Fforme's New Designer, Frances Howie, on What's Next for the Minimalist Brand
When Frances Howie was starting out as a young designer, she worked as an assistant to Alber Elbaz, the legendary creative director of the French fashion house Lanvin. Elbaz liked to see her work in three dimensions, so once Howie had sketched a dress, he would send her down to the atelier to oversee the construction. But Howie spoke no French, and the artisans working on her designs spoke no English. The only way they could communicate was through the language of craft.
“You’re some young person who's come from God knows where, you don't speak French, you're not part of the institution, and you have to win them over in order to even keep your job,” says the New Zealand-born, London-educated Howie, smiling at the memory. “So it's a process of showing how skilled you are, to win their respect so that they'll actually help you to bring this thing to life. And I think that was very, very formative to me.”
Some two decades later, Howie is counting on her atelier skills to carry her through a new challenge as the incoming designer at Fforme, the buzzy minimalist label that launched to rapturous reviews in 2021. New fashion brands on the New York scene are often founded by their designers, but Fforme was launched by two businesswomen, entrepreneur Nina Khosla and fashion executive Laura Vazquez, who left to pursue other projects in 2023. Its first designer, Paul Helbers, impressed fashion insiders with his credentials (he’d worked at The Row, Maison Margiela, and Louis Vuitton, albeit in menswear) and his ability to create the kind of elegant, understated looks that people were just beginning to label “quiet luxury.” But the brand announced his exit after only two years, surprising watchers of the industry. Now, it’s on Howie to figure out how to make Fforme stand out in an increasingly crowded field.
Forme makes clothing for women with elevated taste and the budget to support it—it’s the kind of luxury that comes from being in the know, rather than from a logo. At a preview in her airy Soho showroom earlier this week, Howie was quick to point out that she isn’t interested in radically upending the formula.
“All I can do is what's authentically my expression of Fforme. And that is probably not going to be exactly the same [as it was before] because I'm not the same person,” she said. “I think when you get to know me, you'll realize I'm very good at making things. I'm very, very connected with the artisanal craftspeople that we work with. Maybe you could say that I'm kind of a geek for that. I feel very comfortable going over and opening that white dress and showing you what it looks like inside.”
And then, like a surgeon, she did. The white dress in question was a column made of subtly lustrous cream fabric, with thick fringe down the sides and across the bodice. Hanging in front of a window that showcased a 14th-floor view of downtown, it glowed in the city winter sunlight. Howie undid the back to showcase two layers of construction inside. “It's built a bit like a couture wedding dress,” she explained, adding that the fabric was developed at an Italian mill that she knew from her time at Lanvin. Getting them to work with her at Fforme, she said, was “a huge coup.”
“These fabrics are just for us,” she explained. “They're not things that other people have. All our makers and our tailors, all of it is in Italy. We are absolutely luxury in terms of the quality.” It was clear from the pride in her voice that she is, indeed, a geek for this stuff.
Next, she brought out a model wearing a black sleeveless ankle-length dress covered with 60 meters of frayed ribbon that looked almost like false eyelashes. As the model walked, the fringes fluttered in the breeze as if the dress was batting its lashes. “We have this kind of softness and this lightness of touch, which is really important to me,” Howie explained.
The model added a sharp coat. “This was a factory in Italy who are three generations of hand tailors—the grandfather, the son, and then the grandchild. They run a very small operation, which is almost like a Savile Row quality of hand-tailoring,” Howie said. It’s impossible for a larger luxury brand to work like this, she added, because the numbers don’t add up. “When you make a jacket like this by hand, they can really only make about 40 of these a day in production in total. It's so labor-intensive. And it's so detailed.”
The same kind of attention to detail came across in a trench coat with a pleated back that was built to be convertible—remove the top layer of the coat, and you have a sleeveless dress. You could see it, too, in fabulous fringed trousers, the hair running down the sides at once referencing track pants and ponies.
This emphasis on quality and rarity is Howie’s bet for how Fforme can break through the noise of the luxury market. “What I think we're going to succeed with is this idea of having a smaller and more intimate business. We kind of have to play on that. We are an underdog.”
Nina Khosla, the brand’s co-founder, agrees. “One of the things that has always been most important to me is building a brand based on exceptional quality—using the best fabrics and the best manufacturers. I think this true sense of luxury has really resonated with the fashion industry,” she said.
Khosla has a background in startups and grew up in Silicon Valley. (Her father is Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla.) “I’m an avid shopper and consumer of luxury fashion, so I really think of myself as the customer, at least at the start,” she explained. “As our business grows, our consumer is evolving too. We want to create clothes that fit seamlessly into the life of a cultured and intelligent woman.”
It might be unusual for an emerging fashion brand to switch designers two years in, but it’s less of a surprise when a startup makes a pivot. “I wanted to put a woman at the helm of the brand—someone who really understands the needs of the women that we want to dress,” Khosla said. “And we saw Frances’ work and were just blown away by her talent.”
The brand’s shift to a more female-centric point of view is stamped quite literally on Howie’s debut collection, which includes several pieces with an actual woman’s face and body printed on them. But it will also be felt in the way the company is run. Howie has two children, and she praised her former employer, Stella McCartney, for creating a workplace that was welcoming to moms—a relative rarity in the fashion industry. “I think the only way that I could have had two was that I worked within this company in London that was very supportive of women. I've never felt personally that I was in any way hindered from being a woman in this industry. But I think I'm an absolute minority,” she said. At Fforme, she hopes to establish a similarly welcoming environment.
Howie credits motherhood with keeping her grounded. “I find it very rewarding that I have this other aspect of my life, because I don't just obsess over [work] for 24 hours a day. It's really good for your brain. The sanity that comes from that is healthy.”
But for her, as with all things, it really comes back to skill. “If you are juggling raising children and a career like this, ultimately you’ve already worked out how to multitask about a million things. And the efficiency that I find in that is remarkable. In design teams, the women I've worked with who have children are just running at a different speed. They just get straight to the point and they're very professional and then they go home at six and they have a life.” She's describing a vision of a lifestyle that appeals to so many ambitious women, whether or not they’re mothers—a world where you can have the freedom to excel at what you do and still live a fully-realized life. If Fforme can dress them in an impeccably cut coat while they’re doing it, so much the better.
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