Philipp Plein: the king of bling on high fashion snobbery and why sex rules the world

His flashy designs and spectacular shows have turned Philipp Plein into a luxury power player — but not everyone’s happy about it. The new king of bling tells Jane Mulkerrins about high-fashion snobbery and why sex rules the world
Andrea Ruggeri
Jane Mulkerrins17 November 2016

The address is more than a little incongruous. Manhattan’s Upper East Side, bastion of old money and historically home to Astors, Rockefellers and Roosevelts, is not the first neighbourhood one would expect to find Philipp Plein, the outspoken German fashion phenomenon and self-styled ‘king of bling’.

But as I step off the street into his glittering six-storey townhouse, I’m amused to discover that Plein, 38, has not toned down his tastes to suit the surroundings. His home is a latter-day Versailles, the sort of space where sunglasses indoors are strongly advised. Every inch of the white-and-silver walls is hung with vast oversized mirrors, while ceilings drip with crystal chandeliers.

Plein leads me up the marble stairs to the living room — with its 16 chandeliers, white leather sofas festooned with fur cushions, and a small forest of indoor trees in giant gold pots deeper than I am tall — giving me, in the process, an eyeful of his grey hi-tops, the heels of which are emblazoned with his surname in metal letters. He is handsome, in a strong-jawed, hair-gelled way, and beneath the sleeves of his grey T-shirt, his tattooed biceps and forearms suggest an assiduous workout regime. He is eager and fast talking with excellent English. Once he gets started, he’s hard to stop.

‘Until three years ago, I didn’t have a house — I slept in my showroom,’ he says. (That showroom, admittedly, is in Lugano, the Swiss answer to Monaco.) ‘My first trade show in Milan, I slept in a prostitution house [sic]. Every morning I would have to move out with my luggage because they rented it out by the hour during the day, and I would move back in every evening.’

If Plein is now basking in his own reflected glory, who can really blame him? A fashion industry arriviste who got into the cloth trade ‘by accident’ only eight years ago, his company last year reportedly turned over more than £170m, selling sex, swagger and Swarovski crystal-studded leather jackets — as well as the occasional crocodile jacket lined with mink for £65,000 — in 80 stores worldwide, including Beverly Hills, Ibiza, Saint-Tropez, Moscow and Beirut. Next month, Philipp Plein will open its first stand-alone London store, a four-storey site on Bond Street, decked out in white and black marble which includes a menswear ‘crypt’. In May, Plein also became the majority shareholder in Billionaire couture, the high-end mens-wear label founded by the former Renault F1 boss Flavio Briatore, and plans to double the space the brand occupies in Harrods by spring. Who is his target customer?

‘The typical male client is the [professional] soccer player — we are a rock-star brand,’ says Plein. A fanbase that includes Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi bears this out. In womenswear, he says, the target demographic is a little older. ‘Most young girls cannot really afford a leather jacket for £4,000. We’re not for everybody’s wallet.’ Beyoncé, Nicki Minaj and Fergie, all of whom sport the brand, have the kind of wherewithal we’re talking about.

His wildly over-the-top shows in Milan have become renowned for their extravagance: dropping symphony orchestras into artificial caves, life-size rollercoasters, exploding monster trucks and jet-skis on a vast man-made lido; employing Snoop Dogg, Rita Ora and Theophilus London to perform, and Naomi Campbell to walk the runway. Each show costs upwards of £1m and invariably culminates in an epic party, flowing with ‘champlein’ — a super-charged cocktail of champagne and Red Bull. Plein, however, does not drink himself — ‘I hate the taste of alcohol’ — and has recently relinquished his former vice, Red Bull. ‘I figured out I don’t need it. It’s a placebo. People have always said: “That guy must be on drugs”, but one of my biggest assets, and maybe also my disadvantages is that I get very, very excited about things.’

Along with the New York townhouse, he also owns a sprawling estate in Cannes and a ‘small mountain’ in Bel Air where he is constructing his ‘dream house’. His garages runneth over with the petrol-fuelled trappings of success. ‘I have two Rolls Royces, one Lamborghini, one Range Rover, one Bentley, one Audi… That’s it. I sold my Ferrari. Oh, no, I have a Porsche in LA. I forgot about that.’

Yet, in spite of his rapidly expanding empire, Plein still sees himself as ‘David against Goliath’. ‘Fashion is a mafia,’ he says, leaning forward, as if to warn me of its dangers. ‘These big brands, they are controlling the f**king market. They all know one another; they grew up together and dominated the game. The fashion world is a circus.’

If he sounds bitter, it’s not without reason; he was not initially welcomed into the fashion world with open arms. The Camera Nazionale Della Moda Italiana — the organisation that controls the Milan fashion weeks — initially refused to give the unknown Plein a slot at all, eventually allowing him the graveyard shift. ‘They told me: “Nobody will come to your show, because the editors want to go to parties and dinners.”’

Not only did he not try to impress the editors — for whom he seems to hold particular disdain — for his first show in 2010 he ignored convention entirely, hired a DJ, spent £4,000 on vodka, and made it a party. ‘It was a revolution, it was a movement. Now that we are stopping [shows in] Milan, they are crying that we’re going away.’ The brand will, from now on, be focusing on the US market, and showing at New York Fashion Week from February onwards instead.

On stage at his men’s SS16 fashion show.
Joe Schildhorn/BFA.com

Plein does not mince his words when it comes to The Industry. His company, he argues, has youth on its side. ‘We’re the 20-year-old girl that everybody wants to f**k. You don’t know how to use the knife when you come to a formal dinner, you act stupid, you say things which are inappropriate…’ Is everything — in fashion, and the world beyond it — all about sex then? ‘Of course it’s all about sex,’ Plein cries. ‘P*ssy rules the world. Or… the other thing.’ (He means the penis.) ‘Maybe people don’t want to admit it, but it’s true — in the end, it’s all about sex.’

Plein was born in Munich, where his middle-class parents were both doctors, who sent him to Schule Schloss Salem, an elite Swiss boarding school when he began going off the rails at age 15, dating an older model and hanging out in nightclubs. He had notions of becoming an entrepreneur, but, having noticed that most CEOs had been to law school, enrolled to study business law. He came across an article in a business newspaper about the pet industry, which was profitable even in a recession, dropped out of law school, and, with a loan from his grandmother — the equivalent of £9,000 — started producing luxury dog beds. ‘In the furniture business, everybody prepays you, so you always get paid,’ he explains. ‘I was a one-man show, no expenses, living in my parents’ basement, producing only what I was selling.’ He made £800 on each luxe bed.

On stage at his men’s SS16 fashion show.
Matteo Prandoni/BFAnyc.com

At 23 years old, having earned his first million, he bought his first Porsche — and promptly crashed it — and had his first tattoo, ‘Philipp Plein’ in large lettering up the inside of his right forearm. ‘It’s not about my name, it’s about my company,’ he says. ‘I was selling dog beds and people thought I was crazy, but it was about what I believed in.’ He graduated to other furniture, and soon the business had a turnover of more than £5m.

The switch to fashion came when, at a Parisian trade show, he needed clothes to hang on a steel rack he was displaying. Plein bought a consignment of army surplus coats, covered them with the Swarovski crystals he was already throwing all over his cushions. The £8 jackets sold for £160, and a fashion empire was born.

As creative director, Plein now oversees a staff of 400 with garments manufactured mainly in Italy. The speed at which the company has grown is nothing short of dizzying, particularly since, Plein claims, it ‘is growing out of its own cash flow. We don’t work with banks, we don’t have investors’. Does he really have no financial backing? ‘This is what my father always told me, never spend money you don’t have in your pocket,’ he insists, ebullient. ‘I never leased a car, the house is paid off, nothing is on loan.’

There are chinks in his uber-confident armour, however. When I ask him about his toddler son, who lives in Brazil with his ex-girlfriend, two fat tears roll out of his right eye and down his cheek. Does he see his son? ‘No,’ he says, simply. ‘It is very difficult. When you are successful in your life and your work, you feel untouchable in many ways. But in a situation like this, you have no control, you feel very... touchable.’

His current girlfriend of six months is Andreea Sasu, a Romanian model he met when she modelled in his Swiss showroom, who features heavily in his Instagram feed and is patiently waiting downstairs in the kitchen. ‘I love all the women,’ he cries. ‘Old, young, I like them all. I’m obsessed with women — like cars.’

Sasu travels everywhere with him. ‘An employee could not bring his girlfriend to work, but as I’m the owner of the company, I can mix my private life with my business,’ he smiles. ‘It’s hard for the woman, though, because women always need attention.’

Provocative though he may be, it’s difficult to dislike Plein, with his boundless energy and enthusiasm. His eyes light up as he tells me the Bel Air house on the site he’s bought used to belong to aviator and entrepreneur Howard Hughes. ‘He was the biggest player, the richest man in the world at the time, dated all the Hollywood actresses,’ he beams, clearly inspired.

He is equally revved up on the subject of Plein Sport, his new high-end activewear brand, which he hopes will have 25 standalone stores by the spring. ‘It’s a cash machine, it’s a f**king killer — we’re going to do a 100 million turnover with this next year,’ he fizzes.

The Industry better get used to it, because the Philipp Plein show is here to stay.

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