Fashion icon and ultimate tastemaker Lucinda Chambers does not believe style is something you either have or you don’t. “I think style is something you absolutely can learn,” she says. “It’s like a craft, like anything else. You try it out. You make mistakes. You learn from those mistakes.”
After decades at British Vogue and now as co-founder of covetable shopping site Collagerie, hers is one of the most recognizable eyes in fashion and interiors, but the way she talks about taste is refreshingly unprecious.
For Lucinda, it comes from looking, trying, getting things wrong, changing your mind, and staying curious. These are the rules she has learned along the way.
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(Image credit: Future)
1. “Try Everything Out”
Lucinda’s mother gave her one of the most useful pieces of creative advice she has ever received: “Try boyfriends out, try makeup out, try hair out, try everything out.”
Lucinda took it literally. “I used to dress in a crazy way, but it was experimental.” At one point she put a wicker wastepaper basket on her head, tied it with a bow and convinced herself it looked like Stephen Jones. “No. I looked like I had a rubbish bin on my head.”
That willingness to get it wrong became fundamental to how she developed her eye. “If you don’t try things out, how are you going to learn?”
Her route into fashion was just as improvised. She and her mother made art-school portfolios together on the kitchen table when money became tight. Lucinda initially felt hopelessly outclassed, until she discovered the Perspex room and started making jewellery. A pair of earrings she had made eventually appeared on a model in a free London magazine. “I remember thinking, oh my God, I held those and made those.”
Later, one of her Vogue mentors told her: “Darling, you’ve got lots of furniture in your head, but it has to come out.” The instinct may be there, but the skill is learning how to use it.
2. “Always on the Lookout”
Lucinda’s eye has been trained by looking. Constantly. “I am always, always on the lookout.”
Travel played a huge part during her Vogue years, but inspiration can come from almost anywhere: exhibitions, films, art books, car boots, shop windows, or something completely accidental. “It could be a plastic bag caught in a tree that’s the most amazing color, and you think, oh my God, that could be a whole collection.”
Marrakech remains one of the places she finds most inspiring, particularly for its color and craftsmanship, but the bigger idea is to keep your brain “on receive mode”. Car boots are particularly good for this because, as Lucinda puts it, every stall is “somebody else’s point of view”.
3. “It’s All Storytelling”
Lucinda sees very little distinction between the way she approaches fashion and interiors. “It’s all about decoration. Whether it’s decoration on the body or for your home, it’s storytelling.”
The same elements matter in both: color, proportion, pattern, texture and, crucially, comfort. “You have to get dressed every morning. You have to put yourself down on the sofa every evening.”
She will not wear uncomfortable clothes, and she will not buy an uncomfortable chair. A room has to support what actually happens there: somewhere to read, somewhere to put your feet up, somewhere to put a coffee cup. “I always start with what am I going to be doing in that room?” That question comes before the color, pattern, or furniture. Her electric yellow dining room works because she wants the space to feel energetic and sociable. A bedroom can be calmer because it has a completely different job.
(Image credit: Lucinda Chambers)
4. “You Can Creep Color in”
Lucinda loves color, but she does not think confidence has to arrive all at once. “You can creep color in. Start with a lamp, cushion or rug and build from there.” In her kitchen, green emerged gradually through cushions, ceramics and eventually a reconditioned Aga that she’s just bought from Range Exchange. “If people aren’t confident about color, then I always just suggest having a thread running through your home.”
When she chooses colors more deliberately, she carries a small notebook, cuts out paint swatches, and moves them around. “I do in my head go, are they talking to each other?” She does not necessarily want them to be talking too politely. Her recently redecorated bedroom is a soft lilac-grey, but she matched the ceiling to a muddy tobacco-colored candle because the room needed something to “throw it off a bit”. “If they’re living all very harmoniously, then probably to me that seems boring.”
5. “I Like to Throw a Curveball in”
Lucinda becomes suspicious when something looks too tasteful. Her husband calls it “ghastly good taste”, and Lucinda calls the antidote “the grit in the oyster”.
In one restrained room, that meant introducing an orange chair purely because everything else was getting along too well. The same instinct guides the things she buys. “I’m sort of attracted to things that I’m not really attracted by.” At flea markets and car boots, she looks for objects that make her feel a bit uncomfortable: a strange 1960s lampshade, an awkward ceramic, something she has never seen before. One of her best finds was a five-foot Murano glass lamp bought for about $25 in New York. “It sat on my lap in economy for six hours.”
“If it makes you feel a bit jaggy, I quite like that. That slight discomfort stops a room from becoming predictable.”
6. “I Can Just Look at It, Appreciate It, and Walk Away”
Lucinda has spent much of her life collecting. She is now learning the opposite skill.
“I’ve spent thirty years accumulating stuff, and I’m going to spend the next 10 years getting rid of it.” Her rule now is simple: if she cannot imagine where something will go, she does not buy it. “I can appreciate it, clock it mentally, then walk away.”
She learned the value of editing after returning from a long trip and seeing her own hallway afresh. “It was electric pink, there was a pom-pom on almost every doorknob, and every surface was full. I just thought, oh my gosh. I’ve overloaded, and I haven’t noticed.” She cleared the decks and repainted it. “Now it looks like a German urinal.”
(Image credit: Zara Home x Collagerie)
7. “To Hand Over Something to an Expert Was an Absolute Revelation”
Lucinda is instinctive, but she is not precious about doing everything herself. One of her best investments at home was a professional picture hanger. After repainting her hallway, she took all the art down and gave him complete freedom. “I just said, you choose whatever you like and can leave stuff out. I’m going out.”
The result completely changed how she saw the collection. “He hung all my pictures in a way that I would never ever have dreamt of. There’s not a day that goes past when I don’t walk up the stairs and just think, wow.”
She feels similarly about framing. “You can buy something that’s £5, but if you frame it really interestingly, it just elevates it.” This isn’t necessarily expensive. She has just bought IKEA frames, painted them with Annie Sloan paint, and attacked them with a nail file.
8. “You Don’t Have to Get It Right Straight Away”
Perhaps the biggest obstacle to developing personal style now, Lucinda thinks, is the pressure to find an answer immediately.
“I think people feel very, very pressured that their houses become either Instagrammable or perfect.” Her own home has evolved over 35 years. One son’s room was once completely covered in graffiti by an artist she spotted working on Portobello Road. It is now a calm spare bedroom. Rooms have changed as children have grown up, things have been repainted, collections have expanded and then been edited back.
“I think there is a pressure to get everything right all at once, all at the same time.” Lucinda is much more comfortable with trial and error. Even at Vogue, she learned that not every detail needed endless perfecting. Some things demanded obsession; others were, in her words, “good enough for jazz”. That balance between caring deeply and knowing when to let go is part of developing an eye too.
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