because we’re famous.”
Indeed, for Holland fame is no precursor to becoming his friend. I wonder which fellow celebrity he would like to see wearing his label.
“I’d kind of like to see Gaga wear it, I’m not a massive Lady Gaga fan but I just think it would be kind of cool. But I think I screwed that up.
“We went in her dressing room and there was me and two of my friends at [London club] G-A-Y and her management were like, ‘She’s desperate for you to meet her’ and I was like, ‘Really?’ I wasn’t into her at all at the time, she was really naff, and there was a lull in the noise in the room and my friend was sat on a coach with one of her dancers and he just said really loudly, ‘So, how old is she really? 24? I wouldn’t have thought so’!”
Holland’s ebullience in conversation is infectious. He sums up the Gaga anecdote, “And she had a Paris Hilton cardboard cut-out in her dressing room.” Says it all, really, doesn’t it?
It’s little surprise Gaga would want to meet Holland. With his trademark quiff – which, I can vouch, is huge and very pliable (he touches it a lot, I don’t) – unique dress sense and tiny frame, Holland cuts quite a figure on the young, British designer front.
Since bunking off school to go shopping with his mum, he has had an avid interest in making his style stand out.
“When I first started working in magazines I was dressing kind of nu rave and I had a rule, ‘cause I used to walk to work, that if I hadn’t had some abuse from a white van man that meant I hadn’t made enough of an effort. I’d be, like, ‘I didn’t even get a whistle, shit’!”
Herein, he believes, lies his success. While fashion-trained designers have style rules to abide by, Holland makes a few T-shirts for a laugh and becomes massive.
“I didn’t have any tutors for two years saying ‘oh, you have to do it like this’, or ‘you must do it like that’ ‘cause they do, especially in fashion. But it’s objective, fashion, isn’t it? Like people might think I look like a real tit today.”
Apart perhaps from the odd van driver and the man who spat at him in London because he was wearing pink Converse – “He called me a batty boy, I was like, ‘we’re in Soho, this is my corner, get out’!” – global sales of his House of Holland collections suggest many people do not think he looks like a tit. He still gets a buzz when he spots someone wearing his designs.
“I was walking through New York a few months ago with Pixie and this woman walked past in a pair of my tights and I went ‘tights!’. The women turned around, looked at me and started giggling and Pixie was just like, ‘you loser’!”
His own look can change several times in a day.
“I sometimes change, like, three times a day ‘cause if there’s something about what you’re wearing that’s a bit off it can really kill your mood for the day. Plus I can’t do anything without my quiff, I look ridiculous, I can barely look at myself.”
So how does one go about infiltrating Holland’s group of friends? As with nasty comments and dressing up, he has self-imposed guidelines for this, too.
“On Facebook I have a rule, if I care about what you’ve had for lunch, I’ll accept you, if I don’t care, I won’t accept you. Unless it’s a hot boy and you have to accept them to look at their pictures, then you sometimes forget to delete them afterwards.”
Yes, it’s unlikely Lagerfeld et al have such Facebook rules, but then, who cares what they had for lunch?
See www.debenhams.com/henryholland and www.houseofholland.co.uk
Posted on Wednesday 4th August 2010
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