While the Tories are in freefall, one former first couple are bucking the trend. Samantha Cameron, the designer and founder of the fashion brand Cefinn and wife of the former prime minister David Cameron, is about to open her first bricks-and-mortar store. The Belgravia boutique puts her back in the public eye, just as the role of foreign secretary has returned her husband to the frontline of politics.
Cefinn steers a course between garden-party nostalgia and modern life. Its sleek long floral dresses are aimed at a well-to-do customer who has taken half a day off work to be at a school sports day but needs to be back at the office to lead a meeting by 2pm.
The Elizabeth Street store in central London is a significant marker for Cefinn, which expanded its customer base by 23% last year. But there is a measure of irony in the post-Brexit trading conditions which Cefinn, along with many other small businesses, continues to battle with. Cameron, who in 2021 told BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour that Brexit had made business survival “challenging and difficult”, says that “supply chain disruption continues to cause problems. There have been many moments when we have had to adapt and pivot to survive. This is not an easy time for many of our customers, and inflation has really impacted us as a business.
“Having a store allows us to meet our customers, to hear their feedback, to see what the collection looks like on different body shapes and sizes and different colourings. It is a small space, so it is intimate and friendly, with big changing rooms and great lighting so that hopefully it feels like a positive experience.”
Cameron took a pattern-cutting course during her husband’s second term in office and launched Cefinn just three months after his resignation in 2016. As a result, Cefinn is inextricably linked with her much-discussed Downing Street wardrobe. But Cameron insists Cefinn is “not just about me”. The name is an amalgam of her children’s names. “It is not named after me, which is something I felt strongly about. It is about all the women who work here with me, women who work really hard as well as having busy diaries outside work.”
Cameron said when she launched Cefinn that after the Downing Street years: “It’s Dave’s turn to support me.” She says now that “he’s always been very supportive, actually – I’ve always worked and it’s always been relatively even. Things are simpler now, because I don’t have any informal or formal commitments in his [foreign secretary] role, and our children are older. One has left for uni, so it’s just two teenagers at home and they are quite independent.”
She says being in Downing Street changed her own style and helped shape the brand. “I was a much more minimal dresser at the beginning, but I was lucky to get to wear lots of fabulous British designers like Erdem, Christopher Kane and Roksanda, and that introduced me to the power of colour and of print.” These days her style ranges from “days when I want to wear a simple black leather skirt and cream jumper, and days when I want to wear a really pretty dress”.
Public scrutiny also “made me quite obsessed with clothes that won’t let you down. It was awful when I’d leave the house feeling like I looked fine, and get back at the end of the day and look in the mirror and I was a crumpled mess. So I care a lot about things that travel well, and details like poppers to keep your bra strap in place, and stitching down the buttons of a shirt dress and putting a zip in the side so that nothing gapes.” One high-profile customer “works in television and likes to run into work, and she runs with a Cefinn dress rolled into her rucksack and then she can put it on and be on television and it doesn’t need ironing.”