Anyone who shed a tear at Mrs Harris Goes to Paris, the sweet tale of a window cleaner who falls for a Dior couture dress, will delight at seeing Lesley Manville, who plays the 1950s housekeeper, at fashion week. It is there we find the Brighton-born theatre doyenne upstaging everyone at the Loewe show with her delicious one-liners about Jack and Lazaro’s joyous vision for the house, while looking every inch the part in a black tank dress and sculptural pumps.
Manville, unfathomably 70, with a wicked sense of humour that makes us wish she was, in fact, a fashion critic, is well placed to offer her hot take on Loewe. She’s been a firm fixture on the front row since Jonathan Anderson’s days at the craft-centric brand, and appreciates his successors’ approach to the formidable challenge of following his tenure. “I feel like Jack and Lazaro have grabbed it and made it theirs – it’s lovely work,” she says, before waxing lyrical about the leather, which, incidentally, was a key topic of conversation between Manville and her seat mate Anna Wintour. “She thought it was rather lovely as well.”
“Surreal” is how Manville describes the fashion week circus. “To be invited into this world as an actor has been such a treat because they chose the right person to bring in.” She’s not referring to her ability to hold her own in the upper echelons of an industry known for its unsmiling nature, but her own obsession with clothes. “As a kid growing up in Brighton with no money, trying to get outfits together that were different and unusual, the thrift shops, the antique shops and the vintage clothing shops were my friends,” she shares. “I would spend my weekends happily trawling around these meccas in my first really grown-up shoes – they were so quirky and unusual.”
A young Manville would surely have approved of her Origami Cubic heels and the sunrise-coloured Amazona bag punctuating her editor-black show look. “Oh that’s a good one,” she quips as if she’s never been asked what her fashion week survival kit entails (the usual answer runs the gamut from Listerine strips to cigs). Manville is less precious than all that, but she does have two non-negotiables when in Paris: butter and Skims. “I thought, ‘Am I just going to have a hard boiled egg for breakfast? No, I’m going to have some bread. I’m going to have a croissant. And I’m going to enjoy it because my Skims will do the work for me,’” she smiles. “And they have.”
The rest of Manville’s Paris trip will play out in a whirlwind of pastries (“I’ll probably have a heart attack, the amount of butter I’m eating”) and catch-ups (“Conversation is always lively with Loewe – you’re never short of somebody interesting to grab half an hour with”), before Manville goes back to London to squeeze in some theatre trips (Josh O’Connor in at the Almeida is top priority) ahead of rehearsing for 2027’s West End revival of . “There’s a lot of culture coming my way before I have to be the culture myself,” she adds. Fashion, in the meantime, makes a “terrific” intermission.
