Amanda wears a coat by Ermanno Scervino, shirt by JW Anderson, trousers by Brunello Cucinelli and boots by Belstaff. It wasn’t a good ride, Brooks admits when we meet that afternoon. She had been up all night with food poisoning, and the horse she’d borrowed from a friend and was hoping to buy had turned out to be impossibly strong. “The first field we went into, he took off. He just flew into the jump,” she tells me, as we drive up the lane from Kingham railway station to her home at Fairgreen Farm in north Oxfordshire. Brooks, 43, looks exceptionally composed for a woman who spent the night being sick and the morning shouting “Out of the way!” as she bowled through the Cotswolds countryside on horseback. But presumably she’s a woman for whom lack of sleep barely registers. Five years ago, she was managing one of the most hectic schedules in retail as fashion director of Barneys New York. Back then, she was a Met Gala regular and Diane von Furstenberg’s mentee. When the This story is from Kinfolk Issue Twenty-Six Buy Now Related Stories Arts & Culture Issue 19 Going Incognito We all secretly wonder what mischief we’d make if invisible: When our identity is hidden, everything seems possible. Arts & Culture Issue 19 The Best Policy Sometimes we talk to each other without feeling heard. Honesty—a most intimate interaction—can be just as thrilling as its more devious inverse. Arts & Culture Issue 19 A Sense of Suspense With unhinged imaginations and mountains of cliff-hangers, the filmmakers behind the sci-fi podcast Limetown have all the makings of a scary story. Arts & Culture Issue 19 Like Clockwork In this new column about time, we learn how slipping off our watches makes us feel like deadline-damning renegades. Fashion Issue 19 Nick Wakeman Creating a menswear-inspired line for women, Nick Wakeman welcomes the challenges arising from forging new aesthetic territories. Fashion Issue 19 Camille Tanoh Camille Tanoh found his niche working for Pierre Hardy and Paul Smith. Now he’s blazing a path for the next generation of French designers.
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