Penelope Chilvers, the footwear designer whose tasselled riding boot has been worn by the Princess of Wales for two decades, has expanded into ready-to-wear. Speaking to HELLO!, she said the clothing line launched this spring after customers began asking where they could buy the clothes shown in the brand’s footwear photographs.
Chilvers founded the label in 2002 with the aim of making an ideal equestrian boot, produced to her own specification by traditional artisans in Spain. The result, the Inclement Long Tassel Boot, was first photographed on the Princess of Wales in 2004, and Chilvers said the princess still has her original pair. The Duchess of Edinburgh is another customer: she visited the brand’s stand at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show in May, wore its espadrilles on her recent trip to Zambia and was seen earlier in the summer in its Goldie cowboy boots.
The vintage-inspired clothing is designed around the label’s best-selling shoes, either through shared trims or in how the pieces are worn together. Chilvers called this approach her “safe zone for design”. The Incredible shearling gilet, made in Somerset and based on the snow boot of the same name, has already become a bestseller.
The company started at Chilvers’s kitchen table when she was a single mother, and both of her daughters now hold key roles. Gemma, a former stylist who assisted Elizabeth Saltzman, leads marketing and styling, while Africa spent seven years as a nursery-school teacher before retraining as a designer and joining the footwear team. Africa speaks Spanish and Catalan and visits the family-run Spanish factories, some of which have worked with the brand for 24 years, two or three times a season.
Chilvers stressed that the business is no longer a kitchen-table operation. The three women are part of a team of 50, run from London by managing director Amy Tooley and a senior leadership team. Because the boots are welted and can be resoled, many customers keep a pair for 20 years, and during a 2024 tour of six US states the family arrived at a stockists’ dinner in Boston to find 30 guests wearing the brand. Childrenswear, she said, is not on the cards.
