Her name is synonymous with fashion – Karen Millen, the High Street designer whose dresses have been worn by some of the world’s most famous women, including the Princess of Wales.
But, as 63-year-old Karen confesses in this exclusive interview, even she is not immune from worries about her appearance.
Three years ago, she looked in the mirror and realised her once sharp jawline had disappeared.
‘I’d suddenly aged overnight. I’d just hit 60 and it’s almost like I woke up one morning and the texture of my skin had just gone,’ Karen recalls.
‘Everything began to look really crepey – my hands, neck and even my legs. What particularly bothered me was around the jowly area on my face which, as we age, tends to drop a lot. It became quite noticeable.’
High Street designer Karen Millen, 63, pictured before and after her facelift operation which she had done at the Cadogan Clinic in Chelsea, west London
Such a dramatic physical change put a big dent in her self-confidence.
‘There are certain expectations I think people have of ‘Karen Millen’, of what she’s going to be wearing or what she’s going to look like,’ she tells me.
‘It was hard for me to process what had happened to me physically because it was quite sudden. It was hard trying to come to terms with the fact I felt like, ‘This is it – it’s all downhill now’.’
Indeed, she refused to: this summer, Karen took the plunge with a £35,000 facelift using the very latest surgical techniques.
Was it worth it? The Mail followed Karen before, during and after her procedure in July, documenting her transformation. As these photographs reveal, not only have her hated jowls been eradicated, but many of her fine lines have been smoothed away, too.
‘Knowing I look ten years younger, I feel ten years younger, too – if not more,’ she says.
You might wonder why something so superficial matters so much to her. She has always been the image of a strong, confident businesswoman, after all – even when it all went wrong.
Millen grew up on a council estate in Maidstone, Kent, and in 1981, aged just 19, began a tiny shirt-making business funded by a £100 loan, with her now ex-partner Kevin Stanford. After she sold the business in 2004 – for £95 million, of which she received £35 million – it ballooned into a global brand, with 400 stores in 65 countries.
Yet in 2017, after a dispute with HMRC over a £6 million tax bill – and after receiving some catastrophically bad financial advice – she was declared bankrupt.
The much-loved Karen Millen brand can now be found online and is owned by the fashion group Boohoo, which acquired it in 2019.
Women’s desire to look good, she says, stems not from vanity but self-respect. ‘In the past, you got to a certain age and were put on the shelf, but now [older women are] very much celebrated. So there’s more pressure for us to actually look after ourselves – and that’s good. It keeps us on our toes, [so we don’t] get too complacent.’
Having rebuilt her design career – today she collaborates with her old company on a capsule range called Karen Millen: The Founder – she estimates she has spent many thousands of pounds over the years on facial ‘tweakments’, including wrinkle-busting Botox; a laser skin resurfacing treatment called Fraxel; and Profhilo, an injectable treatment that aims to rebuild the skin of the face and body when it loses elasticity and firmness.
Eventually, however, she concluded that a facelift would be ‘more cost-effective’. ‘You look at your face every day. Why not fix it?’ she says.
That’s not to say she didn’t feel nervous before her operation at the Cadogan Clinic in Chelsea, west London.
‘It doesn’t matter what it is, whether it’s for health or whether it’s for cosmetic reasons, there’s a certain amount of risk and uncertainty attached to surgery.’
Karen took the plunge with a £35,000 facelift using the very latest surgical techniques
Karen’s surgeon, Dr Tunc Tiryaki, co-founder of the London Regenerative Institute based at the luxury hotel and spa, the Corinthia, is known among clients as the ‘Da Vinci of facelifts’.
Renowned for his ground-breaking work in ‘facial regeneration’, he was one of the first surgeons in the world to use fat-derived stem cells in mini facelift procedures.
As Dr Tiryaki puts it, his approach doesn’t just make you look younger, but helps tackle ‘age-related decay’ at its source.
After a consultation, Karen opted for a surgical lift to the lower half of her face and neck, an eyelid lift and a stem-cell enriched fat transfer, taking fat from her thighs and transferring it to her face. It’s little known that you can harvest stem cells from adipose tissue: Dr Tiryaki uses the fat to plump the face and the stem cells to regenerate ageing facial skin and diminishing bone structure.
‘Stem cells are capable of turning into any cell in the body you need,’ he tells me. ‘So, if you inject your stem cells [around] your liver, they can turn into liver cells. If you inject them around the bone, they can help bone growth. If you inject them into the skin, they will help the skin.’
Karen had ‘heavy sun damage’, Dr Tiryaki continues, and what he describes as the ‘three hallmarks of ageing’ on her face. ‘Bone resorption’, where the bones literally recede and ‘the framework scaffolding’ of the face loses ‘its definition and strength’; ‘skin muscle sagging’, which is what it sounds like and causes the skin to become loose; and ‘surface quality loss’, which happens as we get older and the skin simply ages. The procedure aimed to tackle all three problems.
It is not for the faint-hearted. The operation lasted two-and-a-half hours and Dr Tiryaki advised that healing would take six weeks, with the full results visible about three months later.
‘Initially, I found it difficult to open my mouth and eat, and I couldn’t speak for a week,’ says Karen.
‘[But] every day the bruising was going down, swelling was going down, and even the scars were healing. I was actually amazed at how easy the procedure was.
‘After two weeks, I was back attending meetings, albeit still a little swollen, but not to the extent that people noticed.
‘After a month, I was already getting compliments as to how well I looked.
‘I felt no real pain – more like a little discomfort for a short time. It’s remarkable how quickly our bodies are capable of healing.’
Karen’s surgeon, Dr Tunc Tiryaki, was one of the first surgeons in the world to use fat-derived stem cells in mini facelift procedures
Karen’s post-operation plan also included a course of five sessions using a hyperbaric chamber with oxygen at the London Regenerative Institute, costing £600.
Recommended by Dr Tiryaki, these treatments involve sitting in a closed pressure chamber for an hour a day to increase the amount of oxygen in the blood. ‘It decreases healing time and also enhances wound healing,’ he explains.
Karen says her two sons – Josh, now 34 and Jake, 27 – were unfazed by what she had done and Josh has since acknowledged how well his mum looks. Meanwhile, her daughter Jordan, a 32-year-old yoga and pilates teacher, supported her every step of the way.
‘She was 100 per cent behind me. She’s the one who always says, ‘Mum just own it’.
But to this day, Karen’s 86-year-old mother, Sheila, doesn’t know about her daughter’s operation.
‘I didn’t want to tell her at the time because I didn’t want her to worry’ she says.
Now, she can pre-empt Sheila’s response: ‘She’ll say: ‘What have you done that for?’ I don’t think she’s ever had a facial in her life – or even a pedicure or a manicure,’ says Karen.
‘It’s never been important to her because I think women of that generation were too busy juggling everything.
‘She placed importance on caring for others and looking after the family and she always came second – or last.
‘I remember looking at my grandmother at 70, thinking she was an old lady with blue rinses and old-fashioned clothes. There’s no reason why we have to be like that now.’
Today, three months on from her surgery, Karen couldn’t look less ‘old lady’. Her complexion is dewy and her loose, sagging skin has been replaced by an impressively sculpted jawline. ‘I feel rejuvenated,’ she says. ‘I used to get up in the morning and look in the mirror, and I always looked quite tired and aged.
‘Now I can actually see my eyes – they are much clearer, they’re more open. My face is just fresher, and with just a bit of tinted moisturiser, I’m good to go.
‘Before, I probably wouldn’t have really enjoyed opening the front door.’
All of which meant she could properly celebrate her 63rd birthday last month. ‘It’s hard to put an age on how I look,’ she muses. ‘What is 63? What does 63 feel like?
‘Funnily enough, I was sitting next to a lady the other day and she said, ‘God, your skin’s so smooth. What do you use?’ So, it’s noticeably different and noticeably better.
‘I’m grateful for having the opportunity to rejuvenate myself, and I mean not only physically, but how I feel within. I feel like it’s given me new energy.’ Karen doesn’t rule out more surgery in the future either.
‘Never say never. By the time I get to my early 70s, hopefully I’ll be looking like someone in her 60s…
‘Maybe I’ll get to a point where I’m happy to be the way I am, but who knows?
‘They say surgery can be addictive. I totally get that because if you’ve seen an improvement somewhere, then why wouldn’t you try it elsewhere?’ Will her new face help her rebooted career?
‘If you look good, it makes you feel good, and if you feel good, then you’re going to perform better in anything that you’re doing, particularly if you’re in the public eye.
‘When we started the label, it was never about age, it was always about attitude.
‘For the first time in years, I feel excited again. I feel alive. I feel like it is my time again.’
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