FT: The Chambermaid Wears Prada

The chambermaid wears Prada

By Josh Sims

Published: July 18 2009 01:59 | Last updated: July 18 2009 01:59

The bar uniform at the Connaught, London, above, and, below left, a W Hotel uniform designed by L.A.M.B

There are elegant, streamlined clothes that began life on the sketchpad of designer Michael Kors. Then there are short, gymslip-style black jersey dresses by Gwen Stefani, the frontwoman of the punk-ska band No Doubt and creator of the clothing line L.A.M.B. So far, so fashion. But neither Kors’ nor Stefani’s designs are on the catwalk or in a shoot; rather, they are uniforms for staff of the trendy W Hotels chain. This summer, what you see while lounging around a resort could be as chic as anything you see in a store.

“I wanted to design a super-cute dress that I would be excited to have in my own closet, and approached it in the same way I think about my clothing for a tour,” Stefani said of her hotel uniform, which debuted early this year. “We’ve designed an outfit for these women to wear while on their own stage every night.”

Designing uniforms for restaurant employees and airline crews has long been a fashion sideline. Bruce Oldfield did it for McDonald’s staff last year; 40 years ago Emilio Pucci created a uniform for Braniff International Airways, as Julien Macdonald did, more recently, for British Airways.

Hotels have only recently come round to the idea, but they are making up for the lost style years. Alongside W Hotels, staff at the Hotel Monaco in Denver are sporting Cynthia Rowley this season, those at the Royalton New York are in Yohji Yamamoto, and at the Peninsula, Beverly Hills, they are in St John.

The motivation is simple: the desire to intensify competition. According to a 2008 PwC report, some 30 new hotel brands launched over the preceding 30 months. So brand image has become ever more important to differentiation. The choice of a hotel is as much a statement of taste as the choice of car, clothing or any other consumer goods.

“Uniforms are becoming much more important to the hotel industry now, as more hotels become ‘fashion’ brands themselves,” says Nicholas Oakwell, managing director of No Uniform, a uniform design company that counts Ibis Hotels, the Connaught in London, and Abode, the British boutique hotel chain, among its clients. “It’s about building customer appeal: the uniform tells a customer what the hotel is all about, especially since guests tend to be more fashion- and design-conscious now.”

Indeed, today’s hotel uniform, whether it be chic and minimalist or something more striking, can be as exclusive and as much of a statement as any designer line. When Top Hat Imagewear – a hotel uniform design business that works with the Ritz-Carlton, the Four Seasons and MGM Grand groups – designed a new look for the $400m overhaul of New York’s Plaza Hotel last year, the result was ornate black outfits with gold trim and hand-embroidered details.

“It needed to say, ‘This is the Plaza, and we’re back!’ and the concept made for quite an expensive uniform by industry standards – there was nothing faux about it,” says Marion Steinger, Top Hat’s senior vice-president. “That is rare [at the moment] but it’s increasingly the case. Hotels won’t compromise on uniforms and they don’t want to see their competitors’ staff dressed in anything similar.”

The Connaught’s latest uniform, created late last year, includes jackets made from specially woven fabrics and horn buttons with a hand-engraved logo. “We get a lot of customers saying, ‘Can we buy the suit, can we buy the dress?’” reports Oakwell. “That is the kind of level hotel uniforms have to operate on now. Although we don’t sell them – we want to keep the exclusivity.”

By contrast, the new Nylo Hotels, located in Texas and Rhode Island, sell their 20-piece NyloWear uniform collection, designed by Project Runway reality TV winner Daniel Vosovic, online.

The Gansevoort Hotel Group, which launched in 2003 and operates hotels in New York and Miami, is the apogee of the fashion approach to uniforms. It pioneered an arrangement with Hugo Boss, Alexander McQueen for Puma, Nautica and, for its 2010 Toronto opening, Prada, that sees the uniforms selected from across these brands’ collections – at no cost to the hotels. Instead, it is product placement for the brands.

“We couldn’t afford to do it any other way,” says Gansevoort’s chief executive Elon Kenchington. “And we want to align ourselves with the fashion world, from which a lot of our guests come. Having staff in designer clothing has fast-tracked our own brand to luxury status.”

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HOTEL STYLISTS

‘We don’t just change the flowers’

Instead of having a few pages in a magazine to fill, how would a fashion editor feel about styling an entire hotel? “Etonnée” – astonished – says Maud Lesur, a 35-year-old stylist and fashion editor at Madame Figaro magazine who, in 2004, was asked to become a fashion consultant at the five-star Métropole (www.metropole.com), a 130-year-old institution just a credit card’s throw from the Monte Carlo casino, Simon Brooke writes.

“But then I decided that I could bring an external viewpoint and some originality to the world of the luxury hotel,” she says.

Her job is to restyle the Métropole’s image every two or three months. January’s theme was taken from the frills and extravagant prettiness of the dresses in Sofia Coppola’s film Marie Antoinette, while this spring the colours were purple and green, following the colour trends from the women’s and men’s wear shows in Paris. The current theme, entitled Blue Mood (pictured), was drawn from the deep turquoise-blue of Matisse’s paintings of goldfish in a blue room.

“Deciding on the themes is like working on a mini-collection,” says Lesur. “My job is like being a fashion editor but at the same time it’s very different. We don’t just change the flowers every season, as hotels have done in the past; we change the cocktails in the bar, the amuse-bouches served in the restaurant and the ties of the concierges. Even the doorknobs will reflect the look, and in each bedroom there’ll be an object that symbolises the theme. It means that in every part of the hotel you have a ‘mood touch’ in keeping with that season’s fashions.”

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Hotels haven’t just discovered fashion gurus – they’ve discovered beauty gurus too. From pedicurist extraordinaire Bastien Gonzalez, who plies his no-polish buffing to the feet of guests at the One and Only resorts and Paris’ Hotel Costes, to the Guerlain experts at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, upscale services have become de rigueur extras, Vanessa Friedman writes.

Although the holiday-treatment landscape has tended to be dominated by the spa crowd, a new addition to the fold is attempting to bring the city salon to the seaside. Julien Farel (www.julienfarel.com), whose eponymous Manhattan space is a favourite of the Madison Avenue and Wall Street sets, has agreed a deal with the Capella Hotels and Resorts group to open in the Capella Pedregal (www.capellapedregal.com) in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, which launches this month.

“Beauty on vacation is more in demand than ever,” says Farel. “People do not have the time to get everything done prior to travelling, and this gives them an opportunity to recast it as pampering – which is a vacation activity, after all.”

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009