The designer quietly streamlining summer wardrobes with her joyful, timeless and unique designs
Words by Juliet Herd
Growing up, Wiggy Hindmarch remembers being fascinated by fashion, makeup and skincare – “anything to do with bettering yourself”, as she explains it. She was particularly aware of the impact her stylish mother had on people – although in her case, achieving that effect was effortless.
“She had an innate elegance that people admired,” says Hindmarch. “I realised from a young age how important the way you present yourself is; how people are attracted to that. If you present the best of yourself, you can change people’s opinions of you and open doors. I realised the power behind that.
“I’ve always been keen to work in situations where I can help people to make the best of themselves. It’s so easy if you know how to do it – my mother did it naturally. I often see people around me, and think, ‘If only they did this or that’; it’s like the difference between night and day. It’s the one thing I know how to do.”
For the past eight years, Hindmarch has been doing exactly that – quietly but determinedly helping women to look their best through her own label, Wiggy Kit, which is about as joyful and wearable as fashion can get. She launched the brand after becoming increasingly frustrated by the lack of collections that straddled both summer in the city – in her case, London – and holidays in hotter climes (she and her family have a beach house in the Bahamas). Everything was too skimpy, sheer or short – ideal for the beach but not for the school run or a lunch in town. She wanted one versatile wardrobe to take her seamlessly between the two.
“It kicked off with me doing a clear out of my closet – my husband was beside himself with how many clothes I had,” laughs Hindmarch, whose entrepreneur husband William is brother to accessories designer Anya Hindmarch. “This was in 2014 when there was no such thing as resort wear. I realised I had two sets of summer clothes: one for going away somewhere really hot and totally inappropriate for London and a few pieces that were appropriate to wear in London when it’s hot. I remember thinking it’s ridiculous that I can’t find anything to wear in London and I shouldn’t need two types of clothes.”
She reasoned that if she were struggling to build a cohesive wardrobe, then others were too. “I started the business because I identified a need. Now, every brand has cottoned on to spring/summer wear that is versatile,” she says.
The essence of each Wiggy Kit piece is its adaptability, transforming a look from casual to dressy depending on which shoes you wear. “It’s very much high-low dressing,” she explains. “I’ve been known to wear one of my dresses at a wedding with Gianvito Rossi high heels but will equally wear it into the office with a pair of black sandals or mules. When I design something, it has to be able to go both ways.”
As focused as the brand undoubtedly is on functionality and form – for Hindmarch, sleeves on summer dresses are key – there is a certain je ne sais quoi about its aesthetic, which sets Wiggy Kit dresses apart from myriad other floaty frocks. You can’t help but be drawn by the distinctive prints, the luxurious fabrics, the attention to detail, such as signature scalloping and delicate cross-stitching, and the eye-catching colours, from cornflower blue to the perfect orangey red.
Hindmarch designs her own prints and manufactures all her own fabrics, prioritising natural materials in her collections, including linen, silk and organic cotton.
“Fabric is the bedrock of the business,” the designer says. “It’s not just the way it looks, but the way it works with the cut of the dress and how it feels. I design for a long season, so it has to be something that you can start wearing around Easter all the way through to an Indian summer in September.
“It needs to feel good against the skin. I won’t wear anything uncomfortable or scratchy, so I’ll enzyme wash a linen for ultimate softness and comfort and to give a gentle rumpled look.”
While silks come from China because “they are the experts”, the brand’s cottons and linens are made in mills in India and Portugal. Hindmarch makes a point of keeping supply chains short and relationships strong with the factory owners. “When I first visited our factory in Delhi and saw behind the scenes, I was blown away,” she says. “When one thinks about India your mind goes to a different place than what I experienced: an immaculate, super organised factory. I met everyone from the warehouse workers to the merchandisers and watched everybody under one roof, from pattern cutters to embroiderers. It’s very much direct to the factory, so I know what is going on and where everything is coming from.”
Her prints are often inspired by vintage remnants sourced through dealers. “I personally like vintage because then you’ve got something original to you,” she reasons. “It might be something as small as a drink coaster that sparks something in me and then I’ll work with a textile designer to develop it. My prints are very irregular – you can see the handiwork – and I like variations within the fabric, so they feel antique and not off-the-shelf.”
Also integral to Hindmarch’s designs is colour. Core Pantone shades are blues, reds and pinks – but only in the right tones – and she spends hours scrutinising swatches in different lights and on different skin tones. “There are a million reds that I wouldn’t touch with a barge pole,” she shudders. “It has to be so specific because I want the colour to enliven the skin and make it glow. I didn’t have anything red in my wardrobe until I started my brand. There’s something about red that can be so wrong – and the same with pink. It can’t be wishy washy or too Barbie. It has to have a certain strength.”
She is equally fastidious about cut and proportion, favouring an exaggerated silhouette and adding unexpected angles, while conscious of always creating a look that flatters the body. “I cannot stand a boring cut,” Hindmarch declares. “I tend to have a slightly oversize aesthetic, which is a much cooler look. My pet peeve is when people wear things that are too tight. Some clients get confused and say, ‘This is too big’, and I say, ‘You can go one size bigger!’ Things need to be unbuttoned and sleeves rolled up to give you an edge that doesn’t look mumsy.”
At the same time, she’s very much aware that her clients are in the 30-60 age range and makes sure to take into account their needs and insecurities, hence the addition of the all-important lightweight summer sleeve and often a slightly longer hemline at the back. “I am 46 and have a very similar lifestyle to my clients. People love a sleeve but elbow length or three quarters, so it has sex appeal.”
While her pieces may be easy to wear, they still need to work hard. “They’ve got to work with my lifestyle before I put them into my collection,” she insists. “Very selfishly I know what I need and these pieces can work everywhere – it might be a weekend in Rome or the Caribbean. “I always wear sets – I’ll wear a woven multi-coloured gaucho skirt in winter and one in cornflower blue with a square neck top in summer and you won’t realise it’s the same style.”
For spring/summer 2023, this consummate traveller has created a collection that takes the wearer from South Africa’s wine region and the Argentinian pampas to the English countryside, the connecting theme being nature. Think vintage botanical prints, Provencal meadow-inspired prints, crisp tobacco and white striped linens, ivory broderie anglaise and gingham cotton seersucker in red and blue – all designed to conjure the sense of a “bucolic idyll”. “Imagine yourself picking fresh fruit and vegetables from a kitchen garden in South Africa or Somerset,” rhapsodises Hindmarch.
Born in Singapore to British expat parents, the designer has wonderlust in her blood. At the age of four, she moved with her family back to Britain, where her father took the reins at his family’s company Thomas Mercer, the world’s oldest makers of marine clocks and chronometers. When it was sold, the then 16-year-old Wiggy’s parents relocated to Newport, Rhode Island, while she continued her education as a boarder at Tring Park School for the Performing Arts in Hertfordshire. She’d always wanted to be a dancer but changed her mind after touring in The Nutcracker with the English National Ballet for two years’ running when she was 13. “That was a bit of a shock to the system,” she recalls. “I realised I didn’t actually enjoy the lifestyle and from then on, I started to think that maybe this wasn’t for me.”
After leaving school, she flirted with the idea of becoming a backing dancer and even successfully auditioned to tour with the late singer-songwriter Prince in Japan. “That would have been the dream job but after getting over the excitement, I went off the idea,” she admits. “That was the final nail in the coffin.”
Instead, she ended up joining her parents in America, first in Rhode Island before moving some years later to Charlotte, North Carolina, where she fell in love with all things retail after landing a job with internationally-renowned boutique owner Laura Vinroot Poole. She gradually progressed up the ladder to become a buyer and designer for a range of American brands. “I was never going to go down the academic route; uni just didn’t feature on my radar at all,” she says. “I’d always been very creative as a child, painting and doing arts and crafts projects, and with each job I got, realised I was naturally interested in and talented at fashion.”
After returning to the UK in 2000, Hindmarch worked as operations manager for Catherine Prevost before marrying William in 2005 and starting her family – the couple have two daughters Scarlett, 16, and Marina, 14, and live in a Grade-II listed riverbank house in west London.
It wasn’t until her daughters were both of school age that she decided to flex her own entrepreneurial muscle and start Wiggy Kit. She was nicknamed “Wiggy” as a small child – although she’s not sure why – and has never been called by her given name, Philippa. “When we sent out wedding invitations, friends thought, ‘Who is Will marrying!’” She added the word “kit” to her brand name because of its association with clothing.
Having married into a family of entrepreneurs – William runs BOTB (Best of the Best), a spot-the-ball competition where you can win luxury cars weekly, Anya helms her eponymous handbag empire, another sister Nicole owns fashionable children’s shoe shop Papouelli while father Michael founded his own company – dinner table conversations are certainly lively but Hindmarch insists that she and Anya don’t engage in any design talk.
“We are quite separate on that,” she says. “We talk about business in the general sense of the word and the ups and downs of it but we don’t talk about design. I talk a lot to my father-in-law; he’s an amazing man.” Would she and Anya ever consider a collaboration together? “I think she is probably busy enough,” she laughs. “She’s got bigger fish to fry than worrying about a collaboration with her little sister-in-law. She’s an amazing inspiration, though.”
Wiggy Kit is distinctly more international in terms of its DNA. “It feels very international with a strong flavour of America; it has a different aesthetic to other British brands,” says Hindmarch, who admits that her way of dressing has been strongly influenced by her years living in New England and the Carolinas.
“Having that amazing American experience will stick with me for the rest of my life,” she adds. “It feels like home to me; I really understand it and the people and learnt so much. You feel like you can do anything there. It was a culture shock when I came back [to the UK] – I had to relearn being English again.”
It’s not surprising that she and her family spend as much time as possible at their beach house on Harbour Island. “The girls go to boarding school and spend more time in their rooms in the Bahamas than here in London,” she says. “Home for them really is Harbour Island. The first thing I do when I arrive is walk straight down to the beach, and drink a Sands Light beer with my husband and think how lucky I am. I can hear the waves from my bedroom.
“What I love about Harbour Island is that it’s unspoilt; you don’t have to put on shoes or makeup. It’s the ultimate luxury to go back to a much more natural way of living.”
But as Hindmarch does find herself living in the UK for much of the year, she has started designing winter collections, partly in response to demand from clients, who wear her dresses all summer but “don’t know what on earth to wear in winter”. Tones are earthy, fabrics cosy such as corduroy, cotton canvas and velvet, and designs sophisticated Bohemian with stylish boiler suits a highlight.
As a future project, she wants to perfect that quintessential British item, the raincoat, one that is not only waterproof but properly lined and sartorially appealing. “Nobody does warm rainwear chic,” laments Hindmarch. “I’m always coming up with random ideas. Everyone rolls their eyes at me in the studio and knows I’ll do it. I started this business because I identified a need; don’t wait for other people to provide you with the opportunity – you be the one who does it.”
And Wiggy Kit certainly bears testimony to that!