. 'We've always been a bit unconventional and I suppose people are drawn to that.' She is the third child of Lady Pamela Hicks (whose parents were the Earl and Countess Mountbatten of Burma) and the late interior designer David Hicks. She is also the second cousin and goddaughter of King Charles – like him, she spent her teenage years in the no-nonsense Scottish boarding school of Gordonstoun. Her glamorous life is put somewhat in perspective when you realise that, aged 11, she was on holiday with her family in Ireland when her grandfather's fishing boat was blown up by the IRA. He died, as did her 14-year-old cousin, Nicholas, and this frightening peri){kind=link}
The designer and former model seems to have had a charmed life – and now she’s working with three British fashion brands
Speaking to India Hicks is enough to make you regret all your life choices. Woe betide you if you followed her on Instagram over lockdown – the white clapboard house in the Bahamas that she shares with her husband and five children has the sort of wooden shutters and palm-tree filled garden that we dream of at the best of times, let alone during a pandemic.
Or earlier this year, when she and David Flint Wood – the father of her photogenic brood and her partner of 26 years – finally married in a picture perfect Oxfordshire village. Hicks looked dazzling aged 55 in ultra-fitted lace Emilia Wickstead with a long white veil; her eldest son gave her away, while her teenage daughter was the maid-of-honour.
So far, so idyllic – but then again, Hicks has been the envy of her peer group since 1981, when she was a cherub-faced bridesmaid in flouncy petticoats at the wedding of Charles and Diana. The aura of glamour intensified in her 20s when she moved to Paris and became a high society model. Now, she works as a designer from one of the Bahamas’ smallest islands, while spending a good chunk of time in a rambling house in the Oxfordshire countryside.
“It hasn’t always been perfect,” says Hicks (unconvincingly, really, as she’s calling me in rainy London from her Bahamas study, which has its doors flung open on to the beach). “We’ve always been a bit unconventional and I suppose people are drawn to that.”