Russh Magazine

Keeping Sydney’s Great Gatsby of mansions from Sydney Harbour is a large swimming pool: with a clear view of the bridge, it’s a cool blue stretch against the sky and where, of late, Emma Hill, the brand’s Creative Director, can be found swimming laps each morning. Built in 1915, Rose Bay’s Tivoli Villa rubs modernism with art nouveau, and in December last year, to mark a celebration of sorts, it played host to the Mulberry crew and their complete SS 11 collection. Today, post-swim and sitting on the very edge of a white lounge, Hill leans forward, her bare legs crossed, her hair loose, her arms wild in the air. She talks fast, with a weight on each word, and interrupts herself with near-military precision – everything, it seems, has a back-story, a finer detail, and Hill’s are cushioned in loud, loud laughter, ‘likes’ and ‘you knows’, almost on the off-chance that you MIGHT know them.

Despite her girl-like handclapping and the – literal – squeals of delight littering her conversation, Hill is a formidable force shaping the world of fashion. She’s at the helm of the Brit brand which made its name on the shelves of London’s Biba and four decades later is one of the last luxury brands to retain a local factory. Hill became its custodian mere weeks before the GFC gave market players a good, stern talking-to. Prior to this, she presided over accessories at Chloé, Calvin Klein, Marc Jacobs and Temperley, among others. Three years later, Mulberry’s leather agenda has evolved under her hand: there has been the Poacher and Biker jackets, and on the bag front, the Alexa (named for Alexa Chung), the Mitzi, the Daria and, now, the Tillie.

On magnitude, Hill is the kind of woman who fills a room. Be it with the hip-height paper pink roses that lined the SS catwalks in London and NYC, Willy Wonka’s Pure Imagination from her personal playlist at near-full volume, or with her floral-bound lookbooks scattered across every available surface. She is the kind of woman who walks into a Mulberry store and – instantly – wants to know who is next door. “This. Is. Not. Big. Enough. Bust through the walls. Take over.” Her head of visual merchandise, her “resident genius”, is all too familiar with such requests. “I’ll say, bigger! More! But BIGGER! How many roses have we got? Have we got enough? No, really, how many?”

There is something matriarchal about Hill. Her team sits close to her and when she speaks to you, her hand finds your arm and her eyes, your own. She smiles and says the best thing about doing what she does is working with her contingent: “Just getting to work with such brilliant people.” Then, she jumps, squeals, heads for the door. There, red-haired, pale-skinned Georgie Wass stands at five-foot-ten in shorts and thongs, ready to choose from the range for the evening’s garden party launch. Amid the hugs and high-pitched fervour, the 21-year-old London-based model, a Sydney native, is a familiar face. “Georgie did the first show and she was so brilliant,” says Hill. “She’s a friend of Mulberry; she does every show and it’s just really nice. Backstage, it’s really great having her in the line-up. She’s like the mummy, she keeps them all in line. She’s very old, you know.”

In spite of her small stature, Hill is all-powerful, all-seeing; a prerequisite for the role. What exactly does she do? “Apart from my 50 laps?” she laughs. “It’s everything. I’m very OCD so I do – sort of – everything.” She smiles, and continues. “I think often the bigger a job people get, often they get pulled further and further away from product. I would rather go and be a baker or something if I couldn’t ... you know, I mean, I just couldn’t, I can’t.”

She loves what she does and would, she assures, “just die” if she had to work in, say, “insurance”. “It’s incredibly fortunate to get to live your life doing something … where it almost doesn’t become work. It’s always work, but the boundaries are really blurred because you just love what you do. And I think that’s an amazing thing and a privilege.” So, does this feel like work for her? “Um, hello?” Hill waves her arms at the harbour views, the roses, the people.

Hill’s reality, it seems, is firmly rooted in fantasy. This season takes its cue from the gloriously overgrown Grey Gardens of the 1976 Maysles documentary. “For years and years when I lived in New York, we had a rental house in Far Island and our season used to start much earlier than everyone else’s, we used to start going out in April when it was windy and rainy and so we’d have movie nights around the fire with the ocean crashing and every year we would watch Grey Gardens and that’s how it started.” SS 11 also draws on Hill’s favourite girlhood book, The Secret Garden. “I had my head in a book always,” she says. “I would create this fantasy world to take me into and it was… this idea of this garden, of this whole other life that we would build.”

But it’s far from literal, she says. Trippy tigers (a key print of the SS collection), after all, were not a staple in the world of Big and Little Edie, not of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s heroine. “It really evolves from there, it starts growing, growing, growing,” says Hill. “I don’t look at films for the clothes or anything, so it’s not like I’m gonna send bag ladies down the runway.” Instead, it’s the romance of The Secret Garden, the untamed wistfulness of Grey Gardens, grafted together, amped up, her own neon wonderland. Think giant neon roses, bold floral prints and gentle tailoring. This season is all frills, rosettes and ruffles. Postman’s locks, dog macs and wrap booties in oak snake print. Electric blues, light peaches, bright corals. English plums, powder beiges, and dusty roses. The show, a parade of stilt-legs playing “dolly dress ups” – impossibly beautiful, immaculately tailored.

Hill is quick to assure she prefers to identify more with the “little girl in The Secret Garden” than the Edies. The reality, she admits, might be a touch further from the truth. “I just had to get a storage space because my house is getting completely overrun with like visual merchandise things and bags and shoes so I was like ARGGH. Don’t live the season.” The season, perhaps not. The brand, certainly. “I’m kind of obsessed by the idea of brand and I think I got that from working at Calvin, working with Calvin, even though our product and our company and our philosophies couldn’t be more different, it’s the same thing – that attention to detail and really caring about every single thing. People always laugh at me because, like, I went into one of our stores and they gave me a Bic biro. And I’m always really nice about it but I’m, like, you know, that’s not Mulberry, it should be the Mulberry experience. I want the pink pen. “I really respect brand. For me, it’s about always respecting the heritage and just moving it on. Lots of things kind of go on the fashion wayside because they’re not Mulberry, even lots of beautiful things that I think are really great and could be great for lots of other brands, I just think, you know, no. There’s a certain kind of DNA that I think we should always have.”

For Hill, Mulberry is grown-up, but not without “bedazzle” or “squidge”. “Even in a totally bedazzle bag –” she points to the Jewelled Lily in Camel Suede “– it’s still really squidgy and the stuff that’s all over it is really fun; there’s denim rivets on there … where as, if somebody else were to do it, it might be all Swarovski or it might be on a hard leather.” Hill loves “that whole high high-low thing”, a jewelled bag, with jeans. “Every once in a while, some bright spark will sort of rear their head and be like, let’s do a – what do they call it? – consumer profiling or something. And I’m always like, yeah, let’s not. Because I think that anyone that gets the position of consumer profiling – and I’m going to really piss people off with this, I’m sure – it probably just means that you haven’t got the right product in a way.”

Hill is the kind of woman who fronts her show at NY Fashion Week in denim shorts, a grey hoodie and wrap booties of her own making. She is largely unfazed by demographics, commercial realities or even financial crisis. Build it, she believes, and they will come. Of the brand’s staple bag, the Bayswater, she told the Times Online: “You’ve got Kate Moss lugging hers around everywhere, yet it also appeals to my grandmother, who is very ‘lady of Harrogate’. I wouldn’t like it if those ladies couldn’t wear it, too.”

“I am no spring chicken,” says Hill, “I’m 41, and I don’t think it’s about age. I think it’s about attitude. So, no, we would never design a bag and be like, ‘oh, that’s for the old ones’. Who’s to say that if you’re old, you’re not going to wear colour? I think that’s what is quite lovely about Mulberry: we’re inclusive, not exclusive.” Indeed, Hill’s biggest challenge is “making the stuff fast enough”. “Which, as an old boss used to say to me is a high-class problem, but, you know, when the Alexa took off production was really kind of blindsided.”

Each season, the biggest family is manufactured out of Somerset before it outgrows the site. “So if you’d bought the Alexa from that first season, it would have been made in Somerset, which is really important to me. At one point, we had a waiting list online of about 10,000 people for Alexa. So that was a challenge.” Hill lost her own Alexa to Kate Moss. Her popularity holds firm to a broader trend; as head of a quintessential Union Jack brand. Hill is of the Brit Girl league, whether she accepts the tag or not. “Oh, me? Am I Brit Girl then? God, I don’t know. I mean, they’re geniuses, so if you can put me in the same sentence as them then it’s all good.”

Along with the ilk of Stella McCartney and Phoebe Philo, Hill has kept calm and carried on, pioneering a new breed of pragmatism. “Nothing against the boys, but girls do tend to get it because girls are the ones wearing it…” This, guesses Hill, is where there new-found following has come from. “… I’ll look at things [designed by men] and I’ll go, oh my God that’s amazing, so it’s not like I don’t love those things. It’s just that they are so far removed from my life or the life of pretty much anyone I know. I think that that’s where women like that are just doing such an incredible job. Quietly and confidently just kind of getting on with it.”

In that vein, Hill was relatively unfazed by the economic woes that brought many a good brand to its knees. And in a typical I-bite-my-thumb-at-you-sir, she once told The Guardian nobody needs a new bag, they “just want it”. “I spent most of my 20s not being able to pay my rent because I’d blown it on high heels,” she laughs. But she always managed. And she continues to do so. “Blindly ignore it, that was my strategy,” she laughs. “I’d probably been [with Mulberry] about two weeks and suddenly the whole world caved in. And I was like, fantastic, great, well, that’s just more of a challenge, it’s alright. Everyone was freaking out and the thing is they didn’t know ME. Well, they knew my heritage and they knew my pedigree, and I was like ease-y, it’s all going to be fine, it’s all going to be FINE.

“We’re a luxury brand, but … we’re not really shouty.” The Alexa – laughs Hill – was designed in sharp relief to the “very lady, very status” bags. “It became its own status, the sort of anti-IT bag that became the IT bag!” The lesson? “Hunker down,” she says, “don’t worry about it.” If you make beautiful things, people will love them. As Willy Wonka sings in technicolour not far from Hill’s own palette: “If you want to view paradise, simply look around to view it, anything you want to do, do it. Want to change the world? There’s nothing to it.”

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