Weir shows me iPhone snaps of her latest harvest: tomatoes, broccoli, strawberries, carrots, courgettes. To the delight of her nine-year-old daughter, Astrid, there are also wild flowers and newts in the pond. “We’ve got a great fig tree, but it’s getting decimated by the wood pigeons,” she says, laughing. Work-life balance doesn’t exist, it’s all integrated, she says. “It is a place of calm; somewhere Astrid, my dad and I will take a packed lunch.”
It makes sense that cultivating the vegetable patches chimes with her job. Ever since her stint at Selfridges, Weir has been fastidious about measurable growth, be that with planting or persuading a board of directors around to her way of thinking. She encourages her team to check in regularly with designers and connect them with the right people to drive their businesses forward, on a local and global scale. Weir’s own Rolodex isn’t short on contacts. She has close ties with V&A director Tristram Hunt, chief executive of the BFI Ben Roberts and Serpentine Galleries CEO Bettina Korek. She is also in lockstep with deputy mayor Simons. “It’s an industry that has huge growth potential and also more broadly, the power to bolster our reputation and influence our culture,” Simons says of Weir’s appointment, citing her vision in stewarding the BFC into its next exciting era.
Arguably, the CEO’s biggest challenge will be to rewrite — and continue to rewrite — some of the council’s own rules from within. “Arriving here at the BFC when you’ve had the same leadership for 16 years, of course, you’re going to have this feeling of ‘We’ve always done it that way’, but what would we do if we were rebuilding — how would we reshape this organisation for now to meet the needs of the people that matter most, which is the design community?” says Weir.
It’s time to get strategic about the UK’s global fashion future, she says. On her mission list: forging new relationships with her colleagues in Paris to work together to ensure that, with the pipeline of creative talent that comes out of the capital to service the rest of Europe, “London stays a healthy part of the fashion ecosystem”. She’s also envisioning what a future for British designers might look like with a BFC base in Mumbai. “Everyone talks about how the other cities have got commerce, and we’ve got creativity. Yes, we do have creativity, but it doesn’t mean that there isn’t success, scalability and growth that can be attached to that creativity,” Weir says. Outside her window, the Regency balustrades on London’s rooftops are bathed magnificently in late afternoon sunshine (“Architecture from when this nation was proud,” Weir notes).
Brace yourself for London Fashion Week, and a new dawn for British fashion. “This is the start of a different era,” she says. “Let’s experience it together.”
Photographs by Tung Walsh. Styling by Honey Sweet Elias.
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