Precisely two days before I speak to Philipp Plein there is a break-in at the designer’s store on London’s New Bond Street. Thieves smashed the doors and reportedly stole thousands of pounds’ worth of stock. In response, Plein posted a CCTV video of the robbery on his Instagram feed and a photo of the damage captioned, “Last night my store on New Bond Street in London got robbed! They could have robbed Cartier next door but they preferred obviously PP... fan love $.”
What’s more, Plein also asked his PR company to issue a press release with all the details and pictures of the break-in – a response that, to many, might seem bizarre but is typical behaviour on Planet Plein. “What can you do in this kind of situation? You can sit around and cry that they destroyed your door and stole your stock or you can make something good out of it,” Plein tells me. “That’s characteristic of the brand I’ve built. You either say the glass is half empty or the glass is half full. And I prefer to say the glass is half full.”
This penchant for the unorthodox is what has, over the past decade, come to set the German designer – who spends the majority of his time at his home in Lucerne, Switzerland – apart from his peers. “Believe me, the fashion world was against us from the start,” he says bluntly. “I have experienced all of it before. When I got to boarding school as a teenager I had long hair when all the guys had short hair and wore cargo pants and polo shirts. I tried to fit in, but after a few months I realised that wasn’t me and that I didn’t have to fit into a system I didn’t support. That’s how I handle my business now I’m in the fashion industry.”
It’s a strategy that, thus far, has worked incredibly well. Having launched his eponymous high fashion clothing label in 2008, Plein now has more than 120 stores globally and last year reported a turnover of approximately £230 million. His brand portfolio now comprises four labels: Philipp Plein, Plein Sport, Plein Kids and, most recently, Billionaire Couture. At a time when many fashion brands are wobbling, Plein is winning.
It’s in part thanks to the legion of superfans the designer has collected over the years, many of whom you’ll find at his high-octane fashion shows. I have sat in the front row for some of these and each one has topped the spectacle of the last. I’ve witnessed car chases on the catwalk. I’ve seen a live performance from the Harlem Globetrotters and I’ve seen supermodels slink around in fountains filled with bottles of the label’s own-brand Champagne (make that “Champlein”) in the garden of his Cannes villa. I’ve sat behind Tiffany Trump, next to Paris Hilton and seen Lil Wayne storm off stage during his performance after the fashion crowd wasn’t responsive enough for his liking. With thousands in attendance on specially constructed bleachers, these shows are more rock concert than fashion presentation.
The most interesting thing about said shows is that they’re never just attended by the press, but also by Plein’s (inordinately wealthy) clients, all of whom come dressed head to toe in the brand’s exotic-skin jackets, ripped jeans and Swarovski crystal-encrusted dresses. They’re not only there because they love Plein’s clothes, but also because they’ve bought in wholesale to the seductive image his shows present: a bombastic and boisterous lifestyle that Plein clearly enjoys (see his personal Instagram account for proof). “I live the brand. I have to be the brand. If I didn’t do it, I wouldn’t be successful,” he says. “The difference between Philipp Plein and lots of other brands is that you can still see the person behind it. It feels authentic.”
All of this is even more impressive when you consider this isn’t the career Plein imagined for himself. At 22, he was selling luxury dog beds, dropping out of law school as the orders started rolling in on his way to making his first million. As his furniture business grew, he looked for ways to attract people to his stand at trade fairs, adorning it with crystallised cushions and accessories to catch buyers’ eyes. It was a customised army jacket he studded with crystals that turned him fully on to fashion – when the jacket started accruing more orders than the clothes rack it was designed to sell. “I learnt how hard it is to sell a chair and how easy it is to sell a jacket,” he says, laughing. “People always ask me, ‘Why is Plein so bling?’ This was our way to be relevant, to stand out. Call it bling. Call it whatever you want. We created product that was irreplaceable.”
This hits to the heart of Plein’s success: he understands that to have a voice in an oversaturated market, you need to find your customer and, most importantly, give them what they want, when they want it. Does he have advice for men who might want to achieve what he has? “Never get comfortable,” he says. “If you start to get comfortable, you risk losing everything. You need to have discipline to be successful and stay successful.”
And it’s a path on which Plein intends to stay. Over the next couple of years he’s to design the “official uniforms” for AS Monaco FC (a new partnership), in addition to opening new stores in Las Vegas, Madrid, Geneva, plus two new Billionaire Couture outposts in Paris and Monte Carlo. There are also restaurants and clubs on the horizon and that’s before you get to his first fragrance. What’s more, the ground has just been broken on his new 40,000-square-foot Greco-Roman mansion in LA.
Of all of this, what is his proudest achievement? “I don’t have rich parents. I don’t have investors. I don’t have credit from a bank,” he says. “This is what I’m really proud of. I have stayed independent and built all this with my own hands without the help of anybody.”
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why Philipp Plein is GQ’s Brand Of The Year 2018.
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