Serena, Marchioness of Bute—or Lady Bute, if we’re being formal—was already seated by the fire in the Ladder Shed bar of London’s Chiltern Firehouse. The languid blonde with long legs and electric blue eyes looked up, smiling shyly.
We’d come to discuss her eponymous range of silk track pants and matching shirts, popular with fashionistas. Its sales have grown exponentially since the line’s launch, in 2015. Bute was wearing an outfit from her latest drop: a relaxed-fit, light-blue, hammered-silk shirt and white pajama-like trousers, with a white blazer.
The youthful 64-year-old blended in among the London hipsters drinking lunchtime cocktails, but her story, which includes a lonely and mostly fatherless childhood, heroin addiction (she’s now 40 years sober), grief (she lost her beloved second husband, John Crichton-Stuart, known as Johnny Bute, to cancer in 2021), and adversity is also one of fortitude and determination.
Bute was born in London. She was three when her older sister died, and then, her parents’ marriage dissolved. Her grief-stricken father moved to Spain, essentially disappearing from her life. Overnight, she became an only child, living among a matriarchy of formidable British women that included her emotionally detached mother, an imperious grandmother, and a much-beloved great-grandmother.
“They were such strong personalities,” she says. She remembers sitting at the top of the stairs of her home in Belgravia, building up the courage to run down without drawing their attention. Her mother eventually remarried, to a politician whom Bute describes as “a good and honorable man.” He dressed formally in black tie for dinner every night, and Bute longed to live like other families did, sitting around a cozy kitchen table.
She loved clothes from a young age. She remembers gazing adoringly at her red Start-Rite (an English children’s-shoe brand) shoes and white socks, praying she would be sent to Glendower Preparatory School, in South Kensington, because she loved their purple uniforms. (Instead, she went to Garden House School—blue gingham blouses and gray pinafores—on Turk’s Row.) After that came boarding school in Kent, where she attended Sibton Park and Bedgebury Park, before returning to London.
For the next few years, Bute lost herself to partying (she was a debutante), took drugs, worked at the fashion emporium Joseph, and modeled in London and Japan. (“I was the worst model,” she recalls. “I hated having my picture taken.”) By 23, she was in rehab. “The drugs gave me false confidence,” she says.
She married her boyfriend, Robert de Lisser, soon after, and they moved to Jamaica, where he was born. “I thought I was sailing off into the sunset,” she says, just as Bob Marley portentously starts playing in the background. She alludes to her husband’s illicit financial dealings, how she toyed with relapsing, and how she started making children’s clothes in their dogs’ kennel to survive.
After 10 years, with her husband “on the run from the authorities,” she says, she’d had enough and moved back to London with her two children, Jazzy and Josh. Broke and alone, she founded the label Wendell and Howe with a friend, designing Comme des Garçons–inspired shirts. Eventually, she also launched a hospitality company, Events Unlimited, and an art dealership, selling works from Jamaica.
At a private viewing, she met John Crichton-Stuart, the handsome Formula One race-car driver. He took her to Wagamama on their first date, and they married in 1999. “We had this huge life together, six kids between us,” she says, smiling sadly. “I had the family I’d always dreamed of having.” But her past addiction still hung over her. She had not known that she had contracted hepatitis C while using drugs, until she unwittingly passed it down to her daughter Jazzy, who became severely ill. Years of tortuous treatment followed, but Jazzy eventually recovered. To distract herself, Bute set up a new label, Anonymous, making camisoles and twinsets. It endured for 10 years.
The family lived a peripatetic existence between Paris, Verbier, London, and Ibiza. (Her house on the island is renowned for its parties; it recently hosted model Jordan Barrett’s wedding, with Kate Moss as ring bearer.) Bute also runs the family estate, Mount Stuart, in Scotland.
When she started noticing Jazzy, now an actress and fashion influencer, wearing Juicy Couture, it gave her the idea to design a more refined version. But not long after she launched her eponymous collection, Johnny was diagnosed with cancer. He died in 2021, and she is still clearly enveloped in the loss of her husband.
But she forges on. “Johnny encouraged me to keep it going,” she says. “I cut things right back while he was sick, but I’d laid down the foundations and rebuilt it up again.” Her range now includes drawstring jogging pants as well as silk dresses, jackets, coats, and tailored trousers, and she is leaning on her friend the stylist George Cortina for advice as she expands.
She’s moving on in other ways, too—renting out the vast, industrial modern house (the former studio where Monty Python’s Flying Circus was taped) to return to her old one in Kensal Rise. “It’s closer to the kids,” she says. As she leaves to take a Zoom call, that great British wartime saying comes to mind: “Keep calm and carry on.”
Vassi Chamberlain is a Writer at Large at Air Mail
