Now that he’s free to do his own thing, he’s not wafting off into flights of expensive fancy. Although he has designed china for Wedgwood, costumed at least a dozen ballets and masterminded one of the best royal wedding dresses – for Princess Margaret’s daughter Sarah Armstrong-Jones in 1994 – his new venture is rooted in reality. Last autumn, he launched a range of bags: classic, discreet, but not boring, and under £300. If Sir Terence brought affordable furniture to the masses in the 1960s with Habitat, his second son does so with fashion.
‘There’s really no reason good design should cost more than bad,’ he says. Encouraged by the reception to his bag launch, he’s about to unleash a collection of dresses – priced from £160 to £350 and sold in Next – and they’re just what you’d expect: classy, flattering, timeless, in decent fabrics, including silk and high-quality viscose. And all of them have pockets. ‘I want them to be the friend in your wardrobe,’ he says.
Now 62, he remains Nordically good looking and decidedly un-podgy, despite being an accomplished cook. (He overcame the eating disorders by himself.) He works out every day with a trainer for an hour. I don’t recall ever seeing a photo of him not slim, and not well turned out in something similar to the white jeans and dark polo he’s wearing today, when we meet at his Fulham HQ. He has so many of those white jeans, mainly Levi’s, and so many of those jumpers, from Connolly, ‘it’s embarrassing. But at least I wear all my clothes. I never throw anything away. That’s what I’m trying to do when I design for women – so they can shop like men and wear their clothes for years.’
The next category he plans to launch after dresses is coats. ‘When people think, “I want a coat,” I want them to think, “I’ll go to Jasper,” same as they do with Max Mara if they have a million pounds.’
Of all the British talents that sparkled alongside him in the ’80s – such as BodyMap and John Flett (who died aged 27 in 1991) – Conran is, along with Vivienne Westwood, one of the last standing. But success has not come without a fight.
Despite the silver-spoon reputation, Conran’s childhood sounds borderline rackety. He was barely one when his parents separated. ‘At which point the fighting intensified and Sebastian and I lived with our mother.’
His godmother Mary Quant and her husband Alexander Plunkett-Greene would pick Jasper up in their Rolls-Royce and take him to fashionable restaurants; meanwhile Shirley and her sons kept moving to ever smaller houses, then flats, ‘until eventually Sebastian and I ended up in bunk beds’.
Shirley went on to become tremendously successful as women’s editor at The Daily Mail and The Observer, then authored Superwoman, a feminist bestseller, in 1975, and the ‘bonkbuster’ Lace in 1982, which was adapted into a miniseries. At this point, the downsizing ceased, and she acquired a place in Monaco. Sir Terence, meanwhile, remarried a year after his divorce.
(In all he had four marriages and five children: Sebastian and Jasper with his second wife, Shirley; Sophie, the homeware designer, Tom, the restaurateur, and Edmund with his third wife, Caroline.)
