Isabel Marant: “I Feel Like a High-Performance Athlete”

French fashion designer Isabel Marant has opened up on how she copes with such a busy lifestyle. Constantly producing collections, including for her mainline label and also the Etoile diffusion collection, Marant admits that it can be stressful, and so she has to be careful and stay healthy. The designer likes to swim to elevate stress and often feels more like an “athlete” because of her workload. She explains that her job often feels like a race to keep up and stay on top of everything:

”I think now to be a designer you have to be the most healthy person – I wake up early and have a half-hour swim every morning to manage the stress. If you don’t go to bed early, with all those collections we have to provide all the time … really, it’s a race. I feel like a high­ performance athlete more than a designer.”’

Marant also believes designers need to be “strong” because things can go wrong and it’s easy to begin feeling isolated. She comments that her family help her to stay grounded because she believes it can otherwise be a very “lonely” profession. She adds that the celebrity aspect of being a designer can also warp people because it can be quite fake and fleeting. She candidly said:

”You have to be very strong to survive. I have a family – I think that helps a lot. You can be so lonely. You get very huge with celebrity, but it’s nothing after that. There’s a lot of fakeness, and it can leave you alone very easily.”