“We were dressing UK pop stars and TV personalities, and I got to the point where I was very frustrated because I wanted to be dressing A-stars,” she recalls. She started her business with her now-husband, Mathew Anderson, after graduating from Central Saint Martins in 1987. It took “over a decade of sartorial social climbing” to get here, Packham has said. I meet the fashion designer in her North London studio, a white-washed warehouse where puffs of gauze and clouds of lace emanate from boxes and clothes rails everywhere. And then she’ll talk about nipple pasties, or confess her love for Harry Styles, and you feel silly for ever thinking her austere. She has a clipped accent and a countenance that doesn’t give much away. For someone who has spent the past 10 years rubbing shoulders with A-list celebrities and dealing with the “maelstrom of egos” that comes with it, Jenny Packham is surprisingly reserved.
