Phoebe Philo will debut her long-awaited eponymous brand this fall, the designer announced, breaking the news on Thursday via a simple text slide posted to a newly created eponymous Instagram account.
Per the post, the canonically offline British designer’s “inaugural collection will be revealed and available on our website, phoebephilo.com, in September 2023.” (For now, that URL currently leads to a domain name system error.)
Charmingly, the text continues: “We will be opening for registration in July 2023 and look forward to being back in touch then.”
Philo’s decade-long tenure at Céline has loomed large in the fashion consciousness since well before she left the LVMH-owned brand (and largely stepped away from the public eye) in 2018. The Philophile radar spiked in 2021, when the designer first announced her intention to launch her own namesake line in early 2022, only to flatline again when that date came and went.
Philo’s womenswear had serious menswear accolades, even long before her successor, Hedi Slimane, introduced proper menswear at Celine in her wake. Her designs, which often featured elegantly baggy trousers, collared shirts, sharp trench coats, and low-profile sneakers, as well as Philo’s own understated, spot-on personal style garnered her plenty of famously stylish fans. (She was a pioneering figure in the 2010s Stan Smiths revival.) In 2011, Ye famously wore a patterned silk blouse from Céline’s spring collection onstage at Coachella, not long after he’d namechecked the designer in the album opener of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy; Travis Scott was spotted wearing the same shirt years later. While attending Paris Fashion Week in 2019, Frank Ocean paired his Philo-era Céline green leather tote with an orange Marmot down jacket. Anyone could be a Philophile, which is a notion that may or may not compel the designer to create men’s or gender-neutral clothing for her own brand.
And perhaps as another sign of fashion’s past making a warmly welcomed comeback, Philo may even become a pivotal participant in a possible re-serification of high-fashion branding: the Instagram announcement, which was rendered in white Times New Roman script on a black background, included a simple, substantial serif logo. In light of Philo’s Céline protégée Daniel Lee kicking off his Burberry tenure with a new old-world logo earlier this week, it appears that Phoebe Philo will, too, be a serif font brand—which, if the chatter is any indication, seems to be as much an ideological choice as an aesthetic one.
