In London, you’re never more than a few feet from something with whiskers. Or someone wearing Carelli’s Bambi coat. I first spotted the jacket – fitted and fawn-spotted, with faux-fur cuffs – at Frieze Masters, not far from the £675,000 Triceratops skull, on someone with an international-school accent complaining about the boy she was seeing texting her too late into the night. Then again that afternoon, on someone fishing the asparagus out of a Bloody Mary at the Princess Royal in Notting Hill. And the following evening, at the Louis Vuitton apartment, on British ’s Julia Hobbs, holding court with the legendary Grace Coddington. Having declared it “the greatest spring jacket of all time” on her Substack back in April, Hobbs doubled down this week, adding in a new post, that “I get stopped on the street and asked where I got it more than any other piece I own.” (And she owns Prada coat.)

Much like Viktor Gichev’s and Conner Ives’s housecoats, the Bambi – and its ornately buttoned, faux-fur-trimmed, decorously patterned sisters – is part of a broader trend for eccentric, vintage-looking outerwear (though, in the case of Gichev’s and Ives’s designs, the fabrics are genuinely antique) that serve as an alternative to the mind-numbing blandness of, say, the greige funnel-neck trench coats that have dominated recent winters. Carelli’s founder, Anna Carels, agrees. “I don’t work with moodboards, but I was thinking about Upper East Side, jazz, old-world glamour,” she says of designing the jacket. “At first, I thought it might be too much – the print, the cuffs – but it’s an outfit maker.” And, of course, a runaway success. “The demand has been insane. And don’t get me wrong: there’s luck in being picked up by the right people at the right time, but it’s also been a lot of really hard work. I’ve been so focused on building the brand that I don’t have the time or energy to do much else”.

Though the Amsterdam-based designer had always dreamed of a career in fashion, her mother encouraged her to study economics instead – a decision that would prove useful when it came to running her own business. But it was perhaps her mum’s commitment to glamour – “the kind of person who’d pick me up from school in high heels and pony-hair coats” – that left the more lasting impression. Graduating into a job market decimated by Covid, Carels found work at a members’s club, where, surrounded by creatives, she eventually became a stylist and personal shopper, all the while sketching designs in the evenings. “But I was just so insecure, and never shared them,” she recalls. “What if people don’t like them?” It wasn’t until she became pregnant in 2024 that she found the confidence to take the plunge. “I thought, I have to pursue my dream. I have to do whatever it takes. Knowing that I was doing this for someone else gave me the power to just go for it.” She gave birth that October and launched Carelli three months later with a small collection of Penny Lane-style coats, followed by the Dolly – a leopard-print precursor to the Bambi – which sold out within an hour. “It went from zero to 100 in seconds,” she says. “With a baby.”

As well as seemingly everyone in west London, Dua Lipa, Peggy Gou and Olivia Dean have all been photographed in one or other of Carelli’s viral coats. “Olivia was the most thrilling, because, for me, she has so much taste,” Carels says. “She just has that New York vintage vibe that is spot on for the brand.” Such popularity, however, comes with its challenges, as I discovered when I first tried to track down the Bambi on a reverse image search, only to be confronted with hundreds of dupes. “Being copied is part of the game, and what can I do?” she says. “It would cost me so much in legal fees to fight.” (The giveaway, apparently, is in the buttons. “You can go to hundreds of suppliers, but you won’t be able to find them, because I designed them. The specific structure, the size, the sheen. That’s what makes the coats special and authentic.”) Still, Carels is determined to see the upside. “As much as I hate it, I take it as a compliment, because it means I’ve set a tone in fashion, which I couldn’t have dreamed of before.” And she knows there’s always more where that came from. “The solution to all this,” she adds, “is to just design even cooler stuff than I ever did before.”

Such as the Clement, a tailored paisley jacket fastened with three horn-like toggles, which launched as part of a party-season drop this week. “It’s the perfect jacket, and the velour is so beautiful at night,” Carels says – and while she concedes that it “could reach the same hype” as the Bambi, she is determined not to let her future designs become quite so commonplace. After all, when something becomes too ubiquitous, there is a risk of losing what made it feel special to begin with. “I’m wrestling with that all the time,” she says. “Striking the balance between making money and maintaining the soul of the brand. We’ve got to keep the bestsellers, but once new pieces have sold out, I won’t be restocking.”

There is, however, plenty more in the pipeline: dresses for Christmas, gloves, hats, belts and a fully fledged ready-to-wear collection in the spring. And to think that just a year and a half ago, it was all sketches on paper. What, then, would Carels tell the woman who, newborn in arms, decided to take that leap? “You’re exactly where you need to be,” she says, emphatically. “From the day I turned 16, I knew I wanted to have my own brand, and while everyone told me it was a bad idea, I had a gut feeling it was going to be alright. This is confirmation my instincts were correct. And don’t be so stressed, you’re not saving lives.”