Interview by Melanie Rickey, Fashion Features Editor at Large, Grazia

Photography by Chris Brooksmenswear

She is the fashion writer par excellence with four million readers and an acute eye for new designers. Now Sarah Mower is the BFC’s Ambassador for Emerging Talent. Students, look sharp…

Sarah Mower is probably the most read fashion critic in the world. With a career that spans more than 20 years at the forefront of fashion journalism, not to mention four million regular readers on Style.com – for whom she reviews the catwalk shows in London, Milan and Paris – her influence and global reach is second to none. Designers read her reviews of their shows on their BlackBerrys the morning after. Journalists read Style.com to see how she is thinking, because her thoughts are often the barometer of where fashion might be going, and certainly help pin down where it is now.

Closer to home in London (where the writer lives with her husband and three children Tom, Maisie and Phoebe), Mower has become an ambassador for the British Fashion Council. Or rather, to give the title its full vent, in May this year Sarah Mower became the British Fashion Council’s first Ambassador for Emerging Talent. When you break down what British fashion is famous for – namely its new, fresh talent that feeds the rest of the world’s design studios – it actually means that she plays a pivotal role in nurturing the next generation of British fashion designers.

The BFC job involves spotting, advising and promoting to the world the best design talent our art schools have to offer. What’s more, Mower also ensures these fledgling designers secure the correct funding and every kind of support to fulfil their potential.

Thus far she is doing a sterling job with a stellar bunch. Of those in her care from day one, Christopher Kane and Marios Schwab lead the charge. Behind them march Meadham Kirchhoff, Peter Pilotto, Mary Katrantzou, Mark Fast and – making his debut this season – Michael van der Ham.   All are at London Fashion Week in large part thanks to Mower’s stewardship.

With her uniform of peak-shouldered Margiela tailoring, extremely high heels, dark shades and her penchant for not smiling or making small talk, Mower cuts something of a mysterious dash around the fashion capitals. In actual fact, most people are intimidated by her and find her steely demeanour quite scary. In real life, though, she is simply, by her own admission, “something of an introvert”. What she’s saying is that she’s shy. Behind the veneer is an endearing character for whom the mantra “with great power comes great responsibility” could have been written.

Melanie Rickey, Fashion Features Editor at Large, Grazia

HERE, SARAH MOWER REVEALS TO THE DAILY HER THOUGHTS ON FASHION

I thank God every day for Google. Because when designers start quoting their influences to me, at least now I know what obscure photographer, artist, or blah blah they are on about because I can go and check it.

Feeling the electricity of ideas connecting, that’s what I like. That’s where my Ambassador for Emerging Talent role has come from. You know quite a lot of things about a lot of things and about a lot of people, and you can see who needs what and you can right wrongs, and, knowing how the whole system works, you can enable people.

I know I have a very grumpy face, but that isn’t what I’m like inside. I’ve learned not to be riled at fashion shows. There isn’t any point. You can get anxious about getting into the thing. You can get anxious and annoyed about waiting. You can get annoyed with PRs who don’t know who you are. What I’ve learned is that it’s just not worth it. Because all that stays with you are the good things. You just have to let the rest go.

I never had the patience to be an artist. My mother was an art teacher. As soon as I was old enough to hold a pen she encouraged me to just draw all the time. All I could do, ever, was draw. Get an idea down quickly. There couldn’t be any palaver between me thinking of an idea and expressing it.

When I started out, I was really scared of designers. And very intimidated. They were older than me. Gradually, they got younger and younger than me and I learned more and more. I now see what it really takes for a designer to actually be able to do it.

Embarrassingly, I have cried at a show. Oh God! I used to sob at Helmut Lang shows and I don’t know why.

Being a fashion critic is very complex. You have to judge or assess what a designer is doing in relation to everything else: the trends that are coming up, or the feeling or mood that is rising from the season. You also have to connect how it relates back to their body of work. So you are judging them against their own track record. I know all this inside me when I sit down to a show.

I have Googled myself. I am happy to say I have only ever found two spiteful things about me. One was hilarious: it said, “Who is Sarah Mower? Has she ever done a day’s work in her life?” And that really did make me laugh. That is because those who know me will know I work every single hour I could possibly work. And I love it.

I’m big in Japan. I have an illustrated column in Japanese Vogue. They like me in China, too. When I was in Shanghai, a girl came up and said, “Oh, Sarah Mower! You’re like a manga hero!”

Back in the 1990s, Alexander McQueen and Hussein Chalayan were putting on the most incredible shows we will ever see. It was beyond fashion. It was Barnum and Bailey. It was absolutely mind- blowingly theatrical, visceral, moving and terrifying. They were rivals. It was like the Blur and Oasis stand-off.

I don’t get my legs out much because I’ve got terrible legs. And you can write that.

Know who you are. If it’s a frilly moment and you are not a frilly person, you can’t give in to frills. When I was a kid you had to wear a miniskirt or bellbottoms. Now fashion is so diverse. And thank God.

A lot of people ask me what makes a good designer. It’s when they’re able to articulate who they are, while capturing something about the times, while making clothes that can be worn; that’s the key. A designer is bad when they are derivative, run after every trend and don’t have the skills to make things properly.

After 9/11, London fashion was so dead. Everything was so hopeless. The rest of fashion became so polite. Then suddenly all those kids – Christopher Kane, Marios Schwab and Gareth Pugh – came up with this sense of confidence. But it wasn’t an aggressive sense of confidence. They weren’t snotty. They wanted to learn. I didn’t know if I could help them, but I was going to try.

For me, the less identifiable clothes are, the better. I wouldn’t wear the obvious thing by a designer. Dressing for me is a process of many things: trying to dress your own body, accept your own body. And whatever age you are – know it and celebrate it.

I’ve met Martin Margiela [the famously private Belgian designer, who hasn’t been photographed for over a decade]. He is the best mentor and teacher there could ever be. He talked to me about how he does things. I can’t tell you what I learned from him, because I swore to him that I would never, ever break that confidence. And I never will.

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