SOPHIE HICKS ARCHITECTS

Sophie’s father, Richard Hicks, had a fruit distribution business; her mother, Joan, had been a successful model in the 1950s who worked with the photographers Norman Parkinson and John French. Growing up in Kensington, west London, Sophie was enmeshed in globally influential youth cultures. “Kensington High Street was amazing, the King’s Road was amazing. There was no fast fashion in the 1970s, so you either saved up for something that might cost an astronomical sum, like Åí40, or you went to Kensington Market, which was full of people with little stands who bought stuff, cut it up, restitched it on their dining room table. It was very exciting.”

In 1978, Harpers & Queen magazine hit on the idea of producing an issue guestedited by teenagers, and Sophie, then 17 – having just left boarding school in Surrey – was one of its recruits. She stayed
at Harpers & Queen, taken on by the editor, Willie Landels, for its Shopping Bazaar pages, before moving to British Vogue as Grace Coddington’s assistant. “I learned a lot from Grace,” Sophie says. “She was so precise and refined.” Before long, Mark Boxer, then editing Tatler, poached her. It was her big break. At Tatler, a magazine she remembers as unusually willing to take risks, she worked with photographers including Arthur Elgort, Paolo Roversi, Peter Lindbergh, Bruce Weber and David Bailey, building a reputation for pictures that were more adventurous than conventional society-magazine fashion images.

By the mid-1980s, Sophie found herself tiring of the cycle of fashion. “I thought, I’d love to do something I can do forever, where I don’t have a sell-by date.” She toyed with the idea of working in film, and through her friend Dado Ruspoli, a central inspiration behind Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, she secured a meeting with the Italian director. She had hoped to land a job as an assistant, but Fellini announced his plans to adapt Kafka’s Amerika with her as the 16-year-old male protagonist. (The money didn’t materialise, but she does make a brief appearance in 1987’s Intervista.)

Instead, she moved to Paris to style photographs for Azzedine Alaïa, who she had met when she attended one of the first shows he staged in his apartment on the rue de Bellechasse. The audience, crammed into corridors on little gold chairs, waited for hours before Janice Dickinson’s heel announced the start. “Out came these incredible clothes on these incredible models. He’d got these girls to get on planes at their own expense – he didn’t have money. The clothes were so good they just wanted to be part of this new birth of something.” She spent a couple of years working with Alaïa before returning to London in 1987, having met her future husband.

Architecture had been an interest since Sophie had encountered the Roman temple complex at Baalbek on a trip to Lebanon when she was 13, and the thought of joining the profession had even led her to struggle through A-level maths. But she was 27 when she finally went for her interview at the radical Architectural Association, dressed in top-to-toe Alaïa. “I said, ‘I am awfully sorry, I don’t have a portfolio, but I do have my fashion show sketchbooks. This is Versace, this is Alaïa, this is Miyake. And I’m sorry a lot of them don’t have heads or feet, as I didn’t have time because the models were moving so fast.’ They looked at me as if I was a Martian.”

Half the jury thought she wouldn’t last five minutes, but after much debate they offered her a place. “Having achieved a lot in fashion, to decide to navigate the AA for a full five years is completely admirable,” Nigel Coates says. “That’s somebody who knows what they want.” Sophie was conscious of not wanting to stand out. She remained guarded about her professional history. “I’m quite good at disguise.” In her third year she began receiving commissions and decided to set up a firm of her own.

A figure of arresting androgynous beauty, Sophie has frequently found herself in front of the camera. Sporting her habitual short hair, masculine wardrobe and makeup- free face, she featured on a 1984 i-D magazine cover, shot by David Bailey, one eye patched with gaffer tape. She had had her hair cut short at nine. “Before then I’d had these terrible curtains of long hair with a fringe, and I’d always felt horrible. But then when I cut it everybody thought I was a boy, and I didn’t like that.”

She went through years of wearing pretty dresses – “and I looked OK” – but she was 19 before she found a look she was comfortable with. The unlikely setting was the marriage of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer in 1981. Sophie’s then boyfriend, the journalist – and later publisher – Nicholas Coleridge, was due to cover proceedings for the London Evening Standard, and Sophie, having noticed that his invitation made reference to a driver, decided to play the part. George Christie, who ran Glyndebourne opera house, was a family friend, and she knew he owned a chauffeur’s cap. “When George was pissed, he used to say to his wife, Mary, ‘You get in the back. I’ll sit in the front with the cap on and they won’t stop us.’ So I borrowed George’s cap and one of Nick’s suits, grey flannel from the Fulham Road boutique Piero de Monzi. I had a yellow Daihatsu jeep with an open top, and ours was one of the first vehicles to go down the Mall early in the morning. The crowds had been sleeping there all night and began cheering like crazy. Afterwards we ended up at a party, and everybody thought this look of mine was great. I thought, Maybe a man’s suit is OK.”