Never has the maxim that behind every great man there's a great woman, been more true than in the case of Joseph - the British brand with 99 international outposts, which is enjoying a renaissance at the hands of three clued-in women.

 

Fittingly emblematic of the international appeal of the brand, this holy trinity of females is made up of an Italian, a Parisienne and a Brit who hails from Sunderland. Together they have brought Joseph, which is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, back from the brink of mediocrity and restored it to the upper echelons of cool that it enjoyed during its heyday during the '80s and '90s.

 

Moroccan-born Joseph Ettedgui had arrived in London in 1960 with his brother Meurice and opened a hairdressing salon on the Kings Road. He had an eye for fashion and a knack for giving women what they wanted. He started to display knitwear from designers he admired - Kenzo and Alaïa in particular - and this was such a popular move that he opened his first shop on Sloane Street in 1972, designed by Norman Foster.

 

Joseph, with its monochrome leanings, became a mecca for the style minded. A place where they could hang out and shop for their Fashion Week wardrobes. The empire grew to include fragrance and restaurants but, in 1999, Ettedgui sold 50 per cent of the company to French investors. In 2005, Japanese clothing label Onward Kashiyama (which also owns Jil Sander), purchased the entire company. Shifting agendas and priorities during this time meant that the brand lost its focus and the stores lost their magic.

 

Italian management consultant Sara Ferrero is the mastermind behind Joseph's return to relevance. Interestingly, this is only the second fashion job for London-based Ferrero - after six years as a management consultant for McKinsey & Company she was tapped to take over at Furla where, in less than five years, she tripled the ailing accessory brand's retail figures.

 

But, as an Italian, she says she was aware of fashion from an early age. "In Italy, unfortunately, we don't wear school uniforms. So from the age of three, there is a competition between the little kids for who dresses in the best way, which is horrendous! And my mother's Australian and she didn't dress me up enough. I ended
up being the ugly duckling. You grow up looking at the way people dress, not in an obsessive way, but it is part of the way that people live, so you grow with this thing about clothes, about the way you're dressing. Especially in the period where I grew up, where fashion in Italy was really the leader in the market."

 

When I meet her at Joseph's South Kensington showroom, Ferrero has left all traces of the ugly duckling behind her. She is all sleek blow-dried hair, intelligent eyes and lean limbs dressed in black trousers, a plain white T-shirt and a black sleeveless blazer. It's not complicated but it's undeniably chic.

 

With Furla's impressive turnaround on her track record, she joined the Joseph team in May 2008 and was charged with overhauling the entire operation. "I remember when I lived in London in the early '90s, Joseph was the coolest place to shop. Not only was Joseph creating amazing stores, but you could eat there, you could hang out there. He developed that whole lifestyle approach to a concept store long before Colette or 10 Corso Como," she reminisces.

 

"I had three phases to my plan. The first was to bring back that amazing curation that Joseph was known for. For this, we hired Alain Snege, who used to be a buyer at Colette. He really was the first instigator of change and the only person that I hired when I started, I really wanted to find someone that had a little bit of that Joseph magic."

 

Next in Ferrero's strategy was to make sure that the Joseph shops reflected what the brand is all about. This meant refurbishing key stores in London and Paris. "They had become quite safe," she says. "So we re-energised them so that the Joseph customer could go into all of the shops and have a different experience in each one. They sell different collections so that they don't compete with each other. Bond Street, for example, is where we show off the younger designers like Alexander Wang or Isabel Marant, but Fulham Road is where to find the more established designers like Givenchy and Lanvin."

 

The last step in Ferrero's grand plan was to bring the Joseph own brand into line with the designer collections that it hangs next to. For this, she needed a designer who would "get" it; "get" Joseph and, importantly, "get" what she was trying to achieve with the brand.

 

Enter one Louise Trotter. A petite
Sunderland-born designer, who earned her stripes at Gap, Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger and Jigsaw, and whose Northern lilt goes hand-in-hand with a strong work ethic that saw her back at work in the studio just two weeks after giving birth to her second child earlier this year.

 

"My first memory of Joseph was the trousers and the knitwear. That was what everyone came to Joseph for. I remember buying my first pair of Joseph trousers and feeling as though going through a rite of passage, like I've made it," says Trotter who, when we meet at Joseph's atelier in Paris, was wearing what I quickly assessed to be a version of the Joseph monochrome uniform: black leather trousers, a white Tee, a black tux jacket and black and white Adidas trainers.

 

She is the living, breathing embodiment of the Joseph woman: effortlessly cool, minimal but not dull, busy, smart, engaging and genuinely excited about the clothes.

 

"When I first started, Sara told me that the Joseph own-brand collections had to be able to stand up next to the likes of [Azzedine] Alaïa and Givenchy." A big ask, especially since, by then, the Joseph own-brand was developing a reputation as a destination for dependable basics, not for cutting-edge fashion. So how did she go about designing the kind of clothes that Kate Moss would wear, without frightening away the Kate Middletons among their clientele?

 

"It's been a slow process, I'm three and a half years down the line and we still have a way to go," says Trotter. "Joseph is an incredible brand with a unique heritage that we respect and honour. What we've tried to do is not alienate our customers, because we still have our loyal clientele who comes to us for great wardrobe basics and we have worked hard on updating those pieces so that they feel totally relevant. But it's not just about basics anymore, Joseph is equally becoming known as a fashion brand with its own unique hand writing. You know when it is starting to make sense when every
fashion editor is wanting to wear your clothes."

 

"I think the mistake you can make is change too quickly, and suddenly you find yourself with no customers, you haven't quite attracted the new customer and you've lost your old customers," she says. "So I think it is -
and has always been - important for us to have this be a considered growth. Sara's been very smart in how she's tackled that."

 

In March 2010, Joseph Ettedgui sadly passed away and, later that year, he was followed by Snege. In searching for a fresh pair of eyes to help direct the new Joseph vision, Ferrero enlisted the skills of French stylist and fashion consultant Marie-Amélie Suavé - the third member of this over-achieving girl gang.

 

"When Alain died, I really felt that we needed someone else to help us and support us, to really push us out of our boundaries," says Ferrero. "I think we are quite good in doing what the market wants, and what the customer wants but we really needed something that is much stronger to express in an extreme way what we are trying to say. Marie-Amélie is amazing, she has an amazing eye, amazing knowledge and it's been very good workingwith her, both for Louise and for myself. To not stop when everyone is telling you 'that's too much' - that's probably when we want to go further."

 

Suavé, a style icon to fashion insiders, started her career as an intern at Vogue Paris in the '80s, assisting on shoots with Guy Bourdin and Helmut Newton. She left in 1997 to pursue a career as a consultant because she wanted to work with designers in creating clothes that she would want to photograph and wear. She single-handedly took on Trussardi and has been working with Nicolas Ghesquière during his tenure as creative director at Balenciaga. Most recently, she has been appointed to the role of senior fashion editor at W magazine in New York.

 

But this return from the safe (yet reputation-endangering) waters of comfortable basics hasn't come about solely because the shops have smartened-up and the clothes are cooler.

 

A succession of kill-for-an-invitation parties over the last few years have added to Joseph's rediscovered allure among the style set and opinion makers. Karen Elson sang an exclusive set at the Westbourne Grove shop; Pete Doherty performed at the Avenue Montaigne store to launch a jewellery collaboration between him and Hannah Martin that was being exclusively sold at the store; and there have been private dinners hosted by fashion luminaries such as Katie Grand.

 

"I think Joseph's latest fall collection has been one of its strongest in recent years. The brand has certainly got its mojo back and is back in the conversation in terms of the being a 'cool' fashion brand," says Harper's Bazaar's Gabriele Hackworthy, whose first memory of Joseph, like most women, was an obsession with a pair of trousers. "They are becoming famous again for the building blocks we all need in our wardrobes - a great silk shirt, a fabulous tailored pants suit, an investment coat. Joseph's own brand strength is offering women a cool modern urban wardrobe. Their ranges always include beautifully crafted, highly designed basics on par with the best luxury brands in the world but at an accessible price point. The current collection mixes perfectly with my designer pieces from brands like Balenciaga and Givenchy and I love that I can walk into any Joseph store and know that I will find pieces that are completely on trend, fit well, are well made and won't send me into bankruptcy."

 

For Joseph's autumn/winter 2012 offering, all of this collaborative creativity has resulted in a collection that throws military references into the mix with muted country plaids and statement pieces in animal print - with a smattering of studs for added rock 'n' roll edge. It's the kind of collection that has enough edge to be worn by Rihanna but - broken down - there are pieces elegant enough for royalty too.

 

So far, the results speak for themselves. Sales on Joseph's own-brand collections are up 24 per cent since Ferrero initiated her plan in 2008; and within the next 12 months, 10 new international Joseph stores will have opened their doors, with a further 50 stores expected to open in the next three years.

 

Ferrero's plan is working and Joseph's talented female trio is showing that success can be achieved even when living between two cities (London and Milan for Ferrero; Paris and London for Trotter; and New York and Paris for Sauvé), and even as mothers of very young children.

 

"The great thing is that you can have it all if you don't feel guilty," says Ferrero, whose three-year-old son was born after she turned 40 while at Joseph. "If you know that [work] is what makes you happy, and that your baby is much happier if you are happy; and that it is about quality time, not just time, it can be incredibly rewarding. Definitely, for me, it has been the best journey of my life."

 

Motherhood for the first time after the age of 40 is an experience that Ferrero shares with Trotter. "All my adult life I've been very much about my career. I always thought, 'oh I'll have children but I'm not really sure when'," says Trotter. "And then I hit 40 and, you know, all of your friends are like, 'tick tock'. Sara was very much a role model for me in that it was the first time I'd ever seen a woman having a child, doing her job and still being in control. I think it really gave me the courage to believe that I could do it."

 

It's a role that has changed the way that both women work. Trotter continues, "[Motherhood] makes you a lot more decisive about things. I used to procrastinate a lot more on things. [As a mother] you can't procrastinate, you don't have time to, so it makes you a lot more decisive and more aware of your time. Before, I would sit in the office until whatever time and think 'yeah, yeah I've got all this time to do this', but now I have to make a decision because I need to get home and bathe my kids."

 

And this creative assertiveness has impacted on the way that she designs. "What I want from my clothes today is different from before. I get up early every morning, spend time with my children, go to work and then often go on to dinner. I need clothes that can take me from day to evening and that still look good. I think this is very much in line with the Joseph girl. So it's not only changed my attitude from a time point of view, but how I design and fit the collection."

 

Ferrero and Trotter both agree that motherhood is a game-changer. So when the birth of Trotter's son disrupted plans for Joseph to make its catwalk debut at London Fashion Week for spring/summer 2013, it was an obvious decision to postpone the show.

 

The next big news is the launch of Joseph's long-awaited e-commerce website. Scheduled to go live in October, the site has been designed to have the same sleek, pared-back minimalism that the stores are known for. "We have arrived [online] after everyone else but we have finally arrived," says Ferrero of the site which has been expected imminently for years. The site will initially sell only Joseph's own-brand collections but it will be the first time that it has all been available in one space.

 

Then, after the e-commerce launch, we can expect a fully-fledged fashion show from Joseph at London Fashion Week come February 2013, which will undoubtedly put the brand firmly on the radar for anyone who might have missed its masterful return to fashion's fore. Expectations will be high (Trotter says that she will feel as if she is "in London Fashion Week naked") but, with this triumvirate pulling all the strings, it's sure to be a hit.

In Akira Kurosawa's samurai epic Kagemusha, there's a memorable scene in which generals discuss strategy. One of them points out that the emblem on their flag, a stylised Mount Fuji, symbolises the fact that their lord is "steadfast like a mountain". His constancy and predictability are precisely what make him a formidable force.

 

Twenty-first century Milan is not 16th-century Japan, and Diego Della Valle's sky-blue shirt and navy suit are a long way from a Shogun's battle armour. But beneath his Riviera-ready, smart-casual exterior, there's something of that same steadfast spirit about the 58-year-old billionaire and founder of Tod's. Diego Della Valle has turned the old family leather goods manufacturing business he inherited into a multibillion dollar international luxury brand while sticking closely to its roots in the region and its original artisanal principles. He still believes in the concept of luxury, even in a time when many recession-hit brands and consumers are jittery about the word and its associations.

 

Yet there's nothing old-fashioned about the way Della Valle has made this traditional approach work in the modern world. The scale of his achievement is remarkable. In one lifetime, he has done the work of generations by being attuned to the way power and persuasion work in the media age. His personal charm can be disarming: "Diego is the great seducer", an Italian friend warned me. Certainly, as the Hollywood heroines in Tod's ads attest (along with the much-papped visits of Peter Mandelson to his Capri holiday home and his yacht, Marlin), Della Valle has a record of seeing what matters in culture and tapping into it commercially. It is a story that is particularly Italian. Think of Armani and Richard Gere in American Gigolo; the Italians have a knack for turning fame into fortune.

 

"I think Italian style is about roots with a modern touch," says Della Valle, for whom a key purpose of Tod's mission is to champion the best in Italian lifestyle. While Italy as a market is only a minor concern, accounting as it does for around 20 per cent of its turnover, when it comes to its identity, its raison d'être and what ad people call its USP, it's all about Italy and the Italian way of life. Or at least Diego's idealised version of what Italy can be rather than what it is. Tod's futuristic factory in Sant'Elpidio a Mare, in the region of Marche, where Diego was born and where his grandfather started the family business in the 1920s, and the grand Art Deco headquarters building in Milan, are a testament to the yin and yang of that idea.

WATCH THE CREATION OF A TOD'S WALLET

 

Diego's grandfather was a modest cobbler based in a remote town in northern Italy. In the 1940s his father, Dorino Della Valle (who died in March aged 87), managed to expand the family business, investing in a small factory in Casette d'Ete, Marche, where he sold Italian leather shoes to a handful of international suppliers. But it was Diego who truly expanded the brand's horizons. As a wide-eyed teenager on a road trip of America, Diego became fascinated by the east coast's relaxed, preppy attitude that a new generation of middle-class Americans had adopted - the way they kept some of the trappings of tradition and formality in menswear, but refreshed and softened them with new colours and fabrics.

 

Returning to Italy, Diego began a law degree in Bologna, but quickly decided his true calling was business and fashion. He considered launching his own footwear brand, but had difficulty being taken seriously by the industry because of his youth. Instead, at 24, the budding mogul managed to persuade his father to let him run the family business. First, Diego presented Dorino with a pair of poorly made driving loafers he'd picked up on his travels and a business model in which he argued for profit through higher production values.

 

It was a compelling argument, and Della Valle Jr's masterplan was soon in motion. Diego set about designing and crafting a shoe from the finest leathers and using traditional Italian artisanal methods. Yet what resulted wasn't a backward-looking design or a heavy, stiff, preppy-style shoe: now focused on beauty and comfort, the first Tod's loafers constituted a redefinition of what it meant to be classily "casual" by taking out the hard structure and rebuilding it around comfort and flexibility - not an original concept, but never before done to such degree of perfection. The shoe quickly became synonymous with what Della Valle liked to call a "laid-back but luxurious" way of life. New breezy colours and comfort-first updates of classic styles followed.

 

A new name was needed for this new direction. Fashion business mythology says the name "J. P. Tod" was picked from a phonebook (Chicago, Boston and New York have been quoted) to encapsulate the new, Americana-inspired approach the brand had adopted - something Della Valle categorically denies. What is a matter of record is that the initials "J. P." were dropped from the business's name in 1999, when people began to call it "J. P.'s" stateside; Della Valle was worried that it would confuse people and complicate his advertising strategies.

 

HOVER TO SEE HOW A BAG IS MADE

 

That moment was arguably the only one in the story of Tod's where Della Valle seemed in anything less than total control of his brand's public image. Otherwise what happened to Tod's is a master lesson in branding and a case study in what value good branding strategy can add to a business -
capturing an east coast lifestyle and converting it into a story the world could buy into.

 

If the brand's conception was nearly a work of genius, the marketing of it was equally impressive. Diego persuaded a mutual friend to give a pair of his loafers to Juventus football club chairman and Fiat boss Gianni Agnelli, knowing they would be seen pitch-side by millions via television. A succession of similar promotional opportunities translated into massive demand and the dye was cast.

 

As Tod's matured into a worldwide success story, Diego's business interests widened. He launched the casual footwear company Hogan and the ready-to-wear label, Fay. According to the top Italian banker Claudio Costamagna, the former boss of Goldman Sachs in Europe, Diego proved to be a canny investor. "Diego is an instinctive businessman, not a classic numbers type of guy, although he does pay attention to them; he has incredible instinct and vision." His investments in the banking privatisations paid off handsomely, making him one of the richest men in Italy. He has a wide portfolio of business interests and is the biggest single shareholder in Saks Fifth Avenue (the very store his father once supplied shoes to), and sits on the boards of businesses (including the LVMH Group, Piaggio and Ferrari), and was behind the rebirth of his local football club Fiorentina after it went bankrupt a decade ago.

 

SEE THE TOD'S CRAFTSMEN AT WORK

 

But if you think that makes Diego one of the good ol' boys of highly networked and high net worth men in suits, think again. Diego was the first major Italian businessman to publicly criticise Silvio Berlusconi, then at the zenith of his power. The richest man in Italy with an extensive network of businesses in almost every sector, owner of 90 per cent of Italian media, not to mention the longest serving prime minister in Italian post-war history... taking on Silvio was not, on the face of it, the wisest of moves. But Diego was smart if not prophetic. In a way the schism between the two self-made men represents the two sides of Italy. Berlusconi's brashness veered into vulgarity, while Diego's subtlety and style made him look aristocratic. And where Berlusconi was the poster boy for global laissez-faire capitalism, Diego seemed to be promoting a sort of Cadbury-style paternalistic capitalism of 19th century vintage, building factories that resemble Bauhaus masterpieces. You can eat your food off the shiny white floor, while there is a crèche for the workers and manager's pre-school children. Furthermore, where Berlusconi hankers after the life of Hugh Hefner, Diego's resembles the Kennedys at leisure (fittingly, he owns JFK's restored Marlin sailing ship where he received the news about the start of the Berlin wall crisis).

 

The other jewel in the crown of Tod's group is Roger Vivier, the Parisian shoe brand he acquired in 2000. A sleeping beauty of a brand, Roger Vivier was the ever so French shoemaker to Paris couture in its golden age. In 2002, Diego hired Bruno Frisoni as creative director and Inès de la Fressange to be the muse and ambassador for the brand, lending it both glamour and, crucially, Frenchness. One of the first generation of supermodels, Inès is something of a French institution, being only one of four women whose likeness was sculpted into official statues of Marianne, the symbol of the French Republic. She was the muse of Chanel and its public face for years. Deploying such a figure, however, isn't for the faint-hearted. She has a reputation for being strong-minded, detail-obsessed and a control freak. Some might say that's an apt description of Della Valle himself. So I ask him how they managed to find a way of working together.

 

"Well, it's a long story," he says. "I met her through one of my good friends, Luigi, her (now deceased) husband. Our relationship is between friends, family, relation and professional - she is very professional but in our family touch, she does a very good job. She gives a good mood to the company and the combination between the designer and the image. It's perfect. She has a lot of good ideas - and so maybe for Inès it's a little boring, the day-by-day of what we do. She is an artist, a genius, a businesswoman. Although what I do is I support her, I try to get everything as precise as possible, and of course the team there is very good. It's a good group of people."

 

Whatever the mix, the cocktail works well. The Roger Vivier brand of footwear, handbags, sunglasses and small leather goods has become one of fashion's worst kept best secrets. With no advertising and despite the recession, not to mention the eye-watering prices, sales are booming - the buyer at Harrods' shoe floor told my colleague that Vivier is their bestselling brand.

 

Another fascinating meeting of fashion philosophies has been between Della Valle and the late Elsa Schiaparelli, the great Italian designer who was a leading light in early 20th-century couture. An uncompromising luxury visionary, Schiaparelli had no interest in adapting to the pragmatic new demands of consumers after World War II, and the label closed in 1954. Six years ago, it was bought by Della Valle. Rather than lurch straight into a relaunch, he appointed ex-uber model and society star Farida Khelfa as an ambassador, and she has overseen the establishment of a kind of archive-cum-temple to the brand in the Place Vendôme in Paris, just next to the Ritz, where the Schiaparelli workshop was until half a century before. They've added to the archive with modern pieces that are true to the bold and often bizarre sense of Schiaparelli's beauty and fashion, Like Darth Vader's chair from Star Wars the movie.

 

Thanks to the excitement generated by this summer's Prada/Schiaparelli show at New York's Metropolitan Museum - and the way it drew out the thematic kinship between today's high-priestess of cerebral Italian luxury and her spiritual ancestor Elsa Schiaparelli - Della Valle decided to bring the label out of the archive and back into the retail world sooner than he hadplanned. Accordingly, Schiaparelli will soon re-emerge as a demi-couture proposition - and Della Valle will no doubt ensure that its relaunch is another triumph, coming as it does at the end of the cycle when the rest of the luxury industry is trying to cash in by extending their range down the price scale. No Burberry-style printed baseball caps here thank you very much.

 

Indeed, letting the fashion world's latest crazes pass him by seems to be part of Della Valle's secret. For all his business nous and cultural references, he invariably returns to one simple, familiar idea: that Tod's, and Italian style at large, can still lay claim to a unique understanding. Diego is fiercely loyal to his country, recently pledging 25 million euros to assist the conservation efforts of Rome's Colosseum - a move initially criticised by some as an advertising ploy but one that has since come to be seen as a genuine display of national allegiance. For Diego it's a message, all right, but a message to other titans of Italian business and industry to show some public spirit and eradicate the oft-repeated notion that "Italy is a poor country full of rich people". "If other people follow us," he says regarding his philanthropy, "its good, we want to give back the sign that they made a good choice." It's this commitment to his roots in his beloved Marche and Italy that set him apart from other Italian tycoons. Claudio Costamagna tells how "Diego is at once very international and very local; he loves nothing better than to take his Sunday morning coffee in his village café with his school mates he has known all his life and tell them about the week's adventures in New York or Shanghai".

 

WATCH TOD'S FILM RED TOUCH DANCING DREAM

 

In the luxury fashion world, "Made in Italy" has arguably lost some of the currency it had a decade or two ago. Most brands now look far and wide to source competitively priced materials and workers, and when there is a nation-specific focus, it is frequently on the oft-discussed "emerging markets" of Russia, India and, in particular, China, where brands have led a drive to manufacture (more cheaply than they can at home) and to market (thanks to a billion-strong new prospective consumer base). Many of the top luxury brands who have done best in China have explicitly targeted their offerings to local tastes.

 

Tod's is in China, like everybody else, and Della Valle says it's doing well there. Market analysts tell me that Tod's is underrepresented and therefore represents a huge opportunity, but when Diego is asked if expansion into new territories is urgently needed he seems unhurried.

 

"It's an incredible market, potentially, but you must remember that the Chinese people do love and appreciate quality too - to buy strong, good brands. Maybe if it's a watch, they prefer Switzerland. If it is perfume, they prefer France. If it's quality, it's from Italy. Tod's is in the luxury business, not fashion; for us, that's very important.

 

I tell him about a thriving Chinese designer, Uma Wang, who has reversed the trend of western brands shifting their production to the East. She recently decided that the best way to expand on her early success is to start manufacturing her products in Italy. It's a narrative that meets with Diego's approval.

 

"The idea of making the best one. It is the reason everybody came here. Strong big brands - French, English, Americans - who need to do product fantastically. The reason for this is that it's the best."

 

And who would dare take issue with the great seducer?

Ever since exhibiting her first collection with ON/OFF during London Fashion Week in September 2009, Georgia Hardinge's label has been moving with an enviable acceleration. The graduate of the Parsons Paris School of Art and Design formed her brand when she was only 25 and has since gathered a repuation as an experimental print maker and a designer who foucuses of sculptural shapes. Not only has she been busy forging her own line but she has turned her hand to all sorts of projects along the way including collaborations with Victoria's Secret and Lancôme. Hardinge is stocked in ten countries and is loved by the likes of Florence and the Machine, Beyonce, Lady Gaga, Erin O'Conner, Daisy Lowe, and Jessie J. If there's a dictionary definition for 'one to watch,' she would certainly be the illustration.