However on edge London might be, she appears to be taking her own advice — “You may be hanging on by a thread, but you don’t have to look like it.” She’s elegant in Club Monaco gray silk trousers and a Madison Marcus jacket and two Swarovski crystal necklaces from an upcoming jewelry collection she designed with Sorrelli. The show-stoppers, though, are the four-inch Jean-Michel Cazabat stiletto heels with two-inch ankle straps. “It’s a shackle!” she swoons.
The jewelry line is but one venture in an entrepreneurial year devoted to the book; a new production company; a national fashion campaign for Westfield Shopping Malls; and Style for Hire, the company London co-founded that rolled out Washington in 2010 to bring style experts in multiple cities to average people. Not to mention filming the ninth season of “What Not to Wear.” Style for Hire has since expanded to other cities.
She says overwork has triggered digestive problems. We are dealing, after all, with a self-described perfectionist who organizes her closet by fabric within each color palette. She gets her drive from her parents, a retired think-tank president and NYU professor father and venture-capitalist mother. London’s senior thesis was titled: “Nietzsche, Thomas Mann, and Hermann Broch, the Concept of Self and Its Relationships to the Creation of Character in Literature.”
The style whisperer can write. Viking asked for a memoir. It was not to be.
“I’m 43,” she says. “I’m not there yet. I’m not Shelly Winters. That’s a biography I want to read. She slept with everybody!” London opted instead to have makeover subjects help tell her story.
There are, she says, universal truths. Foremost among them: Style can be transformative. Seeing yourself in an A-line skirt that fits well — no matter what your size — can turn around a negative self image. (Oh, and you can wear white after Labor Day. “Global warming demands it.”)
“I see incredibly successful women beating themselves up,” London says. “There’s something in our culture that allows us to believe we’re never enough. I’m sick of it.”
She makes herself Exhibit A, admitting to insecurity about her unconventional good looks — her distinctive nose and trademark shock of gray hair. “For the record, I would never get a nose job,” she writes. “I wouldn’t be me with a cookie-cutter ski-slope nose. For the same reason, I don’t dye my gray streak.”
In a cluttered landscape of makeover shows, London has demonstrated that fashion is not always frivolous. “Stacy and Clinton are able to access the emotional stuff without humiliating or exploiting,” says clinical psychologist Jennifer Baumgartner, author of “You Are What You Wear: What Your Clothes Reveal About You.”
“That’s rare. It’s done with the dignity of the person totally intact.”
London says she got the idea for the book after a speech in San Francisco a couple of years ago, where she took a risk and came clean about her scars, the broken heart she was nursing and the resulting weight gain. She got a standing ovation. Even in the “Oprah” era, London says, the response shocked her.
Abe Gurko, author of the fashion blog I Mean . . . What?!? says London “translates what fashion is to Everyman,” conveying the idea that “you don’t have to live on Park Avenue to wear a black dress the right way.” He thinks her fans will respond well to her vulnerabilities.
“She’s not trying to be like Anna Wintour,” Gurko says, “and frankly, I’m not sure how much people are really that interested in Anna Wintour’s personal life.”
A fashion queen since age 2, London is pictured in the book as a matchy-matchy toddler in flowered shorts and sun hat. But does she ever close her critical fashion eye?
“I will meet people on the street and the first thing they’ll say is: ‘Rip me apart. Just rip me apart!’ ” she laughs. “As if that’s some fun sort of activity. Some people are gluttons for punishment.”
She used to offer her opinions a lot more freely. “Now I’m a little bit more respectful. But if you ask me, I will tell you the truth.”
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