If you’re like us, you’ve probably wondered what famous people add to their carts. Not the JAR brooch and Louis XV chair, but the stain remover pen and the tongue cleaner. . We asked Liberty London’s design director Holly Marler about the wedding-appropriate pyjamas, the eyeliner, and the dark chocolate she can’t live without.
When my hair is dirty, the peroxide blonde goes a bit dull and then the hair gets flat. So I put this on before I go out in the evening. It’s like a hair spray, but it lifts the hair up at the root. I’ve got a bob haircut, so if I need to go out in the evening, I’ll take my hair out of a ponytail, spray some of this on, and it’ll give it that rough, textured look. My assistant often has to come and get me from the fitting room at the end of the day and say, “Come on, you have that dinner to get ready for,” so it’s good having something you can rely on in a pinch. Plus, I just love the design of the bottle.
This is my favourite chocolate; I really don’t think I could do my design fittings without it. We all joke on my team that we’re the least “fashion” people in fashion, because we eat loads of chocolate at 4 p.m. every day. We have a review design fitting midway through the season, and it’s basically where all the teams decide what prints are going on everything, the final silhouettes, and it’s so intense. There’s a lot of appeasing different teams, ensuring the garment fits. So every day we eat tons of snacks.
These are basically silk printed pyjamas, but they’re so beautifully made and tailored that you can wear them in the evening to a party and look really chic, and you can wear them to the office. I like to wear them as a whole look, but some [people in] the office wear the shirt broken up with jeans and a cardigan.
I also just wore them to a wedding. It was my auntie. She got married at 70 years old. So it was kind of informal, but I wore the pyjamas with the hearts printed on — it was just so perfect. And even though I was only wearing pyjamas, I still managed to look the most glam in the room. Ours are 100 percent silk, and they’re made using classic Liberty prints from our archive.
The first time I got this fragrance was in the Liberty advent calendar in a mini form. Everybody complimented me on it, so when it ran out, I went out and bought a proper bottle of the stuff. It smells very strong, almost heady. I think the reason I like it so much is Le Labo doesn’t make fragrances for men or women, so it sometimes feels quite masculine and sometimes quite feminine. They also print the label for the bottle with your name on it, and when you’ve run out, you take it back and they refill it for you. They make wonderful gifts.
If you wake up at three and start thinking about the next day, you start worrying about the next day, and it just sets you up to fail. So I put this on. It tells you to go through all the points in your body, and tells you to relax them: your face, your arms, your fingers. All in sequence, to the sound of the ocean, it sends me back off in no time. I have two daughters, 5 and 9, and they use it too. As adults, we’ve come to meditation and sleep hygiene late in life, but my daughters have warmed to it, and they get to sleep no problem. I used to listen to Matthew McConaughey read stories on the Calm app, but my husband hated having his voice in the bedroom.
I do a lot of painting, including hand-painting the florals for our collections, as does my team, and on some days we’ll do a painting day where we knuckle down for several hours. I put on ’90s hip-hop and just slip into a trance. I’m listening to a lot of the Roots and Erykah Badu at the moment. But the reason for the headphones is that I have no problem listening to a single song 25 times in a row. Everyone else finds it a bit weird. That’s the kind of listening habit you have to do by yourself. My other big thing at the moment is I can’t stop listening to Elton John. My 9-year-old is a figure skater. She actually competes; it’s quite serious. And I have to listen to a lot of music that her coach sends me, and at the moment she’s working to Elton John music.
I can’t remember a time when I didn’t wear a cat-eye flick. And this liquid eyeliner is my top choice because it’s really black. And it doesn’t come off, even at the gym. (Yes, I wear it to the gym; my own daughter gets freaked out if I don’t have a cat-eye flick.) The other reason I really like it is that I don’t have the best eyelashes, and the lady who sold me it says it’s got an active ingredient that’s supposed to help them get stronger [Editor’s note; The website says that it contains vitamin peptide, wild-rose extract, and arginine for stronger lashes.] People say fake eyelashes are really bad for your actual lashes, and I think now mine look a lot better than they used to.
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