Baby for Karen's man ... (but not with her)
Richard Kay
Last updated at 15:49 28 April 2004
To the outside world she is the epitome of the beautiful, successful and very happy mother and self-made businesswoman.
The shy blue-eyed, slim blonde started out with a sewing machine in her kitchen in Kent making clothes for her mother's friends.
Karen Millen's labours eventually spawned a multi-million pound fashion empire - with 55 branches that carry her name in Britain and another 34 abroad, from Paris to Beirut and Singapore to Los Angeles.
But behind the success there is a heartbreaking story of a broken relationship with the man who is her business partner and the father of her three children, Kevin Stanford.
Despite Kevin being pictured in the arms of Karen on their company's website, the romance has long-since died. Now, he has a eight-week-old son, Luke, with his Icelandic girlfriend, Katla, a 25-year-old former shopgirl who looks uncannily like Karen.
Kevin, 43, tells me: 'Karen and I just got fed up with one another - like people do.
'After all, we'd been together since I was 20 and she was 19. But we're still pretty close - obviously, because we have three children together and we still work together.
'I met Katla four years ago - after breaking up with Karen - at a party in Iceland when I was opening up a franchise there. We've been going out ever since but we didn't live together until Luke came along.
'Katla went on a fashion design course in Florence, and wants to be a designer, but I won't be getting her to work for us because she has to make her own way in Kevin lives in a mansion set in 30 acres of parkland and gardens near Tunbridge Wells.
It is just a few miles from Karen's luxurious Georgian house, where she lives with their three children, aged 13, 12 and seven.
He says Karen, 42 - who is single - and Katla are on reasonable terms. 'They don't go out to lunch with each other, but they get on okay.' Karen met Kevin, then training to be a mechanical engineer, on holiday in Morocco in 1980.
Not only did they fall in love, they went into business together.
Karen, who studied fashion at unfashionable Medway College, had a winning idea: to work designer styles into clothes that young working women want to wear and could afford.
Kevin helped her sell shirts from home, then they opened their first shop in Maidstone.
Kevin oversaw the entire business operation - and still does.
In 2001, Karen said: 'I was never the driving force behind it, it was always my partner, Kevin . . . He's the ambitious one. I've just gone along with it.'
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