What’s it to be? A glossy red ‘chubby heart’ cake filled with the lightest of chocolate mousse? A slice of celadon-green and primrose-yellow Battenberg?
A ‘cartwheel’, her luxurious take on good old Wagon Wheels? What about a plate of those little biscuits exquisitely iced with edible first-class stamps?
I am with Anya Hindmarch, 52, handbag designer to the stars, at her newly opened Anya’s Cafe, trying to choose. It seems a shame to actually eat one. Just as so many of her bags look good enough to eat so, it seems, her cakes look good enough to wear.
I plump for a vegan coconut and banana loaf — delicious and not as worthy as it sounds. It’s gone in 60 seconds flat — with a little help from Anya.
Anya Hindmarch, 52, (pictured) revealed the inspiration behind her new cluster of shops in Central London
Wait, though. What is the message here? Since when has anyone in fashion declared Cake Is The New Black? It feels a bit of an oxymoron. Surely cake is precisely what we don’t need if we care about the way we look in our clothes?
Anya, though, always ahead of the curve — remember her I Am Not A Plastic Bag campaign back in 2007 — thinks otherwise. She wants us to stop feeling guilty about indulging ourselves and find the joy in the simpler pleasures of life.
This includes sitting down with each other at an old-fashioned melamine-topped table and sharing a slice of homemade cake, ‘because really, what’s more pleasurable after lockdown, than that?’
To have her own cake shop has in fact been a long-term dream of Anya’s. A self-confessed sugar fiend, she’s already entertained the idea of opening up an old-fashioned sweet shop too, lined with jars of personal favourites such as Maynards wine gums and strawberry liquorice ‘laces’.
‘Heaven, right?’ she giggles, ‘although perhaps that could be a bit over the top.’
This all fits into Anya’s latest project The Village, a five-strong cluster of shops bang in the centre of London — designed to bring back the idea of community to shopping. The aim is for it not only to be a retail hub but a place where people can interact, as they did before the pandemic and all the subsequent ordering off Amazon.
Along with the cafe (which is also a restaurant — you can get wine, salad and Welsh rarebit, too), there is a shop selling her 100 per cent recycled products.
Another outlet sells products stemming from her obsession with labelling and organisation. (Her brother once bought her a Dymo gun as a birthday gift and she jokes she would even label her children with it if she could.)
Anya said the pandemic taught her to consider the joys of a simpler life and how we’ve forgotten the importance of community and family. Pictured: With husband James, Octavia and Felix in 2012
These join the original bespoke boutique she opened in 1996, with an embossing workshop attached.
Then there’s what she calls the Village Hall, a space which will change according to her latest idea or concept. Right now it’s a pop-up hair salon for ‘shampoo and therapy’ (think 50s-style hood dryers and trays of clinking martini glasses) to mark the publication of her book If In Doubt, Wash Your Hair — more of which later.
‘I hate talking about the silver linings of the pandemic when it has been so hideous for so many people, but one thing it did teach me was to consider the joys of a simpler life and that’s really what the whole concept behind The Village is,’ says Anya.
The pandemic made me realise how much of a conveyor belt we’ve all been on, how we dash around the planet
‘It made me realise just how much of a conveyor belt we’ve all been on. How we dash around the planet guzzling too much gas, how we’ve forgotten the importance of community and family and how a lot of what we really want has been right on our doorsteps all along.’
We are tucked in a corner table, Anya with one proprietorial eye on the door. As we talk, a little girl in school uniform darts out from the queue which is now snaking onto the street, to say hello.
The girl’s family live a few doors down from the townhouse nearby, where Anya and her husband and business partner James Seymour brought up their five children (now aged 17-32). This really is Anya’s ‘hood.
The quirky idea of a Village seems a very far cry from where her eponymous label was just two years ago, when it had 58 near-identical boutiques worldwide. Then the company was run by outside investors, Anya having stepped down as chief executive in 2011.
Anya (pictured) said women spend so much time beating themselves up for not having perfect figures, but we need to make peace with ourselves
But in 2019, she bought the company back and in what would prove in hindsight to be a brilliantly pre-emptive Covid strike, shut almost all of her boutiques to focus on online sales.
Today she is wearing an oversized shirt from Joseph, slip-ons from Celine and boyfriend trousers by Raey, the in-house label of online boutique Matches.
The look is stylish without making a big statement. Glamorous yet approachable. Professional yet sexy. And no, Anya is not model thin, something which once bothered her but not so much now, it seems.
‘Maybe it’s a function of hitting my 50s,’ she admits in her low, somewhat urgent way, as if she’s permanently sharing a secret with you.
‘One is forced to isolate what really matters and what doesn’t. Women spend so much time beating themselves up for not having perfect figures, me included, but in the end, what for? We have to make peace with ourselves about what ultimately we cannot change that much anyway.
Women spend so much time beating themselves up for not having perfect figures, me included, but in the end, what for?
‘My attitude is, yes, it’s annoying I don’t have an amazing figure, but I’ve got pretty good hair and that’s good enough!’
Brought up with her two siblings in a big country house in Essex — her entrepreneur father invented the plastic flowerpot — Anya’s roots are solidly upper middle class.
She launched her business at the age of just 18 on the back of a leather duffle bag she saw and fell in love with in Florence and decided to have one made just like it. Within less than a year she had built up a loyal clientele which included among others, Princess Diana. She referred to her clutches as ‘cleavage’ bags because they came in handy for covering herself when she got papped getting out of cars.
In 2011 David Cameron made her a UK trade ambassador. (Anya is an unabashed Tory supporter, citing Maggie Thatcher — to the embarrassment of her children — as her all time hero.)
Anya’s quirky designs has won her a legion of celebrity fans including Kim Kardasian, Taylor Swift and Reese Witherspoon. Pictured: Princess Diana with one of Anya’s clutch bags
In 2017 her MBE was upgraded to a CBE for her contribution to the British fashion industry. Her quirky, droll designs — including bags with eyes, bags shaped like crisp packets, bags mimicking bars of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk chocolate — have won a battalion of celebrity fans: Kim Kardashian, Taylor Swift, Reese Witherspoon and the Duchesses of Cambridge and Sussex are both devotees.
Looking at her achievements you could forgive her for being quite grand in the flesh.
But as any of her close friends would tell you, she’s the opposite. She is utterly fallible, with a ton of self-doubt and insecurities. A real girls’ girl in fact. She is also, I can confirm, as one of those friends, fastidiously loyal.
When my partner Nick’s sister died suddenly of a heart attack, although Anya was right in the middle of something crucial — probably fashion week — she and James turned up on the doorstep with a crate of Whispering Angel rosé and sat with our family until late into the night.
For a split second I panicked and thought have I revealed too much? Then I realised I was just being myself
Her book If In Doubt, Wash Your Hair gives an inkling of that side. Part memoir, part self-help manual for budding entrepreneurs, it lays bare how she got where she is.
It also outlines what it’s like trying to juggle being a mother of five with running a multi-million pound business and maintaining a 25-year-old marriage.
That she admits to so frequently dropping those balls is what makes the book surprisingly relatable. It is inspiring, too, to see that it is possible to have crippling self-doubt, suffer panic attacks and regularly find yourself up against that brick wall — and still achieve extraordinary success.
In the book, she writes about ‘mainlining Rescue Remedy’, breathing into brown paper bags, ‘waking up gasping for air in the middle of the night’, especially in anticipation of speaking in public.
Anya (pictured) learned to manage her anxiety after just one session of neuro-linguistic programming
She learned to manage her anxiety after just one session of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP). It made her recognise that sometimes it helps to be scared. A chapter in her book is titled: Fear And Excitement Are The Same Emotion.
It is a brave book to write given how private Anya can be and how expert she is, even to friends, at deflecting attention away from herself. In one sense I was surprised she wrote it.
Within its pages, you get to realise how tricky it was bringing up three children under the age of four who weren’t biologically hers (James was a recent widower when they met).
She also tells how the carpet was pulled from under her when Hugo, her eldest son, now 32, was diagnosed with invasive melanoma for the second time. Although he has since fully recovered, she describes it in the book as ‘the biggest punch in the stomach . . . and then you are so scared of being punched again you remain braced.’
It’s both funny and poignant reading how she once nearly bailed on the ‘family trip of a lifetime when I realised I was going to have to spend it wearing a shortie wetsuit that played to all of my insecurities about my body’. And I love the way she describes making small talk (or ‘tiny talk’ as she calls it) for more than an hour ‘like giving blood’.
But Anya must have had to take a deep breath when the book came out this month.
‘It was a little weird seeing it all in print,’ she admits a little sheepishly. ‘I had coffee here with two girlfriends this morning and they said, aren’t you a bit embarrassed about revealing so much of yourself? And for a split second I panicked and thought, have I? and then I realised, no I was just being myself and I can’t really be anything other than that.
In a brave book, Anya (pictured) tells how the carpet was pulled from under her when Hugo, her eldest son, now 32, was diagnosed with invasive melanoma for the second time
‘Honesty, I’ve found is always the best policy. It just doesn’t work for me otherwise.’
The fact that ‘real’ is about the only thing that sells in these difficult times would not have been lost on her. Make no mistake, that’s entrepreneurial blood running through those veins and underneath the seam of self-doubt, I’d argue, there’s an even deeper seam of quiet self-belief.
That said, on reading her book I thought, what a contrast to how, say, shamed Topshop boss Philip Green’s life lessons might read. And how refreshing to learn that it is entirely possible to be decent and successful at the same time.
In fact, given the parlous situation we are in post-Covid, it may be the only way forward.
I’m prompted to remember a small but significant birthday party she threw a few years ago for James in Morocco. One of the highlights was the identical oversized white djellabas she laid out on each of the guests’ beds with a little note saying it was compulsory to put it on that night for the big dinner.
The point? So the evening wouldn’t be all about each other’s outfits and we’d concentrate on talking to each other rather than worrying about ‘if our waistbands were cutting into our tummies’.
If you want an insight into Anya Hindmarch ethos, that’s her to a tee. So, yes, alright Let Cake Be The New Black.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Dailymail.co.uk
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