Daily Front Row

2010 February 22

Sister, Sister

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Savannah and Sienna Miller
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(LONDON) Twenty8Twelve by s.miller designers Sienna and Savannah Miller have defied the odds to create a celebrity fashion line that has legs--and loads of reputable retail accounts. The Daily caught up with the sisters after their show. BY EMILY GYBEN

What's happening with this collection?
Savannah: It’s about a lot of different things, because we always have a melting pot of inspirations. We looked at the Blitz Kids, Kinky Gerlinky…
What's Kinky Gerlinky?
Savannah: Mad name, right? It was a club in Soho, one of the early nightclubs. We also looked at Adam and the Ants meets glam rock, and the ‘70s peace campaign around the Vietnam War. It's all about passion and individuality. We’re not reinventing the wheel, so it’s just a melting pot of color, inspiration, fabrication. We use things that will serve as little details here and there, strange little parts of silhouettes.
Sienna: It’s always kind of crazy, because we make commercial clothes that will eventually just end up being the things that we want to wear. It’s about all kinds of life, and often our inspiration is really about texture or color palettes. We are in a certain price bracket, so it makes more sense to do a presentation than a show because we’re not trying to break the mold.
How do you two work together, design-wise?
Sienna: It’s really tricky, because last season I was doing a play on Broadway and that took all my time. If I’m doing a film, I can come back and forth. But there are always two weeks at the beginning of each season where we go through mood boards and vibes and initial design processes, and then from there there’s Skype, there’s email…
You design via Skype?    
Sienna: Well, we do drawings and get them to each other. The amazing thing about working with my sister is that she can interpret my really horrible drawings. I’m not a designer, I never pretend to be, but I’m lucky enough to wear some amazing clothes through my work, so I know how things should fit and feel, and I have a sort of sense about what I think is cool. I bring more of that kind of thing, and then Sav—with her background in design at Saint Martins—can draw up my crazy ideas and add her own amazing ideas. We don’t fight. I suppose maybe that’s because there’s often a lot of distance between us. We really respect each other, and our aesthetics marry quite well.
Do you design what you want to wear?
Savannah: I guess that’s going to happen to some extent. We try not to do that, because we have a clear idea of who our customer is. Ultimately, though, we work that way because we’re women.