Wiggy Kit is the British fashion label behind the cult summer dresses spotted everywhere from the Bahamas to Belgravia.
I am talking about Wiggy Kit, a small British operation, founded in 2015 by Wiggy Hindmarch, who divides her time between her homes in London and the Bahamas, plus, increasingly, her travels across the US hosting trunk shows.
Her growing American fanbase, which now accounts for 30 percent of her business, is everywhere from New York to Los Angeles, by way of countless stop-offs in wealthy enclaves in between, from Charleston to Dallas.
What’s the appeal? Beautifully considered clothes designed by a woman who knows how to look chic in the sun, with an aesthetic that combines flattering femininity with the kind of pared back lines that look – and feel – cool. Among her high-profile fans are India Hicks, a neighbor on Harbour Island, and Claudia Schiffer.
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“It’s also about the fact that these aren’t ubiquitous clothes,” says Hindmarch, whose sister-in-law is the handbag designer Anya. “This is a niche brand. Wearing it feels a bit more clever, a bit more thought out, as if you have discovered something.”
The so-called floating bib dress is a case in point, an easy-breezy riff on a tuxedo shirt, with its fresh-looking white bib, the rest rendered in red and white striped linen, the end result somehow both preppy and boho. (Hindmarch has a magic touch when it comes to mixing apparently unmixable visual languages into a new whole.) And I am building up quite the collection of its sarong dress, which is released in different fabrics each season and flatters the female form wonderfully, whatever your shape. I never go anywhere warm without at least two.
She aims “to create stand out pieces that don’t shout. You don’t look as if you are trying too hard, but, ‘Bloody hell, that’s an amazing shirt’ or ‘Wow, that is such an incredible skirt’. I don’t want ever to produce something boring. There is always a twist.”
Yet she can also deliver the most full-throttle variety of look-at-me dressing. I wore the brightly floral silk Bay one-shouldered big-bowed number to this week’s Dolce & Gabbana’s Alta Moda event in Sicily, an Italian take on couture which is the ultimate sartorial extravaganza. A couple of attendees – clad in five- and six-figure made-to-order ensembles from Dolce – asked me where it was from.
Yes, I can speak from experience when it comes to the power of Wiggy Kit. Every time I wear something from the brand – and I have a lot of it in my closet these days – I receive not only compliments but anxious enquiries as to where my interlocutor might secure the same for herself. Honestly, I have lost count as to the number of times I have been chased down the street by a Wiggy Kit customer-in-waiting.
The label’s price tags may barely register on the usual high-net-worth Richter scale, but this just means that Hindmarch’s wealthier customers buy it differently, ordering multiples across all their addresses. “One woman orders for London, Hong Kong and Sicily, another for New York, the Hamptons and Palm Beach,” she says. A lot of her clients also purchase multiples as gifts.
“They will buy for their daughter, their daughter in law, their mother, their mother-in-law. They will buy for their friends, for all their nearest and dearest. If they are invited on someone’s yacht or whatever, it’s a great hostess gift. It comes across as thoughtful, in that it’s beach-ready, and, again, it also comes across as a bit clever, as it’s a brand someone may not have heard of. My clients are very generous givers. It’s their way of spreading the love.”
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There’s a kind of sisterhood in play here, in other words; women passing on the Wiggy Kit secret. Partly this is due to the clothes themselves, needless to say, which are cut by a female in her 50s who, soignée as she is, knows what other females want to show and what they don’t. Partly it’s Hindmarch herself, who shares her gloriously on-brand life via @wiggykit on Instagram.
“My videos push sales hugely,” she says. “A gorgeous model doesn’t do much for sales, but when people see me wearing something, they see what it looks like in real life, and they think, ‘Oh, I get that now.’ The brand is very authentic.”
We are chatting in her London boutique, on one of the city’s best shopping streets, Elizabeth Street in Belgravia. She is currently pondering where best to open her first store in the States. As we speak, three separate first-time customers come in – two American, one Swedish – drawn by a window of typically stunning yet relaxed-looking summer dresses. They leave with a couple of frocks apiece, and a pledge to shop more online when they get home. Of course they do.
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