Life and style'It's nothing to do with my father'
She's only 24, but already has her own Harrods boutique and counts Victoria Beckham among her fans. In her first interview, designer Jasmine Al Fayed talks about her life and family to Hadley FreemanThe ghost of Mrs Merton hangs pungently in the air as Jasmine Al Fayed and I take our seats in her favourite bar on Portobello Road. Ho hum, may as well get it over with: "So, Jasmine Al Fayed, how did an unknown, minimally trained 22-year-old convince Harrods not only to stock her clothes but also to give her a special boutique space?"
As Stella McCartney and Sophie Dahl would probably concur, having a famous surname in the fashion business can be a bit of a two-steps-forward-one-media-sneer-back scenario. In particular, it doesn't help when the only place your clothes are stocked is your father's store. So, Fayed, who is now 24, must be a little twitchy about charges of nepotis ..., I begin, but she interrupts before I finish the word: "No, never, because at the end of the day it's a family business and it's always been a part of my dream to put a piece of me in it. I've always been involved in it and, in a sense, groomed to, you know ... " she trails off. "It wasn't anything to do with nepotism; I don't know why people would say that." But can she not see the argument that most 22-year-olds would not be given a boutique space in Harrods? "Well, I mean, it's my home, so I want to do something that has me in it. It's my family." Which rather brings us back to the original question, but never mind.
Despite having been raised on the family's 226-acre estate in Surrey (unlike her father, she has a British passport), Fayed's accent is slightly europudding tinged with American inflections. She is the eldest of four children of her father's second marriage, after his first, to Samira Khashoggi, Dodi's mother, ended. Fayed's mother is Heini, a Finnish woman rarely seen in public. In fact, few of the Fayeds, other than Mohamed, are ever spotted: no falling out of West End night clubs or appearances on Celebrity Big Brother for these children of a multi-millionaire. Jasmine was briefly glimpsed in last month's Tatler, pictured at a party for Roberto Cavalli where, the magazine salivated curiously, "everyone was particularly interested in meeting [her]".
This is the first interview she has given and she's visibly nervous. She has refused to have her photo taken unless the Guardian lets her see the photos beforehand. We don't - "Not even for this?" asks her PR - so she sends in one of her own that, presumably, she has approved.
Although her paternal connections are marked on her pretty, shy face like a faded thumbprint, she has none of her father's blithe glibness when answering potentially tricky questions. Whereas he is prone to detailing enjoyably improbable theories, Fayed ducks away from awkward queries with uncomfortable generalisations and nervous brittleness. For example, it must have been very hard as a child to read so many negative comments about her father in the press? "Umm, I have to cast my mind back to those days," she hedges, although considering that the last negative comment I read about her father was in the 2005 edition of Who's Who ("a controversial figure ... persistently lied about his wealth ... "), she presumably doesn't have to cast her mind back too far. "You know, we were such a tight unit, my dad was never one to ... I don't know, the media always was kind of untrue ... no, not untrue, but to me he was always my dad and there are always two stories." But it's not just the media - don't most people have a pretty low regard for him, too? To this, she echoes her father, insisting that he has "hundreds and thousands of supporters who believe in him and I admire him as well. It's just a small percentage who are negative, the establishment." This is, perhaps, the same establishment who her father once described more colourfully as "the bastards who think they are members of the establishment".
But she has not inherited her father's hungry desperation to foist his various conspiracy theories into the briefest pause in conversation. Questions about her late half-brother Dodi are tentatively rebuffed: "I thought we were talking about fashion," she says, with a nervous fiddle of her diamante skull earring. Nor is she willing to comment on the Nazi-influenced fashion choices of the younger members of the family who might have one day been her half-in-laws. "Why do we keep coming back to this?" she asks plaintively.
Fayed nobly tries to keep conversation on her fashion, not her family, but the two are decidedly intertwined. She became interested in designing "after my dad acquired the store. It was a princess's paradise. I would wait for him to finish work by getting lost in the dresses." So, after starting a course in retail management at university in London, she decided to "carry the theory into the practical and jump straight in".
With the help of her "extremely supportive" parents, she launched her own label in October 2003 and named it, somewhat self-effacingly if not exactly self-deprecatingly, Jasmine di Milo. She decided to combine her name with that of the famous statue of Venus, the Roman goddess of love, because she's "very, like, a keen aesthete and that story is very important to me because she's the goddess of, umm, women and beauty". On a more personal level, Milo is also the nickname of her younger sister, Camilla, and also, when "the statue was found in the sea, nobody knew anything about her. She was untouched and unknown; you could really make of her what you wanted." So, you connected to the idea of making yourself totally in your own image without anybody else's preconceptions or prejudices? "Umm, yeah."
The clothes from her current collection, called Butterfly Effect, are best described with two words: multicoloured and short. No dress is complete without a thigh-high split, no denim is worthwhile without some fading effect. The quality is impressive, albeit at prices from £200 to £1,500. Fayed describes Roberto Cavalli, whose style is vaguely similar, as "a big mentor of mine". An American newspaper described it as "a magnet for rich, glamorous young women who travel widely and want to look good at all times".
Yet Fayed herself looks the antithesis of her collection's decidedly pretty style: she seems to be more of a high-maintenance 80s goth girl in her cropped black leggings and boots, a black corset with lacy top, diamante mismatched earrings and a Chloé bag. Would she wear her own clothes? Slight pause. "In my own interpretation, yes."
Since leaving university, Fayed has lived briefly in Paris to gather more fashion and music inspiration (she is a keen songwriter and describes her style as "soulful rock rather than rock rock"), and is currently living in a house down the road from her parents' Surrey estate and about to share a flat in Kensington with a friend.
Her boutique, di Milo, opened in 2003 and, with its smoke machines and fairy lights, looks a little like a Dubai disco stuffed with diamante-studded clothes from labels that Fayed likes. A belt will cost you about £100. Victoria Beckham is, allegedly, already a huge fan. Her PR told an American newspaper that Jasmine "imagined what it would be like to land in a country without your luggage and to buy everything you needed in one place". Personally, I'm struggling with the idea of buying my entire wardrobe from Harrods, but Fayed seems puzzled by my bemusement. Presumably the scenario is less tricky to envisage if you're the daughter of the owner. "Umm," she says, playing nervously with her cocktail. "Yeah."
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