J.Crew’s Jenna Lyons is a paradigm of womanhood, a 44-year-old who negotiates the fall-out from a public and complicated divorce as successfully as she clashes bold patterns with classic stripes. 

She’s a design genius, who, along with CEO Mickey Drexler, made J.Crew one of the most successful brands in America, and God, she knows how to decorate: I mean, have you seen the Park Slope house she shared with her husband?

We treat interviews with the six-foot-tall creative director/president of J.Crew as instructions for life and now that another has landed, this time in US magazine Fast Company, we have a new set of commandments.

 

1. If your trousers feel a little tight, go on a juice diet. Jenna tells the interviewer, ‘The inside button would pop before I even zipped it. I was like, Oh, God!’ So she went on a 10-day ‘cleanse’, which involved something called Isogenics and left her feeling ‘mangry’ and, no doubt, thin.

2. Be gentle with your subordinates, even when you are incredibly successful and famous. Speaking about how she gets the best from her team, she says: ‘Managing creative people – not so easy. A lot of emotion, a lot of stroking. Some people need tough love. Some people need a lot of love ... When someone creates something and puts it in front of you, that thing came from inside of them, and if you make them feel bad, it's going to be hard to fix, because you've actually crushed them.’

3. Make rare genetic disorders work to your advantage. She has a condition called incontinentia pigmenti, which affects teeth, hair, skin and eyesight. She was relentlessly bullied as a child but learned to seek refuge by creating beauty in art and design. ‘I felt a huge drive to make clothes that everybody could have because I felt ostracised by that world of beauty and fashion,’ she says.

4. Take positive lessons from traumatic life events. After her parents’ divorce, she remembers, ‘Feeling like I never wanted to rely on a man, I was like, I gotta work my ass off.’ And work her ass off she did.

5. Manipulate your boss skilfully. Jenna knows just how to work Drexler. ‘Sometimes his head is filled with 50 other things and he has an allergic reaction to something because he looks at it crooked or he just had a bad meeting,’ she says. ‘And it's like, 'Okay, hold on. Don't look at that for a second. Let's redirect. I need you to calm down.' I swear to God there are maybe three people, one of them being his wife, who can do that.’