In any other living room, Coco Fennell’s electric blue hair might stand out. But in her own, next to a 6ft red plastic rocket ship magazine rack that sits beside the navy velvet sofa, or under a pendant light stamped “Fish & Chips” that hangs in the kitchen, and paired with a pink gingham dress of her own design and cowboy boots, it seems perfectly natural. Fennell rents out her house for photoshoots, featuring the jukebox, arcade games, neon wall lights and wallpaper printed with strawberries. But this is her home first and foremost, decorated by her and entirely to her taste: “I want my house to look like a diner-cum-rodeo.”
A few days after we meet she’ll be hosting a few friends for a dinner party to mark her 33rd birthday.
“They always say, ‘This is the best thing you’ve ever heated up,’ because I just get something from [frozen meal chain] Cook.”
Coco Fennell’s self-titled fashion brand (the dresses are her own designs) is in its tenth year. She started out with £1,000 and what she earned from working simultaneously as a graphic designer, growing the business into her full-time job and a brand worn by Rihanna, Kylie Minogue, Liz Hurley and Holly Willoughby. It’s a one-woman operation by choice; she does everything from design to packing orders.
The Fennells are an extremely successful – and stylish and well-connected – family. Coco’s parents are Theo, the jewellery designer, and author Louise, who it turns out is something of a style influence. “Back in the day, she would always have a beehive and big black sunglasses and gold jewellery. She looked like Patsy from Ab Fab.” Family friends include Sirs Elton John and Andrew Lloyd Webber.
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And then there’s the older of the two Fennell sisters, the actor, director, writer and now Oscar winner Emerald Fennell, 35, who played Camilla in series three and four of The Crown on Netflix and Nurse Patsy in the BBC’s Call the Midwife. She took over as head writer and showrunner on Killing Eve from Phoebe Waller-Bridge, a friend whom she met on the set of the film Albert Nobbs in 2011.
The Oscar was for best original screenplay for the 2020 film Promising Young Woman, a poster for which is hanging in Coco’s hallway. Emerald was the first woman to win in that category since 2007, and was also the first British woman to be nominated for the best director Oscar – all the more staggering given it was her directorial debut. Its star, Carey Mulligan, was nominated for best actress.
It won a slew of other awards earlier this year, among them a gong for Nancy Steiner at the Costume Designers Guild Awards, and two of those fashion moments are of Coco’s making: on screen, Carey Mulligan wears both a rose-print dress and an illustrated baseball shirt from her label. The designer and her mother wore duplicates of the shirt to watch the Oscars on TV (along with Theo and Coco’s boyfriend, the comedian John Robins).
“We stayed up until five in the morning watching it; not a party, but as much as one can have a party of four people. We did have a pretty nice dinner and we were like, ‘How the hell are we going to stay up?’ Had to mainline Haribo to keep us awake. And then it was just so exciting.”
Coco spent lockdowns 1 and 2 with her parents in the house that the Fennells rent long-term in Hampshire – “We’re like The Brady Bunch.” She’s back in London now that she can work from the studio space that she shares with five photographers. Emerald visited from Los Angeles between lockdowns with her family. (She’s married to director Chris Vernon, and was seven months pregnant with her first child during Promising Young Woman’s 23-day shoot, and expecting her second while accepting her Oscar in April.)
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How is her sister coping with her new level of fame? “Her life is so normal that it’s not a thing. Nothing’s really changed. Everything’s as it was – apart from we’re incredibly proud.”
The Fennell sisters grew up in Chelsea, west London, “during the week”, spending the rest of the time at the house in the country. Both attended boarding school: Emerald went to Marlborough in Wiltshire, whose alumni include Princess Eugenie and the Duchess of Cambridge, while Coco attended Bryanston in Dorset, one of the more bohemian public schools. “She was just more academic and I was more arty.” Bryanston’s former pupils include Lucian Freud, Sir Terence Conran and Cerys Matthews. In that sort of atmosphere, any Fennell rebelliousness was little more than what any other pupil got up to.
Emerald went from school to Oxford to study English, where she was spotted by an agent while performing in a play. Coco was never tempted to follow her into acting. “We’re very close and very similar. But I would be so scared to do that. If someone told me to act, even now in front of you, I would start sobbing. It’s so cool, but not for me.”
But she did follow her sister to Oxford. The town, not the university. “I wanted to be in a university town to have the experience, but I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, so I didn’t want to piss away three years. And so I thought, ‘Oh, that looks fine!’ ”
“That” was a six-month secretarial course. “I was just so awful at it. So hungover all the time. After school I did a smorgasbord of courses that I was terrible at. I did a cooking course – it was very bad. I still can’t cook an omelette. I did the secretarial course, which I was also terrible at. And then I did a really amazing graphic design course, and that was when I started working and art-directing, and it was at that point, when I was 22, that I then started my brand.”
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She isn’t the partygoer one might assume she would be, bearing in mind a 2012 “Queens of the Scene” profile in Tatler (which also covered Emerald’s 18th birthday). “I’m too shy. I’ve never been very good at those fashion parties. And I don’t drink so I feel like there’s that part of it. It just makes me too anxious.”
Her brand’s tenth year comes after one where “I’ve sort of been on standby”. A homeware line might be in the works, and Coco’s definition of “on standby” is clearly different to most other people’s – she took a psychotherapy course last year and is weighing up a further qualification. The year before that, it was circus trapeze. Was she any good, I ask, noting the Big Top red and white stripes hung as a canopy over her dining table. “No, and it’s so sad,” she says, laughing. “Because all I have ever dreamt of is to be in the circus.”
Shoot credits
Hair and make-up Jo Lorrimer at David Artists using Bobbi Brown and Bumble and Bumble. Clothes Coco Fennell.
