The singular vision of Lucinda Chambers, fashion director of British Vogue

You might imagine that the fashion director of British Vogue would have a walk-in wardrobe filled with dresses, coats, trousers, skirts and tops all carefully catalogued.

But while Lucinda Chambers's wardrobe is a tightly packed rainbow of blues, greens, reds, pinks (and a very little fashion-editor black), it is surprisingly modest. It really is a cupboard, in a corner of her bedroom. There is nothing walk-in about it.

Her collection of earrings, for which she says she has a particular weakness, is kept in a basket, all jangled up together. She does, however, have a small en-suite bathroom a few steps down from her bedroom, where she keeps her collection of necklaces, hanging from hooks like strands of boiled sweets. Most of them are by the Italian fashion house Marni, with which Chambers has a long-standing creative relationship.

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It is not until you go through the door that leads from the sunken bathroom on to a tiny roof-top extension that you realise Chambers's serious passion is textiles. It is here that she keeps a collection of fabrics that has been a lifetime in the making.

'I started collecting fabrics when I was really young, maybe 12 or 13. I was always cutting out, making bags or trousers and stuff for my room,' she recalls. She still buys any fabric that catches her eye, scouring Portobello Market religiously every Friday morning.

'I don't look for anything specific,' she says. 'I don't have things that go together, nothing matches and I'm quite catholic in my tastes. I like ethnic mixed with shabby English with a bit of Scandinavian and kitsch all together.' She sews now and again using her old Singer sewing machine, although it's more a case of altering things, and cutting up clothes and rearranging them.

The whole house in west London is crammed with layer upon layer of visual delights - things that have caught Chambers's eye over the years. Photographs and paintings lead your eye along the hallway and up the stairs - an abstract painting by her friend the textile designer Georgina von Etzdorf; a recently purchased iPad painting by Charlotte Faber, which she says is 'just beautiful and evocative of the brilliance of the English countryside on a rainy day', alongside photographs by Bruce Weber and other fashion photographers, and a portrait of her three sons taken by the eldest of them, the photographer Toby Knott, given to her as a birthday present.

'I'm very acquisitive and have been since I was a child,' Chambers says. 'My mother figured out that if we went anywhere for the day or on holiday, I had to bring something back. It could have been a lollipop stick with a joke on it, but I had to bring something back that reminded me of that day.'

She is sitting in her downstairs living-room (there is a grander one upstairs), dressed in boho harem trousers with flat sandals. She has pale green eyes, smooth skin (she regularly sees the facialist Vaishaly), a lean physique (she does yoga and says she is 'good at breathing'), and has regular massages. This support system, which she has built up over the years, also includes her goddaughter Lettie, who is the only person she trusts to do her make-up.

The room is comfortable with a bold colour scheme, and is filled with souvenirs of her endless travels for fashion shoots. 'Mario [Testino] always builds in shopping hours,' she says. 'It's probably why we've lasted so long. He's got amazing taste. Anything he touches, if he rejects it, I buy it because it's like he almost liked it - it's got to be good enough!'

Lucinda Chambers was born in 1959 in Notting Hill, west London. 'My mother was married very young, had my sister, who is 10 years older than me, and then left her husband and married my father.'

Her mother, Anne, hadn't had a happy childhood. 'She didn't get on with her parents at all. She had a sister who died, and I think the sister was the absolute chosen one, so my mother felt very unloved. I remember her saying there wasn't even a pair of scissors in the house. There was nothing to do. She always said she felt like the cuckoo in the nest. She was very bright, but had no formal education. She used to do the Times crossword in seven minutes, so she knew she wasn't going gaga. She was determined we should grow up knowing where we were in the world.'

As children, Lucinda and her brother, Rourden, 18 months her senior, moved frequently, always around Knightsbridge and South Kensington. 'We never moved off page 58 of the A-Z between Brompton Oratory and Harrods,' Chambers says. Her mother would take on a property, decorate it single-handedly and sell it at a profit. It was how the children's school fees were paid.

At home they would sew together. 'First of all we made dollies' clothes; we made theatres out of cornflakes packets. My brother loved that as well. He could sew. My brother could do embroideries that were just sensational, like petit point.'

Anne also did jobs for pin money. 'Come June she would make all the school uniforms for [the local school] Falkner House, which has those blue cloaks with Wee Willie Winkie hats,' Chambers remembers fondly. 'I would sew on all the buttons and the whole house was covered in blue felt.'

They didn't have money for holidays or clothes, but Anne would find a way for the children to be well turned out. 'We would go to Harrods and I would try everything on and she would have a tape measure in her pocket, then we'd go home and she would make me a snakeskin tunic.' She remembers wearing it with bright red patent-leather shoes.

Anne died in 2008, aged 83, in the convent where she had been living. 'I was in our house in France when I found out she was incredibly ill, and that day I had been making a mosaic table out of all the plates my children had broken (all my plates are patterned because I have a matching phobia) and I was grouting them with a lollipop stick. And I remember I thought, this is where I'm happiest, and this is what I got from her, this ability to make something out of nothing. That's what she passed on to me.'

Chambers had planned to go to secretarial college ('I had no ambitions at all'). But then her father left, and there was no money to pay for the course, so her mother decided they should both go to art college because they could get a grant. At 58, her mother enrolled at the London College of Printing to do book binding. (She went on to be a world expert in the subject, giving lectures and writing books.) Lucinda went to Hornsey College of Art to do a foundation course. She hated it because she was more interested in fashion, which was frowned upon as frivolous, and spent her time in the plastics department making jewellery to sell - first to friends and then to shops.

When she left in 1979, she was living in a London squat, working as a sales assistant at Topshop, making costumes for a theatre in Edinburgh, and sewing her own clothes out of furnishing fabrics. She would go to a hairdressing salon on Walton Street, where trainee stylists would experiment on her.

'I had very weird hair - all multicoloured,' she says. And it was in all her DIY weirdness that a young photographer, Mario Testino, spotted her. 'I had been living in London for a few years and was just starting out as a photographer,' Testino says. 'One day I was on the top deck of a bus going down Regent Street when I saw a girl who had quite a particular, almost freaky look with shocking bleached blond hair. It was a particularly arresting vision, especially for my South American eyes.'

A short time later he got a call from the Ellis Helen salon to photograph their latest styles. 'I was living and working in my studio in the old Charing Cross Hospital, and when the models came to be photographed, in walked Lucinda Chambers, the girl I had seen from the top of the bus.' It was, he says, kismet. They became friends and have been working together ever since.

In 1980 Chambers plucked up the courage to ring Vogue to see if there were any jobs. A pair of her earrings had made it into the pages of a magazine, and she realised that she wanted to work in that world. She managed to land a lowly job typing out petty cash receipts. One lunchtime she was having a sneaky cigarette at her desk when her boss returned unexpectedly. Chambers threw her cigarette over the partition, and it landed on the editor's assistant's desk. She thought it was funny and got Chambers an interview with the editor, Beatrix Miller. Chambers worked with Miller for three years before becoming an assistant to the fashion director, Grace Coddington.

'It was the time when everybody wore Chanel and I wore vintage and homemade clothes, and I did feel very out of the loop,' Chambers says. She was a terrible assistant. 'I hated sending clothes back. I liked calling them in but would just shove them all in the cupboard. I remember once Liz Tilberis [then the fashion editor] opened the cupboard and everything fell out on top of her. She said, "Will that f***ing girl send some clothes back?"'

Testino recalls going to meet her at Vogue. 'I had no money and I forced her to share her luncheon vouchers with me,' he says. 'She would say to me that one can get away with anything in a fashion picture as long as the girl looks beautiful, and that left a lasting impact.' (Their first story together, in the early 1980s, was a single page that Chambers wrote about vintage clothing, illustrated with lots of postage-stamp-sized pictures. They worked on the story for more than a month.)

Chambers's first Vogue shoots were for the beauty pages, after she was moved to work for the beauty editor, Felicity Clark. She was allowed to do all the shoots, going to New York every two weeks to work with different photographers and make-up artists.

'Beauty is a hard thing,' she says. 'I'm really grateful for that. I'm not a make-up wearer myself but I love make-up and I loved doing beauty shoots - it was such good training.'

Then one day, Miller asked Chambers to do a main fashion shoot. 'She said, "Go anywhere, choose anybody."'

So Chambers rang up Patrick Demarchelier, with whom she had worked as an assistant (she thought he was easygoing enough to take a punt on her) and asked if he would do a shoot with her. 'The last words Beatrix Miller said were, "And none of your bloody hats, darling," because I used to put hats on everything,' she says. Of course when Chambers found a series of felt hats in faded colours she couldn't resist using them. 'I remember coming back on the plane thinking, Why did I do that?' She showed the images to Grace Coddington, who took them in to show Miller and told her they were really good. 'Talk about saved bacon!' Chambers says, laughing. 'I thought I was going to get fired.'

In 1985 British Elle was launched by Sally Brampton, who asked Chambers to join her.

'I went from being an assistant to being a fashion director,' she says. 'That jump was incredible. I didn't feel ready for it but I didn't feel I'd be a failure, either, and Sally was very opinionated. Elle was new so we were making it up as we went along.'

For her first trip she took the photographer Herb Ritts to Morocco and made him stay at Club Med, sharing a room with the hairdresser. 'Elle had such a joie de vivre and it was very experimental. Anna Wintour was at British Vogue [she had taken over from Beatrix Miller] and she had a very clear vision of what Vogue was going to be like so we scooped up a lot of its old photographers.' When Wintour left to go to American Vogue in 1987, Liz Tilberis was made the editor and asked Chambers to go back as her fashion editor.

Her first long-haul trip was to Ladakh in the far north of India. 'It was totally inaccessible,' she says. 'I took Patrick Demarchelier and Cindy Crawford, and we lived in tents for two weeks. We didn't wash or shower - what did I know?' Twenty-five years later she is still embarking on impossible adventures. 'I am incredibly driven, incredibly hard-working,' she says. 'I have a huge sense of responsibility to who I work for - I'll do anything for them. But I don't feel ambitious. I don't feel I have to be up there - and I don't feel I am.'

When Alexandra Shulman became the editor of Vogue in 1992, she offered Chambers the position of fashion director and they have a working relationship that is almost as enduring as that of her old boss Grace Coddington and Anna Wintour in New York. But experience has not dulled her creative spirit. She recently did a story in Antwerp with Testino on Arizona Muse and Freja Beha Erichsen and made headdresses out of tea towels. 'They looked like Flemish portraits,' she says. 'The make-up was really powerful and they looked really still and odd. I remember thinking, "These are beautiful, but Alex is not going to like them." Actually it's one of her favourite shoots. I love her broadmindedness. She sees the point of a lot of different things.'

The day before we met, Chambers was photographing Kate Moss for a secret project. It turned out to be for the closing ceremony of the Olympics . 'Kim Gavin, the director of the closing ceremony, approached Vogue in February with the idea that he wanted to celebrate British fashion,' Chambers says. It involved commissioning nine designers to create pieces for the country's most famous models, including Moss, Lily Cole and Naomi Campbell for a fashion shoot come to life. 'We all went out to have a look at the stadium in daylight and it felt not nearly as intimidating as I had thought, but when the night fell, it was amazing, the sheer scale and the crowd and the roar.'

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Photographs of the models for September Vogue were taken by Nick Knight, who has worked with Chambers since the 1980s. 'Nick seemed an obvious choice,' she says. 'He's British and he loves anything different and a challenge. Which it was.' The whole process, from the fittings to the event backstage, was also documented - for Vogue's iPad app - by Toby Knott.

Supermodels at the Olympics Closing Ceremony. Photo: Reuters

Knott, 24, is Chambers's son from her relationship with the photographer Kim Knott; Theo, 19, and Gabriel, 14, are her sons with her husband, Simon Crow, a radio producer. They live in Shepherd's Bush, in a house that Chambers bought from the proceeds of selling her first flat. 'When Simon and I met, we liked this area. I suppose I never want to move because we moved so much as a child. Also the children, children hate change. So we've been here for a long time.'

Chambers confesses to having been an absent mother. Her job involves spending almost two months twice a year at the shows in Milan, Paris and New York. And then there are the far-flung locations. 'Simon has always been a brilliant father. He was always here, cooked for them, did the school run… very difficult. Simon is better than me because he cooks.' She recalls days when she would look after the children and forget to feed them. 'It is a strange life,' she says. 'When I was in my 40s or my 30s, I would always say to my husband and my boys, "I am back and I'm not going again." But I have realised that this is it. It is what I do, and I go away a lot.'

When she first joined Vogue, fashion magazines were a far less commercial world than they are today. 'We had Grace Coddington and Liz Tilberis and they were much more in their imagination. Grace would go and look at a Matisse book and say, "Oh, my God, look at these colours!" Now it has shifted; advertising comes into it and there is so much stuff out there that you've got to get into the magazine.'

Her own inspiration, she says, can come from anywhere. She recently shot a story with the photographer Josh Olins, for which she took her favourite model, Guinevere Van Seenus, to a modernist house in Sweden. When she talks about the story behind the shoot, she doesn't mention the clothes at all. It's about a mood, an atmosphere.

'I said, "So we've come to this house and you are a bit of a recluse. You've come to think about whether you are going to divorce your husband or not." With Guinevere she will make a little expression, a turn of the head and that's when I think I'm the luckiest person in the world because you can take a really simple idea like that and she runs away with it.'

For Chambers a successful fashion shoot is one in which the main character - whether she is a model or, as is increasingly the case, a celebrity - looks totally believable. 'It has to have a heart and a soul,' she says. Asked what her favourite shoot is, she will say she hasn't done it yet. 'I think what I really like is when everything absolutely comes together; the location, the girl, the clothes.'

Surprisingly, Chambers has not published a book as some of her contemporaries have done. 'A copy of Vogue has never come through this door,' she says. 'If I see somebody on the Tube reading it, I completely freak out. I don't keep any of my own work - not even the odd Polaroid. Once it's over, for me it's over, and I'm on to the next thing.'

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