Photos by Ashley Barrett for Kinn Studio

British-born Caroline Belhumeur knows American fashion. After college, she was personally selected to work alongside Calvin Klein, helping shape the refined sartorial language that made his namesake label an enduring American classic. She later held leadership roles at Theory and Club Monaco before joining Vince in 2017. Since becoming Chief Creative Officer in 2021, Belhumeur has further defined the brand's signature Californian sensibility, placing comfort, luxury, and effortless style at the heart of every collection. In this conversation, she reflects on her creative beginnings, the principles that guide Vince, her philosophy of dressing, and her vision for the brand's future.

OLIVER KUPPER: It seems like the American fashion business is doing well right now.

CAROLINE BELHUMEUR: It's crazy because you would think people would be pulling back with the prices of food, gas, and everything. However, I believe fashion brings a great deal of joy to people, and when you feel good, it makes you feel better. And how you feel when you leave the house can give you a sense of strength. People also need loveliness in their life.

KUPPER: You bring that warmth and loveliness to Vince. Sometimes, fashion can feel alienating to people.

BELHUMEUR: That's nice of you to say. One of the reasons I came to Vince was because I felt that it had a beautiful story to tell. I always thought of their beautiful cashmere sweaters and silks. Vince is designed in California, and there's a certain sensibility to how people dress here. Obviously the weather gives you a certain way of moving through life. I think that’s why Vince feels the way it does. It does have this warmth, and the colors are coming from the natural world around us. It’s like the way you feel when there’s that beautiful, warm breeze around you in California.

“I am a minimalist at heart, but I’m also curious.”

KUPPER: After you graduated from fashion school, you started working with Calvin Klein. What did that experience teach you as a designer? What wisdom did he impart personally?

BELHUMEUR: It was all about the process with him, specifically working with beautiful fabrics. His world was very refined and minimal. At that time in the early ‘80s, there was a lot going on. The hair, the colors. [Calvin Klein] was a beautiful island of calmness and beauty. I also lived down on the Lower East Side—on First Avenue and First Street—in the early ‘80s. It was dodgy down there for sure, but I loved the energy and the madness of it. I loved the tension of these two things in my life: a calm, minimal, beautiful place to create and the madness of the Lower East Side.

KUPPER: It seems like creating these islands of peace and calm amidst the chaos is part of your design philosophy.

BELHUMEUR: I think it definitely is. I want my life to have an ease to it. I don't want to be struggling in front of the mirror in the morning. I want to feel confident and smart, and I want the clothes to feel honest and part of me. I never want to feel like I'm being tortured. For me, this ease of dressing gives me time to do other things because I can easily put myself together. I feel like most women feel this too, and we have a real connection to the customers.

KUPPER: How do you think your design philosophy has changed over the years? Has it changed?

BELHUMEUR: I am a minimalist at heart, but I’m also curious. I love color and texture. I like experimenting too. I don't feel confined to neutrals, black, and minimal. I'm not interested in that. Even when I think about my house, I love that it's eclectic and chaotic because that means there is personality in it. If you go too minimal, you lose personality. I think our customer appreciates a little personality alongside those pieces that she can depend on all the time.

KUPPER: There's definitely a classic American feel to the wardrobe. Growing up in Bristol, what were your reference points? What did you see? What were you reading?

BELHUMEUR: When I was growing up, I wasn’t really thinking about those things yet. You're absorbing, and you don't realize until much later—or when people ask you that question—and then you think about it. I grew up in the countryside, and I’m still today very inspired by being in nature. That's like my church. I think I always appreciated beauty, the simplicity of things, and the realness of it. I love that it's always the same, and it comes back every year; it grows and changes. Also the earthy palettes—I was just surrounded by that. Music is such a source of inspiration for me too. I grew up with many different subcultures. I rode a motorbike. I loved rap music. All these things continue to feed me and my excitement for life. You know, just the joy of music and the color and the vibrancy that it brings.

KUPPER: What about fashion? What were you seeing then? Or did fashion come along later?

BELHUMEUR: It was a craft that I was learning. My mom made our clothes. We lived in the countryside. She was born in the ‘30s, so she wasn't really a hippie, but she had that mindset. She had herb gardens and vegetable gardens and did weaving. She had a huge loom. She taught me how to spin, and we would collect sheep fleece on the barbed wire around the fields. I learned how to spin and how to knit. I think that was the beginning of it. She saw that I was interested in the craft of making things, so she somehow managed to get me to see a fashion show by Bristol Fashion University at that time. I remember going there and seeing the catwalk, and all these girls were in these amazing, black-and-white clothes. David Bowie's TVC 15 was playing. I was like, Okay, I wanna do this.

KUPPER: Would you say there's a central ethos to Vince? Or is it constantly changing?

BELHUMEUR: Centrally, I would say it’s this understated, Californian luxury. The craft of making beautiful clothes for an everyday wardrobe.

KUPPER: How would you define what luxury is today?

BELHUMEUR: That word is used a lot, right? To me, luxury is feeling so good in the clothes. You just walk differently in them. You live differently in them. There's weight to it, the way it feels on your skin. And the fact that you don't have to think about it and it can give you back time to do other things. I think time is the biggest luxury.

KUPPER: How do you approach materiality?

BELHUMEUR: I think it's about comfort. I don't ever want to feel like I can't quite move in something or that I don't like how it feels on my skin. We spend a lot of time with fabric at Vince, and I think this goes back to my background. Our clothes are quite simple, so the fabric is super important to us. Twice a year, we go to a really big fabric show in Milan called Milano Unica and spend days going from one mill to the other trying to find the right fabrics. This is foundational to every collection that we work on.

KUPPER: The shopping experience has changed drastically in the last 5 years. How do you create a destination? How do you create an experience where people want to come and actually shop?

BELHUMEUR: When I joined, the Vince stores had gone through various iterations, and there are quite a few. Some are still in those same iterations because we can't come in and renovate every store at once. I love stores where I just want to hang out, visit, and enjoy the setting. That's what we've been working on. We've opened a new store on Madison Avenue. We opened a store on Marylebone High Street in London. These have more of that feeling. My house is mostly vintage things I found along the way, and there's a warmth to that individuality that invites interest when you walk into a store. A lot of those most recent stores have vintage or collected pieces. What's interesting to me is when there's a mix of materials, like bringing in a feeling of warmth by using wood. Or stucco, which is very proprietary to California, or leather, brass, marble. I love how these things come together. Maybe there's vintage pieces that you would never see together in the real world, you know? I just love the feeling of incorporating things from different decades.

“The most important thing is the integrity of design, the quality. Our customers know that they can depend on pieces that are well thought-out.”

KUPPER: You are building on the legacy of a brand and creating loyalty with customers. People talk a lot about loyalty today. When a brand loses cultural relevance, what is the first tool you reach for to help a brand regain its story?

BELHUMEUR: Foundationally it always starts for us with the product. That's why our customers come to us. It's so funny because every time I tell somebody I work for Vince, it's always the exact same answer. It's, Oh my God, I love Vince. I’ve had this or that piece for years. That to me right there is so core to why we exist. Invariably they also say, But my daughter stole it from me, or I gave it to my son. That's beautiful because you're not just going to give them the crappy stuff. You want them to feel good in it. It also tells me that it's cross-generational. That is core to who we are. The most important thing is the integrity of design, the quality. Our customers know that they can depend on pieces that are well thought-out.

KUPPER: That generational thinking is really important, especially when we live in a world where fashion is so disposable.

BELHUMEUR:I think what's interesting is that different generations might wear one thing in different ways. I have two daughters who are 33 and 25. They wear my pieces in totally different ways. It’s interesting to see how the three of us wear one piece so differently.

KUPPER: Sharon Stone has been such a great fit for Vince. What has your approach been like working with her as a representative of the brand?

BELHUMEUR: We gel pretty well because I think we’re both low-key, you know? We selected a bunch of stuff and threw it in the back of the car, then went to her house and put it on a rack. We spent two hours drinking cups of tea while playing dress-up. We had conversations about politics and life. It's just been so lovely and very natural. I hope to keep that relationship going because I think she really enjoys wearing the clothes and I love how she styles it because it's not necessarily how I would style it, but, you know, she likes to put a little ‘fuck you’ in it. I love that.

KUPPER: She's so good. Where do you hope to take Vince in the future?

BELHUMEUR: I want to continue to elevate our stores and make those a destination. Right now we’re working on connecting to the customer better. We've done a few events around interesting locations like Future Perfect. Showing our customer art and interesting interiors that we find exciting in the building, but also doing things like we did at Sheats–Goldstein. We like sharing architecture and interior design with our customers, and we want to continue building that. I think we want to continue to bring our customers and audience into places we find inspiring.