Why? She’s worried that everyone is doing a leopard-print flat now. Ditto trenches. To someone whose entire ethos is the antithesis of trends (the press release also lists Charlotte Rampling, Lauren Hutton and Led Zeppelin as the collection’s muses), this matters. Phelan, who says she has never seen Kate wear the same thing twice in all their years of friendship, jumps in to allay her fears: “The collection has got – and I hate saying this word – a timelessness to it. You could dip into it at any time. You would have worn these clothes when you were 18. Nothing has changed – it’s still really your style.”
Moreover, rather than a marketing opportunity, it was important to reimagine pieces, such as a rich blue velvet ’30s coat, for now, because such love-worn treasures (there’s scarcely any velvet left on the elbows of that original outerwear) are almost too threadbare to wear. Keeping vintage – true vintage – alive is important to Moss, who still scours markets (Portobello, Camden) for gems and never (bar an impulse 1stDibs splurge this morning) shops online. “Vintage shops are just combed through now, they charge too much and you just feel like it’s not really vintage anymore – it’s like 10 or 20 years old,” says this staunch rummager. “Vintage, to me, is like the ’30s, ’40s or ’50s. And we didn’t call it vintage, we called it second-hand.”