Eye of the Tiger

Katie Grand, stylist and editor in chief of the biannual British style magazine Love, had spent a lot of time handling accessories before undertaking the design of her very own capsule collection for the Italian label Hogan. “I’m very used to looking at the methods and stitch lengths and edge painting and the intricacies of working on accessories,” she says. But putting her name on a product proved challenging in more ways than one. “I think it’s a different experience with my name on something,” she says of her collection, now in its second season. “I was very conscious that the quality level be of a different class.” Even when she’d settled on the right set of accessories to bear her name—for fall, a collection of shoes, bags, sunglasses, and cases for the iPhone and iPad, many in colored tiger prints—the logistics of labeling them hers proved difficult. “It was the little things I normally take for granted that were the challenges. It probably took four months to get the label inside of the shoe right.” The bigger things, though, came more naturally. “The outside was very easy,” she says. “You tend to react against what you’ve just done—that’s what fashion is generally about.” For her, that meant rich safari-print pony skin in response to spring’s polished, patent fluoro. Will her pieces ever appear in Love? “I’m very self-conscious of it,” she laughs. “So the answer is no.”