India Hicks: ‘Good taste has nothing to do with money or class’

Speaking to India Hicks is enough to make you regret all your life choices. Woe betide you if you followed her on Instagram over lockdown – the white clapboard house in the Bahamas that she shares with her husband and five children has the sort of wooden shutters and palm-tree filled garden that we dream of at the best of times, let alone during a pandemic.

Or earlier this year, when she and David Flint Wood – the father of her photogenic brood and her partner of 26 years – finally married in a picture perfect Oxfordshire village. Hicks looked dazzling aged 55 in ultra-fitted lace Emilia Wickstead with a long white veil; her eldest son gave her away, while her teenage daughter was the maid-of-honour.

So far, so idyllic – but then again, Hicks has been the envy of her peer group since 1981, when she was a cherub-faced bridesmaid in flouncy petticoats at the wedding of Charles and Diana. The aura of glamour intensified in her 20s when she moved to Paris and became a high society model. Now, she works as a designer from one of the Bahamas’ smallest islands, while spending a good chunk of time in a rambling house in the Oxfordshire countryside.

“It hasn’t always been perfect,” says Hicks (unconvincingly, really, as she’s calling me in rainy London from her Bahamas study, which has its doors flung open on to the beach). “We’ve always been a bit unconventional and I suppose people are drawn to that.”

She is the third child of Lady Pamela Hicks (whose parents were the Earl and Countess Mountbatten of Burma) and the late interior designer David Hicks. She is also the second cousin and goddaughter of King Charles – like him, she spent her teenage years in the no-nonsense Scottish boarding school of Gordonstoun. Her glamorous life is put somewhat in perspective when you realise that, aged 11, she was on holiday with her family in Ireland when her grandfather’s fishing boat was blown up by the IRA. He died, as did her 14-year-old cousin, Nicholas, and this frightening period of British history was memorably dramatised in the fourth series of The Crown, with Mountbatten played by Charles Dance. I ask if she has seen it and she quickly says no. “We don’t really get Netflix out here.”

I have no doubt that Hicks could watch the show if she wanted to – but I also understand why she doesn’t want to discuss it. She has built a successful career in Britain and America from being stylish, beautiful and royal-adjacent; distant enough from the family to freely write books and launch clothing and interiors collections, but close enough to attend the funeral of Elizabeth II and be a patron of the Prince’s Trust.

“It was extraordinary being there for [Elizabeth II’s] funeral,” she says. “I was very relieved to find myself in England with my mother during that period. The Queen’s death was a chapter closing for all of us, but for my mother [who was a bridesmaid and lady-in-waiting to the Queen] it was grief on a more personal level. I often wondered how she was and she kept using the word ‘acceptance’.”

Hicks is now spending more time in Oxfordshire to be closer to her nonagenarian mother; she also chose to get married there earlier this year rather than in the Caribbean as she wanted, for once, “to be very conventional”. She tells me that Flint Wood first proposed 25 years ago when Hicks was pregnant with their eldest son, Felix. “But being in my fiercely independent woman phase, I never accepted,” she says.

Lockdown changed her mind and it was she who suggested it to him one night after supper at home in the Bahamas.

Spending so much time in the UK planning the wedding has allowed Hicks to partner with three local fashion brands this year – with the leather label Tusting, as well as Hester Bly and Penelope Chilvers. Unlike her earlier collections, which mostly nodded to her Bahamian life, all three are British to the core.

“There is a very unpretentious side of British fashion, one that doesn’t take itself too seriously, that I’m such a fan of,” she says. “There’s also a grittiness that I love. I spent time in Paris after the lockdown – it was wonderful to be there and see that energy but I prefer the style in England.” Gritty, these collections are not – but Hicks explains that she had an urge to work on pieces that were slightly removed from her life in the Bahamas. “Cold-weather dressing is great fun – and I can be drawn into being a little lazy and doing that LA thing where you wear your leggings all day long.”

Instead, she has returned to a heritage that’s in her bones. “When I was a child, nobody ever bought me anything new, so even today I look for longevity,” she says. “My mother certainly never considered spending frivolously on clothing – she grew up during the war, and while she had a mother who was an heiress who could afford handmade shoes from Paris, I had a mother who would religiously bring me hand-me-down boxes. Each October, we would swap from summer to winter – even my underwear would change, and I hated it, especially these scratchy wool pants from who-knows-what great aunt. Winter underwear – my God – what a period in time.”

Hicks has raised her five children – one of whom is adopted – in a far more relaxed way, but when I ask if her aristocratic roots have influenced her taste, she pauses. “I definitely shy away from the word ‘class’,” she says. “Good taste is everything, but in the end it has nothing to do with class. My father came from an ordinary background but he was anything but ordinary. He was a difficult father but a brilliant designer and made me realise good taste and design are by no means dependent on money.”

The collaboration with Tusting has brought together her father, husband and son. Flint Wood owned a treasured but tired old Tusting bag that Hicks had given him 26 years ago. Looking for a wedding present, she asked the brand if they sold something similar. Instead, they offered to rejuvenate it.

She was impressed and their later collaboration was inspired by David Hicks and partly designed with the artistic help of her son Felix, 25. “The inner lining was from a fabric from my father’s bedroom which originally came from 1910. My eldest son was able to add in some of the beautiful motifs when he recreated it for me – it really was three generations coming together.”

Will she give the Princess of Wales one of her bags? “She wants to not be given things, but maybe. She really is an extraordinary woman and has now developed a very strong sense of style which goes hand-in-hand with the work she is doing. She has found the balance, her style doesn’t overtake or overpower her or her causes – and you don’t necessarily remember all the individual pieces, but instead have the impression of something very beautiful.”

The same (as those of us who torture ourselves on Instagram know all too well) could be said for India Hicks.