The heiress and businesswoman Aerin Lauder (granddaughter to Estée and the style director of her beauty empire) recently finished watching the latest series of The Gilded Age before launching her capsule fashion line with Savile Row’s first women’s-only tailor (and great-granddaughter of the Earl Mountbatten) Daisy Knatchbull.
“It’s so amazing, I’m obsessed,” Lauder says of Julian Fellowes’s lavish tale of how New York high society reinvented luxury and reinvigorated the British establishment in the 19th century. (Given that this 55-year-old’s immaculate taste and talent for curation underpins her own multimillion-dollar luxury lifestyle brand, Aerin, it’s worth paying attention when she recommends something.)
There’s a parallel to those transatlantic Age of Innocence links in Aerin and Knatchbull’s new partnership: a brand hook-up which blends American uptown elegance with English heritage and tradition.
“Knatchbull was my first experience of Savile Row,” Lauder says. “I knew about the iconic menswear there, but I completely fell in love with what Daisy was doing. She really reminded me of my grandmother Estée — with this distinct point of view, vision and drive, a love of business and of meeting her customers.”
On Aerin Lauder’s first visit some years ago to Knatchbull’s De Gournay-wallpapered and Diptyque-scented salon, she was fitted for, and ordered, several trouser suits and a safari jacket. The latter has now become the basis — along with cashmere knitted vests in neutral shades of camel, chocolate, navy and ivory — of a capsule collection designed to make modern travel as smart as the Gilded Age version — if thankfully rather less restricted.
