Make with Notion 2025: Design for Better Living - From Couture to Uniqlo (Clare Waight Keller)

Clare Waight Keller’s career arc—from Calvin Klein’s early-’90s minimalism and controversy-driven branding, through Ralph Lauren’s luxury menswear—lands in a central idea at Uniqlo: mass-market clothing can still be designed with the rigor of a fashion house, but the trade-offs shift from runway impact to everyday function.

At Calvin Klein, Waight Keller joined in 1993 as the brand pivoted toward the “heroine chic” and waif era that helped define 1990s minimalism. The work wasn’t just aesthetic; it was branding strategy. Calvin Klein’s designer jeans and underwear were treated as commodities that could be made “cool and super desirable,” and controversy became a deliberate marketing engine—most notably through the Brooke Shields campaign, which was banned yet amplified attention. She also points to CK1 perfume and its street-casting approach, using downtown New York imagery that broke with luxury’s elitist tone. The lesson she carries forward is that strong branding can become recognizable even without visible logos—like the Coca-Cola bottle’s shape.

Ralph Lauren offered a different model: a luxury “startup within a giant corporation,” with a tiny team working directly with Ralph Lauren himself. Waight Keller describes long, hands-on sessions focused on fabrics, color, and concepts, and emphasizes how creative freedom still had to stay inside each house’s aesthetic DNA. That framework shaped her view of craft and training. She specialized early, then built technical knitwear expertise at the Royal College of Art—industrialized knitting with machine programming—giving her a rare skill set. Craft, she says, is not just making; it’s understanding how to cut, knit, and industrialize materials, then using that knowledge to experiment within constraints.

Her move to European houses and later to Uniqlo introduces the biggest shift in design priorities. At Uniqlo, she trades away certain luxury signals—no sequins or embroidered dresses—because they don’t match the brand’s language or values. In return, she gains a scale and a feedback loop she finds deeply rewarding: people who once admired her couture from afar now buy multiple pieces and wear them daily.

The balancing act at Uniqlo is explicit. Price sets limits, but the more frequent tension is function versus pure aesthetic. She gives an example of a coat detail—extra pockets and zip styling—that looked good but risked irritating wearers. The founder’s question boiled down to whether a global customer would find the feature annoying or love it, leading to a tweak rather than a full removal. She also describes a Japanese meeting culture of “thinking deeply,” where decisions may take weeks.

Designing for regions adds another layer. Luxury brands often design for runway messaging; Uniqlo designs for what people wear every day, adjusting for climate and fit across Southeast Asia, Europe, and beyond. She even cites data analysis of global body-shape distributions, noting how immigration patterns can make American fits resemble Asian ones.

Finally, she frames her creative forecasting as a puzzle solved through instinct plus cultural signals—street style, younger generations, and the arts—while planning 18 months ahead. A Uniqlo hoodie and sweatpant success illustrates the method: a modern fabric choice and a relaxed silhouette with structure helped the product sell out repeatedly. She believes fashion cycles return across roughly 25 years, reinforced by generational nostalgia, and names Armani and Ralph Lauren as examples of designers who ride waves by staying true to a vision until the timing comes back around.