Simon Wilson interview: Glittering career

For 40 years, Glasgow-born Simon Wilson has been at the helm of Butler & Wilson, the jewellery company of choice for film stars and princesses (that big, diamant lizard Diana wore on her jacket lapel was Butler & Wilson, and she often called in to shop there). Wilson is 65 now, but he is dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved black T-shirt with' Wow' across the chest, light hair slicked back like a lounge lizard, and a voice that reminds you of an ashtray of fag-ends. He talks non-stop, leaving most sentences half-finished before stuttering into the next thought, ideas dripping from the conversation like juice from a squeezed orange. He's always thinking what next, what next, what next, he says, and even his repetition of the words gives some impression of the relentlessness inside his head, the inability to stop even if he wanted to. "I just work. I have no marriage. I have no kids. But it's what your destiny is."

Butler & Wilson made fake into chic, and its jewellery has adorned the pages of Vogue for four decades. Big and bold, multi-coloured stones and diamant were used by Wilson to make statement pieces, the kind of jewellery to cock a snook at the sedate or minimalist. To celebrate its 40th anniversary, the company is running a fund-raising campaign this year in aid of breast cancer, and has produced a truly lavish coffee-table book illustrating the history of Butler & Wilson designs. Colourful butterfly brooches and exotic flower necklaces that spread spectacularly across the neck like water lilies in a pond, studded diamant skulls and cute teddies, and of course the famous giant diamant spider, pinned to the shoulder of black dresses.

Why breast cancer – does Wilson have a personal connection? "Really it's because my shop in the Fulham Road is next to the Royal Marsden, the biggest cancer hospital. I have been there 30 years, and these women, they're unbelievable. They're going in for chemotherapy or they've just been told they have breast cancer, and they say, 'We want to buy something to cheer us up.' They're amazing." He loves women – in the generic rather than the specific sense. "Women can make themselves fabulous. When a guy tries to do that it doesn't work. I love that a woman can transform herself."

Perhaps it's the obsessive nature of creativity and design that draws Wilson to the abstract of love rather than the specific. I once interviewed shoe designer Manolo Blahnik, a man with a similar attitude to Wilson in that he demanded complete surrender to the tyranny of ideas inside his own head. He had a driven quality that made beauty the ultimate ideal, at the expense of any personal life. Nobody could live with him, Blahnik said of himself. He was impossible. He could barely live with himself. When he had first come into the room, he had literally cried out when he spotted my glass of water. "Who put that there?" he demanded, swiftly removing a cork coaster and restoring the perfection of his room, which was adorned with lilies with lime-green stems and a pair of his own exquisitely coordinated and posed lime-green shoes. Artistry was all.

Wilson's offices, above his South Molton Street shop, are different, higgledy piggledy rooms in a listed building, crammed full of books and materials, vintage clothes (a sideline now for both of his London stores) hung up on the walls. Sequined evening gowns glitter in black and silver and amber-gold. Wilson has a similar zeal for beauty to Blahnik. "I know it sounds corny, but I love beautiful things and I love making beautiful things. I think I've got great taste." Beauty might wither, but style doesn't. "You have to know what your personality is going to be. How are you going to be when you are 60? I don't think you should disappear just because you're 60. Wear a fabulous pair of earrings. You can still be stylish."

Wilson feels lucky to have the talent that drives his life. "What would I do if I retired?" he demands. "What would I do? Gardening? I'd go mad. Stark, raving mad." So usually he is too busy when people ask him out to dinner. When he travels on work trips, he rarely parties, preferring to stay in and work on designs. A couple of glasses of wine and he has a hangover. It is simply too disruptive. In the office where we are talking, a CCTV screen shows what's happening in the Aladdin's cave of his shop below, and Wilson's eyes are repeatedly pulled towards it, almost like an involuntary tic. There they go, swivelling to the screen again. The love of his life? Oh, the business, definitely, he says.

Yet there was another love. Like Blahnik, Wilson, who was brought up in Dumbarton, was very close to his mother. "I had an extraordinary thing with my mother," he says. Was she a very glamorous woman? Is that where his eye for jewellery and design came from? "No, not at all. She was your wee Scottish mum who loved her son, and that's all she cared about. She was adorable." Family, her son Simon and his sister Margaret, were the focus of her life.

Wilson was always close to Margaret, who has worked in the business with him over the years. He loved his father too, but he was more difficult. "He had a hard time. He was born in Ireland, and it really was that thing of no money and a really hard life when he was a kid."

In terms of personality. Wilson was most like his mum. "She was nice," he says simply, "and I'm a nice guy." His parents were easily the most influential people in his life. "For giving me… I mean, totally unselfishly… just caring about the family and giving me a security. Money doesn't give me security. I honestly don't care about money. Well, I would care if I was broke, but… it's not a priority in my life." He has never given his staff targets, and doesn't want customers pestered by pushy salespeople in his shops. Butler & Wilson accounts show a profit last year of around half a million pounds, and he has no desire to expand further – though in 1994 he moved into selling on the lucrative shopping channel, QVC.

Butler & Wilson jewellery was the top seller in Harrods for many years, and the brand became synonymous with glamour. It's not an attribute necessarily associated with the west of Scotland, but Wilson says his memories of Glasgow are of a city where people loved dressing up and had a sense of occasion. "When you went out dancing to the Barrowlands, everyone was very stylish and they were all great dancers."

His father was a military man, a piper with the Black Watch regiment, who wanted his son to follow a traditionally masculine route and become an engineer but Wilson felt lost in that kind of environment. "I said to my sister, 'I really don't know how to do this, and I hate it,' so she said, 'Why don't you become a hairdresser?'"

His father was horrified but finally relented, and Wilson became a junior to an eccentric and volatile Scots-Italian hairdresser who took 40 vitamin pills a day and was known to throw customers out of his door. Wilson was a natural, but at 19 he realised he couldn't continue in hairdressing because one day he would end up an old hairdresser. Why was being an old hairdresser worse than an old anything else? "I don't know," laughs Wilson. "I think it was Teasy Weasy Raymond… But I went to my mum and dad and said, 'I'm going to Spain.' So I went off on my own to Marbella, and I met all the crowd from London. Lulu was there. I was nave beyond belief. Like a baby. I was like a 19-year-old who was 15."

He travelled through Portugal with a group of people before landing in London, where he kept being told he had a twin, someone who looked just like him. This twin was called Nicky Butler. They were both skinny with long hair, in fact Wilson's was so long that his father refused to speak to his bohemian son when he returned for a visit. "When I went home the first time I had really long hair and a long suede coat, and he came to pick me up at the airport. 'What the heck do you look like?' He was so embarrassed… 'Look at the state of you.'"

While Butler & Wilson looked alike, they were different personalities. In the late 1960s, they went into business together, touring the antique markets and collecting art deco and art nouveau pieces. The two would meet with others in the King's Road at 5am to share a taxi to Bermondsey market. "They had this thing called 'grabs'," explains Wilson. "Everybody crowded round and they put things in the middle and you had to grab it. I used to watch this and think, 'I don't know how to do this. I'm never going to be able to do this.' You had to be really tough. I was terrible. Butler was great. Everybody was knocking each other and grabbing and then I realised if you don't get anything, you don't have a business. So we started up with art deco which you just don't see any more. It was all really beautiful stuff. Art nouveau. We treated it as fashion, and it was way ahead of its time."

The pair opened their first shop in Fulham Road in 1972, and ten years later Butler & Wilson made its mark with London's first private billboards, 6ft-high and featuring actress Catherine Deneuve (they would later include Faye Dunaway, Charlotte Rampling and Jerry Hall). Deneuve had been filming near the shop and, because she loved the jewellery, agreed to be photographed. But the end came for the boards after Butler met a strange-looking model whose look he admired. "I called her agency and said I wanted to book this girl. They said that would be 5,000 – and this was in 1988 or something. I said, 'What are you talking about?' I knew what they paid her – like 100 quid or something. I said it's for a billboard and they said yeah, what did you pay Catherine Deneuve? I said, do you know what – and I did swear – I said, 'It's none of your business, but actually I didn't pay her anything and you're a f***ing idiot,' and I put the phone down. I thought, 'That's the way it's going to go. Take them away.' That was the statement I made. Can you imagine trying to get anyone now? What are you going to pay them – 10 million or something?"

For a man whose business has been boosted by stars and who relies on the public's desire for glamour, he is dismissive of modern celebrity and claims he gets as much of a kick out of ordinary people wearing his designs. Of course, he enjoyed his association with stars like Deneuve and loved it when Princess Diana showed the world that real diamonds weren't always necessary by shopping at Butler & Wilson. "She would come in with just one bodyguard. She would try earrings and say to customers, 'Do you like these?' She wore loads of our earrings. She was just fantastic, and it was great for us. She never called to say, 'Will you send me some things over,' she would come shopping. She was just a young girl." But in general, he preferred the old days of Hollywood, when stars still had a sense of mystery and you didn't know who they slept with the night before and what they had for breakfast the morning after.

He has no burning ambitions for material things beyond the beautiful house in London that he already owns and which he says he could never have afforded at today's prices. "I'm not greedy. I am never jealous or think, 'Oh, I wish I had this or I wish I had that.'"

He went to St Tropez a couple of years ago and was constantly receiving invitations. "Always somebody's stupid bloody boat sitting there. You have that bit where you walk along the promenade and they're sitting on boats at the end having champagne, but with thousands of people watching them. What's that about? I just think, 'How embarrassing is that?'" All the St Tropez lot go on to Cannes, then go sailing in Sardinia. "It's all the same people. They are all powerful." Does power attract him? "Not at all," he says instantly. "A lot of it is bullying, and I hate that."

It was in the mid-1980s that Wilson took over the reins of the business completely. Nicky Butler went off to open a shop in America, though he remains a consultant for the company. "I wanted to do my own thing and he wanted to do his, I guess. I wasn't very good at the antique thing, and he started doing that. When the fashion started, I was great at that. We worked together, but it's not like we were joined at the hip. He went off to America and let me get on with what I wanted to do. I wanted to change. I never want it to be big but I want to keep changing it and doing different things."

The current recession has not hit Wilson but the recession in the early-1990s nearly destroyed him. His sister, who ran the Glasgow branch of Butler & Wilson, in Princes Square, which eventually closed, told him the recession would be good for him because he would learn such a lot. He didn't welcome her words, but they turned out to be true. It brought home the importance of diversification, and he decided to make tiaras because no matter what happened, people would still get married, and brides like their glitz. "That totally saved my business," he says.

He still visits antique markets wherever he goes, gathering ideas and old pieces. "You're not just seeing jewellery, you're seeing art and paintings and objects, masses of different things, and it's all about timing." He has never attended a jewellery course in his life but thinks it's something you can't really learn. "You have either got it or you haven't. If you are going to be creative, you are creative."

It's a process of constant thought and evolution. "My job is ideas. I'm not the slightest bit interested in sitting making something. I've never done that. I've always been lucky to have great craftsmen who don't have great ideas but who love to make something and get excited about the plating. My feeling is always, 'Don't show me until it's right.' It's about the end result. I need to get 'Wow!'"

About 12 or 13 years ago, Wilson was on a trip to Milan when an assistant tried to take him to see some Chinese jewellery. Some of the stuff was nice, but he was horrified at the thought of getting things made there. He used a factory in Chiswick, 20 minutes away by taxi. Then he came home, and more and more factories started closing. "I thought, 'You know what, this is getting serious.' I used to make everything in London, and then China happened and places started closing down here. There isn't anything here now. No factories. It's terrible."

Wilson flew out to China. It took him two years to get the colour of gold he wanted for one collection, but he worked with the Chinese to get the standards he wanted. The result was good business and personal links, including a Chinese godson. He loves the Chinese people. They are so family-orientated.

Whatever choices people make in life, there is often a sense of sacrifice, a feeling that to achieve your goal you have to forego other things. Wilson says there is no sense of sacrifice in his. He just feels lucky to love what he does so much that he can do it all the time. Unlike women, he says, men don't have the same biological imperative to have a child, a sense of time running out. "And I've done the partying," he says. "I was in New York in the 1980s for maybe four or five months in the year. I knew all the big Americans. I was so innocent, but they all thought I was some big British rock star. I had long hair, and when I opened the door of the taxi it was, 'Oh, yeah, man!' There could be thousands of people, and you just walked straight in. It was amazing. I've had a mad life."

When he talks about his breast cancer campaign fashion show he gets incredibly excited. It involves disco balls and black glitter and amazing-looking guys in crystal trunks and a big portrait of his dad in regimental kilt, and – if he can organise it – doors will open up to reveal a pipe band. Butler & Wilson never did subtle.

It's nice to have his father represented at the show because it was his parents who gave him the sense of security he has carried all his life. Wilson says he has even picked the church in Knightsbridge where he will be buried when the time comes. Even in death he'd like a bit of style. "The church has this wonderful Scottish stone and a cleanness to it. And an honesty thing as well, and that's a great Scottish trait. I love it."

The Scottish boy buried alone in London is not a thought to disturb him because he has always been very content by himself. "I think it's because of my background," he says. "I never feel lonely."