Last month, the American handbag designer Marin Hopper found herself eating steak in the LA sunshine for Thanksgiving. “We came out of the lockdown in New York and then we decided to move to Los Angeles,” she tells me on a phone call. The 58-year-old Californian has been based in New York City, where she established her luxury handbag brand, Hayward, and its male counterpart, Hopper, since 2015.
But now, after spending the past six years living on the top floor of her Upper East Side showroom, Marin is back on the West Coast. “I’m from LA,” Hopper says, “it’s my home town.”
Hopper grew up in the glow of the silver screen, surrounded by the Hollywood royalty who surrounded her parents, the film stars Dennis Hopper and Brooke Hayward. But her instinct for fashion started at a young age, "I wanted to dress my mother all the time when I was a child. I took great pleasure in dictating to her what she should wear," she says. "I wanted to be in a place that drew on all the worlds I loved - art, music, movies - and fashion seemed like the perfect way to bring it all together."
Along the way she worked at accessories brands Tod’s and Hogan, and served as the fashion director for Elle magazine for five years before the pull of her family's cultural legacy grew too strong for her to ignore. Her father Dennis was an avid photographer as well as an accomplished film actor, and after he died in 2010 he left behind an extensive collection of snapshots detailing his days in the limelight. Alongside the trove of anecdotes and memories from her childhood, these pictures provided the perfect tools for Hopper to tell her family’s story.
But instead of turning to cinema for inspiration, Hopper chose the creative outlet she was most comfortable with and designed a line of luxurious handbags. “Bags are just the way to begin to tell the story,” she says. It was in this spirit that Hopper christened her handbag brand with her mother’s maiden name in 2008. A second brand specialising in men's accessories, Hopper, followed in 2015.
Hopper’s mission lies in giving new life to the characters and objects of her family’s stories. She does this through her designs and the spaces surrounding them. Most notably the Hayward brand logo, a simple H, which was originally conceived by her great-grandfather, the Hollywood agent Leland Hayward, and which bears a complex family story.
For the past few years, the Grosvenor Atterbury mansion on the Upper East Side, which serves as both Hopper's showroom and her private home, has been the space for this. The first floor is filled with Hopper’s designs and family memorabilia, while she lives on the second with her husband, John Goldstone, 51, a film producer and co-founder of Hayward and Hopper, and Violet, their 18-year-old daughter.
The Grosvenor Atterbury mansion is not the first stately Manhattan home to be inhabited by Hopper’s family. Her step-great-grandmother, Maisie Hayward, once owned what is now the Cartier Mansion on 5th Avenue, before she traded it in with Pierre Cartier himself in exchange for “a perfectly matched strand of seawater pearls,” says Marin. “Because who needs the dusty old mansion when you can have the ultimate accessory?”
This trade sparked a lifelong relationship between the Haywards and Cartier. “In those days people like [the socialite and oil heiress] Millicent Rogers used to go from her place in town with a flower or leaf from her garden and say, ‘Can you make a brooch in this exact shape in gold for me?’,” Hopper says. Leland Hayward, Hopper’s great grandfather, was one such person, and as a young man he had Cartier turn a logo he’d designed for himself into a watch fob.
“My mother, after he died, she wore it as a necklace around her neck my whole life,” Hopper says, “and that’s what we use as a font for the Hayward H.” Leland’s logo went on to serve as a lock on the first Hayward bag, a zipper bowl and an ornamental logo.
A portrait of Maisie Hayward toying with the infamous strand of pearls hangs in the showroom. The work, commissioned by Hopper and executed by Claudia Munro Kerr, a Manhattan-based painter, proved to be a hit. “Cartier found out about it,” Hopper says, “and it asked her to do another one for its store when it was redesigned in 2017".
Hopper understands public fascination with her family and its members. In fact, Hopper’s brands are particularly popular in Japan, where customers are mad for her family tree, which serves as the wallpaper in the New York showroom’s bathroom. “They’ve asked us to make prints of the family tree onto canvas and leather for bags,” she reports. Despite the hit to brick and mortar shopping brought about by the pandemic, the Hayward and Hopper brands continue to thrive in Japan, with the brands selling from three of Tokyo’s leading department stores.
Hayward launched in Bergdorf Goodman in 2015, and it didn’t take long before the business spread worldwide. “From there our business grew very organically to the Neiman Marcus Group, we were in a hundred stores across Japan.” Goldstone says. The brands also sell in Manhattan, London and Istanbul, and are featured in a number of high-end boutiques such as Harvey Nichols and Selfridges.
The coronavirus crisis forced the couple to reassess their plans, as local consumers relocate and change their habits. “Everybody has gone somewhere else,” Goldstone says. In this couple’s case, it meant spending most of the summer in Hudson, New York. And it seems they are not the only ones. “We were in lockdown for four months. Everyone was really hunkered down, quarantining, and then when we came out of it everyone we knew had bought houses,” Hopper laughs.
With much of the Upper East Side settling down in Hudson, two hours from the city, the logical move was for the business to follow. “I’ve always wanted to have a shop in Hudson, so we’ve partnered with this great antiques store called The Locust Tree,” Hopper says. As a result, the shopfront has moved from Manhattan’s 70th Street to Hudson’s Warren Street. And the new shop is not the only innovation of the past few months. “We are just about to launch our new holiday collection for Hayward."
The pair now split their time between Hudson and LA, and in California Hopper and Goldstone have been working on other things too. Now that Hopper’s brands are established, she’s ready to move onto the next stage, “and we have a top secret way of doing that,” Goldstone says. But for now, Hopper is enjoying her time back in LA, grilling steaks from her favourite butcher - Gwen LA - and testing out products from her new line.
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