Natalie has always been a trail blazer when it comes to women’s fashion,  renowned for her unique personal style and taste. She began her styling career at Elle, moving to become Senior Fashion Editor of The Sunday Times Style where she wrote and appeared in the weekly column ‘Natalie Hartley Wears’. This how to wear concept became hugely recognised and ultimately copied by myriad magazines and influencers. She then moved to InStyle and most recently Glamour UK as Fashion Director. Natalie has styled many celebrities over the years including Taylor Swift, Naomi Campbell, Kate Winslet, Keira Knightly, Azelia Banks, Eva Mendes, and Alexa Chung.

 

Lydia grew up in the heart of Notting Hill a stone’s throw from the iconic Portobello Road and its eclectic residents. During its heyday in the 80’s, she was surrounded by extraordinary talent, style, music and above all had access to incredible selections of unnoticed vintage clothes. She was influenced by the wide ranging styles of her family and friends and became obsessed with wearing and collecting second hand clothes. Lydia has become an ultimate thrifter, renowned for her fearless dress sense. Her eye has been trained from a young age to find treasures that most of us wouldn’t look twice at. Naturally, her path crossed over into retail, with a successful career in personal dressing, styling private clients and she has developed a unique knowledge of dressing people for their body shapes.

 

With Lydia’s retail knowledge and Natalie’s magazine background Chillie London came to life. “We want to make a difference to people’s lives and the world by re-homing clothes that could simply end up in landfill.  We are passionate about recycling clothes and changing people’s attitude towards wearing beautiful pre-loved clothing. We want to build a business that not only makes our customers feel happy and confident but makes a difference in the way people depend on fast fashion".

 

We use the word pre-loved instead of vintage. Our company is not just about having the latest designer vintage but learning how to reuse cool pre-loved clothing from any provenance. Each piece has been hand selected by us and we aim to ensure it’s restored or sourced to a high standard.

 

The concept is simple: RE LOVE.  RE WEAR.  RE STYLE.   

 

We wear the clothes ourselves, styling them into different outfits to always give our customer new ideas. We use time lapse video to capture our outfits to show true transparency; the clothes are worn as they appear - nothing is pinned, tucked or fitted, what you see is what you get.  We want to carry on telling a story with all the clothes that have already had many stories to tell. Things that haven’t sold are restyled to re-inspire, we are trying to break the unsustainable trend of constantly needing to see new things to buy.

 

Our purpose is to show customers how to play and have fun with clothes; we want them to embrace exciting, flattering, confident styles that tell a story everyday of the year, as well as encouraging everyone to dress as an individual and hone their inner stylist’s eye.  

 

We want our customers to re-love the pre-loved as much as we do!

 

Lydia & Natalie