The Working Wardrobe: Camille Charrière

When it comes to defining her job title, French-born, London-based tastemaker and fashion personality Camille Charrière struggles. Not only is she one of the original – and now most followed – London fashion influencers, but she’s also a podcast host, TV presenter, LVMH Prize Jury member and NET-A-PORTER Vanguard Education Fund mentor. She’s co-designed collections, most notably her sell-out range with high-street fashion behemoth Mango, has written for Harper’s Bazaar, British Vogue, Sunday Times Style, Evening Standard and Grazia, and is a contributing editor at Elle.

“It’s really difficult to put a label on oneself when you’re speaking in the first person and you don’t have that overall arch of a magazine or company you work for,” says Charrière, 35. “Someone told me the other day I was a KOL – a key opinion leader – and I thought, right, that solves all my problems; that sounds snazzy!”

A cultural commentator with wit, Charrière has an innate and original sense of style, and is master of nailing the zeitgeist with her sexy-meets-boyish aesthetic. A firm fixture on fashion’s front row, she’s known for her sharp and irreverent take on the worlds of style and social media. But her route into the upper echelons of the industry was anything but conventional. After graduating from law school in Paris with a double first in criminal justice and family law, she moved to London and took a job at a hedge fund – which she loathed.

“I can credit NET-A-PORTER for giving me my first big break in fashion,” says Charrière, who applied for a role on the editorial team on a whim. “It was a really incredible place to start a career in fashion because NET-A-PORTER was always so ahead of the game in the digital space; they’re the reason everybody else has editorial on e-commerce sites now. They understood early on that it was all part of one thing; you didn’t have to separate your shop from the stories.”

It was on her NET-A-PORTER lunch breaks that Charrière launched her fashion blog Camille Over the Rainbow (now defunct), which would go on to become the bedrock of her social-media stardom. “Back in the day, nobody had anything to say about the fact I was doing that in my spare time – nobody really cared,” says Charrière, who eventually left her role to blog full-time.

Now, she’s come full circle and sits on the board of mentors for NET-A-PORTER’s Vanguard Education Fund, an initiative that – in partnership with the British Fashion Council – provides both financial support and dedicated mentoring to final-year students as they embark on their careers, helping them gain a foothold in the fashion industry. “I love the fact that NET-A-PORTER is spending time and curating mentorship teams to help people who are starting out, and not just focusing on the bigger brands that they know are going to be a guaranteed sell,” says Charrière. “You never know who the next big name is going to be. I have always supported emerging talent on my Instagram, but this feels like a new way I can be useful.”

Read on to discover Charrière’s thoughts on personal style, and her tips for nailing the London-cool-meets-Parisian-polish aesthetic for which she’s famed.

“I’m a bit of a micro-mini queen; I love getting my legs out. I adore a skirt like this Gucci mini because it’s really easy by day and, if you’re going for drinks in the evening, it’s fun to go out and dance in. I love a monogram, too – that’s not very French, but I’m just a sucker for that old-school, flashy nostalgia. I think if you mellow it with a white shirt, it works. In this case we put it with socks and loafers and gave it more of a preppy feel. Again, it’s playing on the volumes and proportions; the masculine and feminine, so it doesn’t feel too ‘girly’.”