“The clothes we wear really do help to tell the story of our lives,” says fashion designer Henry Holland, who recently launched his first podcast What Were You Thinking in partnership with luxury resale site Vestiaire Collective. In 10 episodes, celebrity guests including Alexa Chung, Sir Paul Smith and Beth Ditto share the secrets behind their wardrobes, and the looks and pieces that have informed their life stories. The sartorial journey Holland takes listeners on is combined with each celebrity donating a valued item on the platform, with all proceeds going to a charitable cause of their choice.

Manchester-born designer Henry Holland grew to fame with his label House of Holland, best known for its signature T-shirts bearing rhyming slogans such as ‘I’ll Tell You Who’s Boss Kate Moss’ and ‘Let’s Play Naked Twister Linda Evangelista.’ And although the current pandemic has meant he’s had to shutter the doors of his stores and call in administrators, with 15 years of experience in the fashion world, Holland has plenty of insights. In the podcast he explores the role fashion plays in how people represent themselves, looking at how body shape, sexuality and perception affects their fashion choices. 

In the first podcast, Holland invites British fashion designer and model Alexa Chung to share her thoughts on constantly being in the public eye, the different points in her career, and how her relationship with fashion has changed over the years. In the podcast, she tells listeners about how, when she moved to New York, she felt alienated in a new city so dressed differently and with more restraint. But she’s learnt that there’s no need to “alter yourself to present yourself in a certain way, but you should just be yourself.”

Each episode will include moving experiences and hilarious anecdotes about the boldest fashion choices and biggest mistakes they’ve made, as well as the most reliable pieces in their closets. As Holland says, “fashion’s so much more than what you wear to stop yourself getting arrested for public indecency. Every single one of us makes choices day in, day out, about what we put on our backs and in turn how we want to be seen by the rest of the world.”