For the past few years - as only close friends knew - the dining room at 11 Downing Street doubled as an impromptu atelier. In the January issue of Vogue, Samantha Cameron told Christa D'Souza why the time to unveil her new label is now.
Having overestimated how long it would take for me to get from my house to Samantha Cameron’s - seven minutes - it is still a smidgen too early when I eventually pitch up at the rented terraced house where the ex-prime minister’s family currently live - indistinguishable from any of the others on the little street, save for the fact that there is no number on the front door and two armed policemen are posted outside. After a good few minutes (it seems rude to ring the bell more than once), a voice beckons me downstairs into the basement, and there is Samantha, dressed in towering snakeskin platforms and a belted linen dress the colour of a blood orange, from her brand-new design label, Cefinn.
Looking much taller and thinner than I remember - “I suppose I might have lost a little from dashing around so much, which is very rare considering how greedy I am” - she leads me past the famous yellow sofa (remember the one that Michelle Obama sat on when she came for coffee at 11 Downing Street?) to the kitchen-dining area. Strewn across a spotless work surface are her bag – a well-worn cross-body from Smythson, where she was creative director from 1996 to 2010 – and a set of keys, on a ribbon so she won’t lose them. “That was the strangest thing about moving into Downing Street,” she smiles from beneath that glossy fringe. “It was the first thing that hit, not having keys."
Curtailed by lack of space, for the moment this is where the much-anticipated collection hangs. Although “much anticipated” might be the wrong way to describe it, given the fact that, until very recently, only close family and friends knew of its existence, despite endless rumours. Comprising 40 pieces, and soon to be available through Selfridges and Net-a-Porter, its logo is a loose acronym of her children’s names: Elwen, Florence, Ivan, who suffered from cerebral palsy and severe epilepsy and died in 2009, and Nancy. (As an aside, “Sefin is also the name of a Welsh female saint and I am partly Welsh through my mother.”) She apologises for some of the collection being missing and for any toothpaste stains that might be on the clothes (which of course there aren’t), because she has personally test-driven every single one of them. “In my view, you can never test them enough,” she murmurs as she rifles through the samples: perfectly tailored black cropped trousers, sleeveless bow-fronted blouses with orange and khaki detailing, peplum tops which zip up the back - minimal but not severe, smart but in no way corporate, it’s the ultimate urban uniform for the busy working mother - each piece of which she has worn and washed several times “to check they don’t do anything strange”.
“Because of everything I did with David and getting photographed, I always had to worry about a piece of clothing behaving in a way it shouldn’t,” Samantha goes on. “It’s why every time you ever try anything on in a changing room, you should always sit down in it.” She pulls out a sheer - but somehow not transparent - shirtdress with giant black poppers. “See?” she says. “It’s stitched from the waist to the knee, so when you sit down you don’t gape.”
In terms of other first ladies who got it right, she immediately cites Michelle Obama: “A woman who looks happy in her own skin and whose love for fashion never detracts from her dignity and intelligence. She doesn’t have that insecurity that some women [in politics] do of, ‘Oh, I’ve got to
be like a man in order to operate in a man’s world.’ She’s got the confidence to never feel like that. I think she’s an amazing woman.”
But back to the collection. Like the food at, say, the Wolseley or the Delaunay (or, and I don’t mind saying this, Kitty Fisher’s, the teeny Shepherd Market restaurant her brother-in-law Tom Mullion opened last year), there’s nothing remotely bells and whistles about it. It is, quite simply, just what you want. It suits her body (lean and somewhat boyish, honed by years of regular running and Ashtanga yoga), but it will suit mine and it will probably suit yours, too. Like Maje or Carven, Cefinn has that femme du peuple feel. I compose a preliminary edit for myself in my head: a schoolishly sexy black pleated skirt that hits the knee in exactly the right place; a khaki gabardine zip-up top which could be worn to the office or, with nothing underneath, at night; a cropped blood-orange trouser suit paired, as styled by Samantha herself, with a salmon-coloured T-shirt; a baseball-style sweater in both red and navy and khaki and black, which feels like cashmere but is in fact very high-quality merino wool “because it lasts so much longer. It’s so depressing somehow when you buy a jumper and two weeks later it’s only good for telly-watching because it’s bobbled…” Prices are around £200 to £300 for dresses, sweaters about £150, and tops £100 to £200. “Cefinn sits between Joseph and Whistles,” as Cameron puts it. “I felt that there were a lot of American and French brands out there that fit that bracket of designer contemporary with the right price point and the right styling, but there aren’t that many British brands which fill that space.”
And she designed the collection around herself? “Well, obviously you’re thinking about yourself, but at the same time it can’t be all about yourself because that would be pointless. I’ve spent a lot of time trying stuff on my friends because I wanted to research how they wanted to enhance or disguise different bits of their bodies.”
It is testament to Cameron’s discretion and the company she keeps that the collection has remained a secret until now (the press did eventually get wind of it but wrongly assumed she was going into business with her former aide, Isabel Spearman). A testament to her sheer fortitude, too, when you consider the upheaval of the past six months.
Of the Camerons’ sudden departure from their home of six years she says little, except: “It was on the Tuesday and I remember Dave calling me the day before - the Monday Andrea Leadsom pulled out of the race - to tell me we had to move out of Downing Street on Wednesday. At that stage we thought we’d be there until September, you see. My first reaction was that we had better tell the kids,” she goes on brightly. “We had to get Nancy back from her school trip in France so she could have a last night at home. We had to get them sorted out, that was the main thing. It happened so fast that we just had to deal with it. I think to some extent politics and the situation with Ivan have meant I’ve learnt to live for the day slightly and deal with the next thing tomorrow. If you think too much about something, you never get it done.”
We sit down for lunch – a delicious cold collation of poached salmon with teriyaki sauce, couscous and tomato salad, which Samantha has called in from a café near her “office” in South Kensington. (“Really it’s a shed in the garden of my mother’s shop.”) Thankfully, she and her “teeny-weeny” team will soon move to roomier premises. There are only five of them for now (six fewer than her staff at Smythson) – Samantha, a pattern-cutter, a machinist, a production manager and an assistant.
The idea to design her own line dates back to somewhere between doing her A levels at Marlborough College and her foundation year at Camberwell College of Arts and continued throughout her long career at Smythson. Her best friend, Venetia Butterfield, whom she met before either of them had children and whose husband Chris Lockwood was later to become deputy head of David Cameron’s policy unit at Number 10, recalls how she would always admire what Sam was wearing when the four of them were out for dinner: “And Sam would point to her waist - she’s very good on waists - and say, ‘Yes, but I haven’t quite got it to fit here,’ and I would realise she’d actually made it herself. Since I’ve known her, she’s always been really interested in what I’m wearing, how it fits, why I’m wearing it. The function of clothes fascinates her.”
It was in 2011, a year after her husband had become prime minister and after the birth of Florence, her fourth child, that Samantha decided, having scaled down her job at Smythson, to take the idea further and have a professional teach her how to pattern-cut. And so it was for the next five years, unbeknown to the outside world, that the dining-room table at 11 Downing Street became her workspace, where she’d spend hours on her trusty sewing machine and overlocker, with BBC Radio 6 on, knocking up samples. Still unsure as to “whether I would go for it and turn it into something real; at that point it was a project to keep me mentally agile and artistically preoccupied”, she refrained from seeking advice from the designers - Erdem, Roksanda or Emilia Wickstead - she was getting to know through her role as an ambassador at the British Fashion Council, instead corralling Isabel Spearman, “Hellie” Bonham Carter, her four sisters and her sister-in-law and fellow Marlborough pupil Clare (through whom she met David when she was just 16) to try it all on for her.
“It became a sort of joke,” recalls Plum Sykes, who had collaborated with Samantha on the Fashion Diary project at Smythson and subsequently became a friend. “How we all knew, once we went through that door, that we’d be asked to strip down to our smalls. But what impressed me was how she took her time to learn her craft, how she wasn’t in this massive rush; she wanted to be absolutely ready. She was the exact opposite of the deluded mid-life-crisis lady we all know who is producing a film or launching a jewellery line or has gone into interior decorating, and not only does it in five minutes but has to tell everybody about it.”
“Oh, Sam’s the real deal,” says Mark Esiri, co-founder and partner at Venrex Investment, which bought out Smythson in 2005 (it is the backer behind Charlotte Tilbury, among others, and is now an investor in Cefinn). “In order for us to back you, you need to eat, breathe and sleep that industry, you need a burning desire to create a solution to the problem. Well, she has that. She also has managing skills. When she was at Smythson she had an extremely loyal team. Very low - in fact, no staff turnover in her department, despite the fact that they worked on top of each other in a very unglamorous windowless basement below the shop on Bond Street.”
“That’s a little-known fact about Sam Cameron, how hugely creative she is,” agrees Sasha Sarokin, former buying manager of designer ready-to-wear and all non-apparel at Net-a-Porter, and founder of the design and merchandising consultancy Sasha Natalia. “I remember going to Downing Street last winter to look at these beautiful sketches and asking her who had done them. I had no idea she had done them herself…"
“But at the same time she’s very much created a collection based on women’s needs,” Sarokin continues. “Her muse is reality. I remember her once telling me how happy she’d been when someone had said to her, ‘They’re just clothes that work!’ and wanting to use that somehow in the merchandising.”
Graphic designer Stephanie Nash, whose company Michael Nash Associates designed Cefinn’s logo (former clients include McQ by Alexander McQueen, the Rolling Stones and John Galliano), remembers being struck by her breadth of experience and knowledge of her field. “She knew exactly what she wanted, she knew how to shortcut quickly and she was very decisive and specific. But then, having been a brand director and being used to commissioning work, she had that business savvy.” Nash was impressed, too, by Samantha’s phenomenal drive, a drive she recognises, having a severely disabled child herself (who was treated at St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington at the same time as Ivan). “I remember seeing her sleeping on a mattress on the floor by Ivan’s side – that’s what we all had to do. There were no special favours, though the care was excellent; it was all quite hardcore. This was before we worked together but there was always this unspoken camaraderie between the parents. When Ivan died - every parent’s worst nightmare - my admiration for her just grew and grew. The loss never evaporates,” she goes on, “but because of that connection we often laugh about how we quickly accept ridiculous situations as normal. Like trying to source almost adult-size nappies, unreliable feeding tubes or travelling in a car stuffed full of medical equipment only to arrive at the destination four hours away from home without that small but vital piece of the kit.”
“I’m always rather cross when I read these pieces about Samantha because they never portray her as she actually is,” says Venetia Butterfield. “This image of her as the quiet, doting wife, for example. She’s actually very tough, in the nicest possible way. When she decides to do something, there is nothing that will stop her doing it. David and she, they’re very equal,” she adds. “Sam can get very feisty with him. They definitely both wear the pants.”
Born in 1971, the eldest of eight (she has one full sister, Emily - Vogue’s deputy editor - and six half-siblings through her parents’ subsequent second marriages), Samantha may come from properly posh, almost indecently well-connected stock – her mother, Annabel (Viscountess Astor, to use her formal title), a descendant of Charles II, is the granddaughter of Reuters chairman Sir Roderick Jones (and the novelist Enid Bagnold, who wrote National Velvet), her father Sir “Reggie” Sheffield is the 8th Baronet of Normanby, her stepfather, William Astor, a descendant of John Jacob Astor, was brought up at Cliveden – but it is her roots in trade and retail (“I come from a family of merchants!”) of which she is most proud. And it’s the women of the family, just as much as the men, who have made their mark. Annabel, obviously, with her multi-million-pound furniture company, Oka, was a huge influence, as was her aunt, Sue Jones (a co-founder of Oka), who worked for Jasper Conran throughout Samantha’s teens. Conran was one of the first designers she was exposed to as a young teen in the early Eighties. “Both my mother and stepmother had loads of his jackets, which my father hated because he thought Jasper Conran was trying to make women look like men, but I loved that androgynous look.”
Born and brought up at Ginge Manor in Oxfordshire, her stepfather’s family home, Samantha recalls a happy childhood, despite the fact that her parents divorced when she was only four. “By the time I was 10, all the parents were best friends and we’d spend Christmas together, all eight children and four parents. Brilliant.” Holidays were often spent either in Yorkshire, where her father lived, or on the Isle of Jura, where her stepfather has an estate. (He and her mother got married there in the winter of 1976 when Samantha was five - Annabel in a Fendi fur given to her by her mother, Pandora; the wedding cake a replica of Cliveden, baked by the chef at Annabel’s.)
“Scotland was a very emotional, evocative place for me in a kind of Alexander McQueen way,” says Samantha. “The heather, the sea, the smell of it. I remember becoming obsessed with the idea of a green velvet cloak with a hood. You know when you’re a child you fantasise about the sort of person you’d like to be when you grow up? That’s when I first got a sense of clothes as semaphore, a way of playing with image.”
Both grandmothers, too, were inspirational - on her mother’s side, the glamorous society beauty Pandora Clifford, who was briefly married to Michael Astor and the Swinging Sixties plastic surgeon Philip Lebon (father of Buffalo boys Mark and James Lebon) and the more classic but equally stylish Nancy, née Soames, on her father’s side.
“Granny Sheffield, a sort of property developer, was one of those rare people who was artistic and business-minded at the same time.” So speaks Samantha’s first cousin Cath Kidston, she of the eponymous home-furnishings empire. “Of all us cousins, she took Sam and me under her wing, making us more visually aware of our surroundings, helping us both look at things in a certain way. Sam’s extremely creative but she’s also got a very considered eye.”
Meanwhile, it never occurred to the pre-teen Samantha not to make her own living, watching her mother, whose Knightsbridge-based jewellery business Annabel Jones flourished during the Seventies and early Eighties, in her curlers every morning getting ready for work. As “my friends all thought she was so glamorous, and I think it’s why I never felt particularly guilty being a working mother. I always respected her for being her own person.”
It was Annabel who first taught Samantha to sew – “She’s an amazing seamstress, still spends hours on her machine” – and by the mid-Eighties, Samantha was making her own things, customising pieces bought on frequent trips to Kensington Market, tearing things up and sewing them back together again. “I was a bit of a goth in those days,” Samantha recalls. “My hair was hennaed, there was this pair of black velvet leggings I used to wear all the time, covered in skulls and crossbones. God, I absolutely loved them."
"Being stuck in what felt like the middle of nowhere” - in her early teens, Samantha went to day school in Abingdon, 25 miles from home - “I’d spend a lot of time on my own in my bedroom reading novels by John Le Carré or Günter Grass and listening to the Cure and the Smiths. Debbie Harry was my total pin-up, and actually Paula Yates was, too. She was so original and she had such confidence, wearing what she wanted to wear, not necessarily what was on trend at the time.”
The next formative period on the style front was the exchange year she spent in East Berlin while studying fine art at Bristol Polytechnic. “Being obsessed about the whole Bauhaus period and always having wanted to be a spy as a kid, I was just desperate to go,” she says, “and it completely lived up to all my expectations. The wall had just come down and it had this incredible atmosphere with grass growing through the cobblestones and these crumbling concrete buildings… more like Havana, almost. I met this group of ballerinas and poets and writers, all of whom were completely wonderful-looking but tricky to communicate with because their second language was Russian and my German was so bad. But I just loved that whole modern, minimalist, punky urban look they all had. It was so different from the whole flowery, loose boho look that was going on in London, which just never suited me.”
Sitting here with Samantha on this sunny London afternoon, thinking of the mauling she got for not wearing a hat to the royal wedding, for having the audacity to show her shoulders at the Queen’s 90th-birthday celebrations, and the way the press so microscopically picked over every inch of her body when she was photographed in a bikini last summer, I can’t help but ask whether she didn’t kick her heels slightly with joy when her husband handed in his resignation. How liberating it must feel not to be so yoked to public life, what a relief to get back to normal life as the full-time working mother she was, let’s not forget, before she became Britain’s “first lady”.
“Well, it’s not quite as clear-cut as that,” Samantha says hesitantly. “Even though I didn’t have a formal role there was still a certain amount to do in representing the country. And being a perfectionist, I wanted to do it well...But the public scrutiny wasn’t something I particularly yearned for... I don’t feel relaxed or like I can be myself in the spotlight. And yet at the end of the day I was there as his wife, it wasn’t my gig. It was a slightly odd position to be in. I don’t know if that quite explains it.”
Hearing her say this reminds me of the time a group of us were invited to Chequers for Sunday lunch some time the year before last, myself and my partner, Kate Reardon and Anya Hindmarch included. I remember how we left in convoy from London at what felt like the crack of dawn, with our wellies in the back, having been told the night before that it might be nice to have a pre-lunch walk, and then well into the M40, one of us got a call to say there’d be no walk because of the rain... Could we come at 1pm instead of 12? The Beaconsfield Services branch of Starbucks. Let’s just say, there’s a group of us who know it well."
“Yes, though I remember thinking when you arrived how it would actually have been fine to turn up early,” Samantha says, her blue eyes sparkling playfully at the memory. “You don’t think of yourself as being the sort of person who would worry about what time guests turned up, you always think of yourself as being so laid-back, so it always surprised me when people took the formal side of Dave’s job so seriously."
Laid-back. Is that how I’d describe Samantha? A mixture of laid-back and determined, perhaps, with a rather sweet way of gobbling her words and a habit of reverting from “I” to “you” when she feels the conversation getting a bit close to the bone. She’s got a sense of humour, too, recounting how she gets her lefts and rights mixed up and how a step class she once took was “total chaos! While I was going one way, everyone was going the other!” And, on another occasion, how, when Dave came to stay with her in her somewhat dive-y flat in Bristol, “there’d be prostitutes standing outside and he was always slightly worried, working with Norman Lamont at the time, about getting propositioned.” Then there’s how, standing on the doorstep of Downing Street with David, she always panicked that they’d turn to go in and the door would be locked. And how she hated having to wave. “It became a family joke,” she giggles. “My children would say, ‘Have you practised your wave?’ I was just so bad at it. I’d say to Dave, ‘Please, don’t do the wave!’ It felt so strange. I mean, if you’re not part of the royal family, it doesn’t come naturally, exactly.”
Not having to wave, being able to have control of the radio station in the car again, being able to holiday outside Europe - “I’ve never been to South America and I long to go to Russia and Mongolia” - these are just some of the perks of life back on civvy street. Then, of course, there’s being able to move back to their house in North Kensington. “Dave and I are actually very homey. You like to think when you are younger that you’re this free spirit, but I’ve worked out that I am not. At all. I like my little rituals.”
And where does she see herself and Cefinn in five or 10 years’ time? If her record at Smythson is anything to go by - transforming it from the fusty stationer it was into the luxury accessories brand it is now – the sky, surely, is the limit?
“I wanted to keep it small to begin with, in order to give me time to work with the customer and find out exactly what she wants. Right now it’s about me solving a problem for women who are busy and need pieces that are going to work really hard. What I’d like to do in the future, if the business goes well, is accessories - not bags, because I feel I’ve already done them, but shoes. Sexy mid-heel shoes, ones you can run around in in your lunch hour and that won’t sink into the grass if you’re going to a summer wedding. But how do you do that without being frumpy? That’s the challenge, and I’ve always adored a challenge..."
