From Riches to Rags

Stepping out of his fashion brand Rag & Bone’s new shop on the corner of Sloane Square, the garrulous Marcus Wainwright says, ‘I always knew I didn’t want to wake up at 50 with a house in the country, a Labrador and a job in banking. I can’t think of anything more different to what our peers at school would be doing now,’ he adds of his alumni at Berkshire boarding school Wellington College, the Eton for military families.

Certainly, fashion was not the obvious direction for the 37-year-old whose first career was running a telecoms company. However, after a couple of miserable years, he fled London for Mexico, where he met his wife — the former model Glenna Neece. They moved to the US, where Wainwright decided to ‘make jeans’, naming his company after the old English ‘Rag and Bone’ tradesmen who used to collect bones to make candles, and rags to make clothing.

But brand building, he soon realised, was a huge job for one man and he called on his friend David Neville, an investment banker, to help handle the money and marketing side. Neville had been a year above him at school, but the pair had later bonded in a bar in Portugal on their gap year, and then on the dancefloor of grotty Tyneside club The Boat while at university (Wainwright in Newcastle, Neville in nearby Durham). It didn’t take much to convince Neville, who Wainwright claims ‘[was] always more into fashion than me; he’s a bit of a dandy’, to quit banking and move to the US. ‘He might also have been trying to escape a young lady in London at the time...’

The Rag & Bone boys, along with the likes of Paul Smith, are some of the few straight men working in fashion to have global success in womenswear. But they didn’t start the label with world domination in mind: ‘All I originally wanted was to make a nice pair of jeans for myself,’ says Wainwright. ‘We never understood until recently just how excited women could get about shoes,’ adds the smilier, more relaxed Neville, 36, who is married to the celebrity make-up artist and artistic director of Revlon, Gucci Westman.

To create Rag & Bone, the pair began by visiting a factory in Kentucky. ‘There were rows of women making jeans. Some of them had been doing it for 30 years. There was a real craft to it.’ Despite their lack of experience in womens-wear, the pair took a bold (and rare) step when they opened their first stores, one each for men’s and womenswear on Christopher Street in New York’s West Village in 2008, deciding that a separate jeans collection for both sexes made business sense. Today Rag & Bone is a prestige clothing label, encompassing not just denim but full men’s and womenswear collections, and soon a handbag line, too.

‘We could never have done it in London,’ Wainwright stresses. ‘Here it’s very hard to get two punters not straight out of Central Saint Martins listened to. But that American dream thinking really does give a much more open mentality.’ Wainwright explains that their success could only have happened in the US. The American market is comparatively bigger: do a deal to sell your clothes at a couple of big department stores and your brand might go on to sell in hundreds of locations. ‘We managed to get the business up to a few million bucks off our own backs that way — and could then start hiring people,’ he adds.

‘That’s really what the brand’s about: two English guys in New York,’ says Neville. ‘We might have worn suits, had a military school background and grown up surrounded by portraits of generals. But all that, mixed with New York, has shaped the aesthetic.’

Rag & Bone’s emphasis, then as now, is on wearability: no one-season wonders, nothing that feels disposable, just well-crafted, gently fashionable, ageless clothing that would stick around in anyone’s wardrobe. Just as important is its avoidance of silly prices — a pair of its jeans, for example, can cost as little as £85, about the same as a pair of Levi’s. The label has become the cool rather than the showy choice, favoured by creatives and A-listers such as Charlize Theron, Cindy Crawford and Liv Tyler.

Between them Wainwright and Neville have five children under five. ‘And they’re growing up with American accents,’ says Neville, ‘which is pretty annoying.’ The duo and their families spend a lot of time together. Not content with having schooled together, established and grown a company together, they have their desks side by side on the sixth floor of their Meatpacking District office.

‘We do well with our relationship, given that,’ says Neville, who is now co-owner and co-creative director with Wainwright. ‘There’s a mutual trust and respect. We certainly have gone through some very hard times together early on, just getting the business going and dealing with our naivety — walking up and down Broadway trying to find fabric suppliers, for example. Now if there’s a difference of opinion we “debate”.’ ‘Yes, it’s a “healthy debate”,’ adds Wainwright. ‘After those difficult early times we just agreed that conflict was pointless and that we should make it all fun.’