Anya Hindmarch: 'I’d label my children if I could’

One fashion which Anya Hindmarch does not favour is the current vogue for raiding her shops. In May she was robbed, then again earlier this month. This time a motorbike was driven through the glass door of her New Bond Street shop with such force that it broke not only the glass but the protective grille. Thieves escaped with around 60 of the most desirable handbags, some priced at £3,000 each. "It's really upsetting," she says briskly. "They know exactly which ones are waiting lists."
It was, she reckons, the 13th robbery in recent years, not counting a raid on the warehouse. All her London shops have been targeted - Sloane Street, Notting Hill, Pont Street, Belgravia. The burglars move so fast that they have scarpered with the goods before anyone can stop them.
"One time, Madonna was nearby, so the paparazzi were able to take pictures of it happening. Another time, someone in the flat over the road rang me and described what was going on, before the police arrived."
Many security measures have been tried, including a machine that generated a cloud of impenetrable smoke within three seconds of a break-in. Unfortunately it also smoked out the flat above. Her shops are not the only targets. Other central London retailers, including Watches of Switzerland, Mappin & Webb, Dolce & Gabbana, Christian Dior, Loewe and Miu Miu have been similarly honoured. But Hindmarch takes the prize for the underworld's favourite brand - a compliment she could do without.
"You feel violated. The staff are traumatised as they have to deal with the mess, the broken glass, and sometimes blood. It is expensive for the insurers - and for us, as they never pay 100 per cent back. So much management time is taken up. It is also a worry for the brand as we don't know where the bags are being sold."
Spoken like the true business woman she is, and has been since the age of 18 when she launched herself selling mail-order leather duffel bags from Florence. In the Eighties, she was one of the rare teenagers openly to admire Margaret Thatcher, who features several times in the photogallery on the stairs at her Battersea headquarters.
"So what if you are unpopular: say what you think," she says of those days. Hence, perhaps, the forthright "I'm not a plastic bag" that she designed for Sainsbury's in 2007. It is the nearest she has come to a bag for those who don't have £700-plus to dangle from their arm. When it went on sale worldwide, 30 people were hurt in a stampede in Taipei to buy them.
Hindmarch, now 42, is in the midst of moving her office upstairs. Three weeks ago, she handed over the role of chief executive of her business, which has a turnover of £20 million and includes 54 shops, to James McArthur, who has worked for Bottega Veneta, Balenciaga, Alexander McQueen and Harrods. For two weeks they shared an office, learning each other's style, until she became embarrassed discussing trimmings while he grappled with balance sheets. Now she is back where she started, running the creative side while he grows the business, which she hopes will soon be as big as Mulberry.
A Ben Eine sign saying simply "Scary" hangs over the desk in her new office. She isn't. She talks at top speed as if rushing to catch a plane - as is often the case - but there is a softness to her, suggested by her cosy cardigan, flapping Marni dress over a comfortably non-X-ray figure and, curiously for June, woolly scarf. With a pair of tattered trainers on her feet, Hindmarch looks neither millionairess nor fashionista.
This is her look for an "inside" day. Outside the office whether promoting her own brand, acting as ambassador for British business or fund-raising for the Conservatives, she brushes up well and, of course, sports a handsome bag. Hers are projections of her own personality: highly organised. They come with endless sections, pockets and rings to hold phones, keys, iPods, credit cards, coins, lipsticks, you name it. The new Mega Zip, one of this season's bestsellers, even has a section called "Bits and Bobs", neatly designated in gold lettering. "I'd label my children if I could," she says, seeing me rebel against such careful compartmentalising.
Fortunately for one with controlling tendencies, she is saved from nightmarishness by a sense of humour and the knowledge that life isn't quite so easily managed as personal effects. Her early years, at school and in business, taught her that. Despite what appears to be a perfect life - happy childhood, early success, enduring marriage with five children aged 22 to eight, (two of them hers; three who came into the marriage with her husband, a widower) - it hasn't been easy.
"I didn't do at all well at school. I got seven O-levels and two A-levels but, let's say, universities weren't queuing up for me. It was lonely starting my own business when my friends were all having fun. And it was tough going through the pain that all businesses go through when you are trying, simultaneously, to persuade retailers, suppliers and customers to trust you."
Dyslexia may have been the reason why she underperformed academically, but now she sees the non-linear way her mind works as a source of pride. She was fortunate in having a father who acted as her business mentor, reminding her of important but dull matters such as keeping an eye on the cash flow. Having set up his own plastics company and been on the board of a public company, he evidently provided an appealing role model because the whole family has gone into business - her sister with children's shoes, her brother with fancy cars. Her name is intriguing. "I'm neither Russian nor German, but proud to come from Essex."
Hers is no estuary accent. She is from the leafier part of the county, and has little in common with ITVs clueless Essex girls, rather more with sleek purveyors of top-class luxury goods, including Samantha Cameron (at Smythson), Stella McCartney and Tamara Mellon (of Jimmy Choo). It is no accident, she feels, that so many women of her generation have become entrepreneurs. "One of the joys of setting up your own business is that you can work the hours you choose. You have flexibility, so you don't have to feel guilty."
Three times she uses the word "flaky" to describe the public image of luxury goods, only to defend them. "No woman needs another handbag," she says, although I'm not sure that's true, looking at my own battered holdall. "But fashion gives confidence, it affects mood. And luxury goods are an important calling card for the UK, a source of tourism. People think of Jermyn Street, fine stationery, trench coats, leather goods. This Government really gets it about luxury goods."
Well, it would, wouldn't it, with the Prime Minister sharing a bed with Sam Cam every night? "Absolutely, but it's not just me saying it. Employment laws here are a problem, but this Government is more receptive to entrepreneurs."
What about the banks' reluctance to lend? "The most dangerous thing of all is having too much money. Certainly, good ideas have fallen for lack of backing but, if you are tenacious, you will get there. I begged, borrowed and, I was going to say, stole to get going."
At the thought of theft, her face falls. But, like most problems, she is confident that the robberies will soon be consigned to a file marked "sorted".

With Botox, Looking Good and Feeling Less

Accuracy” by David T. Neal and Tanya L. Chartrand, published in “Social Psychological and Personality Science.”
It’s no shock that we can’t tell what the Botoxed are feeling. But it turns out that people with frozen faces have little idea what we’re feeling, either.
No, Botox injections don’t zap brain cells. (At least not so far as we know.) According to a new study by David T. Neal, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Southern California, and Tanya L. Chartrand, a professor of marketing and psychology at the Duke University Fuqua School of Business, people who have had Botox injections are physically unable to mimic emotions of others. This failure to mirror the faces of those they are watching or talking to robs them of the ability to understand what people are feeling, the study says.
The idea for the paper stemmed from a study conducted in the 1980s, which found that long-married men and women began to resemble each other over time, especially if they were happily wed. “So we thought, what’s going to happen now that there’s Botox?” Dr. Neal said.
The toxin might interfere with “embodied cognition,” the way in which facial feedback helps people perceive emotion. According to the theory in the study, a listener unconsciously imitates another person’s expression. This mimicry then generates a signal from the person’s face to his or her brain. Finally, the signal enables the listener to understand the other person’s meaning or intention.
While the first two steps of this process had been established by research, it was unclear whether facial feedback helped people make better judgments about other peoples’ emotions.
Enter the Botoxed person, a useful new laboratory specimen. And, as a control, the user of Restylane, a skin filler that does not alter muscle function.
In one experiment, women who had been injected with Botox within the last two weeks were offered $200 to look at a set of photographs of human eyes and match them with human emotions. Restylane users performed the same tasks, which were in both cases conducted via computer.
Women with Botox were significantly less accurate at decoding both positive and negative facial expressions than those who had used Restylane, whose abilities closely approximated those of plain old wrinkled adults. On average, the Botox group guessed 2 more out of 36 facial expressions wrong.
A second experiment found that people with amplified expressions do a better job deciphering emotions. Participants who had a gel on their faces that effectively made their muscles work harder to convey emotions could more accurately identify emotions in others. The gel was similar to an over-the-counter facial mask. Ah, the trials of beauty!
While Botox doesn’t go to the brain (the poison doesn’t cross the blood-brain barrier), it does seem to affect its users ability to think. Such findings might perturb those who have dipped into the Clostridium botulinum. Not that we can tell.

How Divorce Lost Its Groove

A COUPLE of months ago, Susan Gregory Thomas, a writer in Brooklyn, was at a friend’s 40th birthday party when she was approached by a woman familiar to her “from the whole Park Slope mommy culture.”

Enlarge This Image

Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

Stacy Morrison of Brooklyn said that for many people of her generation, “the notion of divorce has become one of failure again.”

“So you’re Susie Thomas,” the woman practically shrieked upon introduction. “You’re famous.” Taken aback, Ms. Thomas asked what she meant.
The woman swiftly backpedaled. “Oh, you just come up in these conversations all the time,” she said.
“I was like, just give me the hemlock,” Ms. Thomas, 42, recalled.
Though she wasn’t entirely surprised. Ever since her divorce three years ago, Ms. Thomas said, she has been antisocial, “nervous about what people would say.”
After all, she had gone from Park Slope matron, complete with involved husband (“We had cracked the code of Gen X peer parenthood”) and gut-renovated brownstone, to “a Red Hook divorcée,” she said, remarried with a new baby and two children-of-divorce barely out of preschool. “All of a sudden, this community I’d lived in for 13 years became this spare and mean savannah,” she said.
It was as if, she said, everyone she knew felt bad for her but no one wanted to be near her, either. Even though adultery was not part of the equation, Ms. Thomas said, “I feel like I have a giant letter A on my front and back.”
That a woman who has been divorced should feel such awkwardness and isolation seems more part of a Todd Haynes set piece than a scene from “families come in all shapes and sizes” New York, circa 2011. But divorce statistics, which have followed a steady downward slope since their 1980 peak, reveal another interesting trend: According to a 2010 study by the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, only 11 percent of college-educated Americans divorce within the first 10 years today, compared with almost 37 percent for the rest of the population.
For this cross section of American families — in the suburban playgrounds of Seattle, the breastfeeding-friendly coffee shops of Berkeley, Calif., and the stroller-trodden streets of the Upper West Side — divorce, especially for mothers with young children underfoot, has become relatively scarce since its “Ice Storm” heyday.
For every cohort since 1980, a greater proportion are reaching their 10th and 15th anniversaries, said Stephanie Coontz, author of “Marriage, a History.”
Teresa DiFalco, a 41-year-old mother of two from a suburb of Portland, Ore., recalled being shocked when her husband wanted to split up three years ago.
“I had this sense of: ‘You’re kidding me. We have children. It’s not allowed,’ ” she said. Divorce was not a part of her children’s landscape, Ms. DiFalco said. Her son had just one acquaintance whose parents were divorced, her daughter none.
Similarly, Molly Monet, a professor of Spanish at Mount Holyoke College who separated from her husband in 2007, said she felt out of sync, “like the ultimate bad mom.”
“Now my children were from a ‘broken home,’ ” she said. “My first response was, Is this going to devastate the kids?”
Andrew Cherlin, a sociology professor at Johns Hopkins University, said: “The shift in attitudes and behavior is very real. Among upper-middle-class Americans, the divorce rate is going down, and they’re becoming more conservative toward divorce.”
Dr. Cherlin, author of “The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and Family in America Today,” attributes the swing to multiple factors, among them, a generational makeover.
It’s as if the children of Manhattan and Roslyn, N.Y., and Bethesda, Md., reflected on their parents’ sloppy divorces and said, “Not me.” For Ms. Thomas, whose parents separated when she was 12, “Divorce had pretty much defined everything in my life.” In her divorce memoir, “In Spite of Everything,” to be published this summer, Ms. Thomas recalls telling her ex-husband many times during their 16-year marriage, “Whatever happens, we’re never going to get divorced.”