Clare Waight Keller

Clare Waight Keller is a British fashion designer whose career moves between the intimacy of knitwear and the scale of a global clothing business. As creative director of Uniqlo, appointed in 2024, she oversees its mainline men’s and women’s collections alongside Uniqlo:C. The job extends a career spent adapting her understanding of proportion to very different houses, from Chloé’s romantic wardrobe to Givenchy’s couture.

Her early experience included Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren, followed by Gucci during Tom Ford’s tenure. Creative leadership at Pringle of Scotland developed her grounding in knitwear; she subsequently led Chloé from 2011 to 2017. Softness at Chloé was a matter of movement and attitude as well as material, with clothes that could look relaxed even when their construction was exacting.

At Givenchy, which she joined in 2017, Waight Keller became the house’s first female artistic director. Her remit included menswear and haute couture, placing compact tailoring alongside a more expansive evening vocabulary. Designing Meghan Markle’s wedding dress in 2018 brought that work to a worldwide audience. She departed the house in 2020, then returned to regular collection-making with the launch of Uniqlo:C in 2023.

In a February 2025 interview with Monocle, she explained her interest in entering a company’s story and translating it for the moment. At Uniqlo, that meant thinking through how a jacket works across sizes and how a change in color can refresh a long-established product. It is a practical extension of her luxury experience, using design to solve the problems of a wardrobe bought and worn by many kinds of people.