How everyday clothing is becoming more luxurious

Influential designer and creative director Clare Waight Keller on her move from Givenchy to Uniqlo, "re-defining what luxury is today" – and how Seoul street style is predicting what we wear.

Last week, Clare Waight Keller flew from London to Tokyo, grabbed some fabric swatches, and decided what millions of people will wear in September 2025. "I don't have a time machine," says the 54-year-old designer, who is now the creative director of Uniqlo, the global fashion chain. "But at this point, I've fine-tuned my fashion sense to live in the future," she tells the BBC from her home in Cornwall. "It's my job to see what will happen before it does."

If that sounds far-fetched, consider Keller's track record as something of a fashion intuit. She began her career at Calvin Klein during its early 1990s, Kate Moss heyday, then ed Tom Ford's team at Gucci around the year 2000. As creative director of Chloé in 2011, Keller helped develop the pale blush colour – called "millennial pink" by fashion theorist Véronique Hyland – that first appeared in floaty chiffon dresses and their corresponding Chloé perfume boxes, defining the era's more muted take on "girly" style, one that included a wider and more nuanced spectrum of feminine power. In 2017, Keller decamped for Givenchy, where her long-sleeved wedding dress for Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex spawned thousands of imitations just days after debuting in 2018. Even today, six years later, the boat-necked silhouette is echoed everywhere, from luxury labels like the Row to high-street brands like Bebe.

"You can't underestimate the design of that dress on young women," says Chloe Lee, 25, founder of the consumer trends newsletter Selleb, which tracks what Gen Z consumers are buying. "We were all in high school or college when we saw it. For us, it is the idea of a princess bride, or at least the starting point for one."

Keller is proud of her work with each label, and its she "constantly" searches for old designs on resale platforms like eBay and Vestiaire Collective. But in 2020, she knew it was time for another change.

"Post-Covid was a watershed moment for me in of, 'Right, what's the next 10 years of style going to look like? And how can I be part of the future of fashion">window._taboola = window._taboola || []; _taboola.push({ mode: 'alternating-thumbnails-a', container: 'taboola-below-article', placement: 'Below Article', target_type: 'mix' });