Pierre Lagrange: ‘What I’ve done is disruption with respect’
The maverick hedgie on making suits badass, the case for capitalism — and coming out at 48
Shortly before my encounter with surely the City’s zaniest financier, Pierre Lagrange sends a mischievous message. He has had “another cool idea”. We are to scrap the plan to meet in his Mayfair club. Instead we should lunch at his tailor — and it is his tailor. It is six years since he startled the worlds of fashion and finance by buying Huntsman, then the stuffiest of gentleman’s outfitters. I am, he says, to go to the boardroom, which was “totally wrecked” in an action sequence in the second Kingsman spy movie.
So it is that on a hot summer’s day I trot along Savile Row and into the Huntsman showroom, past two stags’ heads and rolls of dandyish tweed and up a flight of stairs. It’s easy to see how director Matthew Vaughn was inspired to make the Kingsman films after being fitted for a suit here.
The Kingsman conceit is simple. Outwardly it is an old-school tailor; in fact it is the front for a network of secret agents funded by eccentric financiers. My lunch companion fits the script. On paper the 57-year-old Belgian is a financial nerd: an engineer who made a fortune tearing up the rules of investment management as one of the early super successful “hedgies”. But his back-story is rather edgier: innovator, fashionista, iconoclast, Harley rider and more. And secretive his HQ certainly is.
I rattle at the door at the top of the stairs. No answer. Back down a threadbare red-carpeted flight of stairs I go. Only this time I stop on the first floor landing. Ah. There is a handle, camouflaged in the Huntsman tweed wallpaper. I knock. The door swings open. There is Lagrange.
He is wearing his cavernous smile and a thigh-length deep blue jacket with shirt unbuttoned to the middle. We are surrounded by exotic costumes. For more than 150 years Huntsman has dressed royalty from the House of Hanover to Hollywood. Lagrange laughs when I ask if his purchase was a “classic” case of a financial titan getting bored and investing in a “plaything”.
“It’s completely fair,” he says. “When people saw me coming they just thought ‘OK. Someone else is coming to play . . . ’ But my rationale was slightly different.”
Lagrange was in his heyday a master of the universe. In 1995 he was one of three co-founders of GLG Partners as a unit of Lehman Brothers. They surfed the boom years with aplomb — spinning off from Lehman in 2000 and going public in 2007 — and then also the crash when banks all but shut down. They were bought in 2010 by Man Group for $1.6bn — not a good deal for Man as it transpired but that was not Lagrange’s problem. It was then that he became restless. He may be from a country synonymous with caution and calm, but this is a Belgian who likes to push boundaries whenever he can.
“When I was running the hedge fund a great friend of mine said you need to look to do something else too. I did to enrich my life. I’m interested in millions of things. I’m on the verge of Curious George sometimes. I’m just curious about everything.”
We are perched at the boardroom table. It has hosted many a memorable meal in the Kingsman movies — not least, spoiler alert, a dinner when the spymaster played by Michael Caine ends up drinking his own poison in a glass of Napoleonic brandy. But before we can eat we have to go shopping. We are soon striding back downstairs to Nathalie, a deli 10 minutes walk away.
As we weave through Hanover Square he enthuses about an interview he has just read in The New York Times with Jan Morris. The 92-year-old writer’s life story has particular resonance. She was raised as a man, married, had children, and then in 1972, aged 46, had gender reassignment surgery. At the age of 48, Lagrange, then married with three sons, realised he was gay.
“It’s an amazing article; it echoes for me. She is the same person and has a totally different existence . . . When I realised I was gay I was terrified. It was an extraordinary moment. I was terrified that people would not love me any more . . . and that people who trust me would not trust me any more.”
Nathalie’s manager races up to him. In a trice we have picked chargrilled broccoli with smoked paprika almonds, bulgar with graceburn feta and purple kale and a range of spicy salads. We delve into the wine enclave and opt for a 2016 Russian River Chardonnay.
As we march back with our goodies, we reflect on the digital disruption of the media. His advice is simple. “Either eat or get eaten.”