Couture With a Cause

Skye Hankey moves easily between two worlds that rarely overlap: the rarefied air of haute couture and the quieter, more demanding work of hands-on philanthropy. Long before fashion entered the picture, she built her own career in high-end real estate — learning to hold her own in powerful rooms years before she ever married into the prominent Hankey finance family. What stands out most is how private she's stayed despite a life that could easily be lived in public. She's an involved mother first, and she has little interest in performing for an audience.

On Choosing Couture

For the cover, she wore a custom Miss Sohee gown to the Cannes Film Festival — a sculptural piece built around hand embroidery, a dramatic cape, and custom lace Jimmy Choo boots. She's drawn to designs that celebrate the female form without losing softness, and she's just as drawn to the people behind them. Wearing a designer's work, she explains, is a way of honoring a relationship and a craft she genuinely admires.

A Portrait of Motherhood

The image that ended up on the cover wasn't staged. While the team shot her gown in a hotel hallway before the Cannes red carpet, her daughter Rome — who travels everywhere with her — climbed onto the train and turned it into a game the two of them play at home, pretending it was a magic carpet. It's become one of Skye's favorite photographs: proof that couture and everyday motherhood were never meant to live in separate rooms.

Finding Her Own Balance

When dressing for an event honoring a particular designer, Skye's instinct is to reflect that designer's legacy rather than compete with it. She's learned to take fashion risks while still choosing pieces that feel unmistakably like her — and she says the process energizes her rather than draining her. Giambattista Valli stands out as a defining influence: his whimsical, feminine aesthetic, and his early willingness to dress her, shaped the way she carries herself in his designs today.

Giving as a Calling, Not a Campaign

Philanthropy, for Skye, was never an afterthought or a branding exercise — she describes it as a calling she wanted to meet in person, not just fund from a distance. She supports Coco's Angels, the Gabrielle's Angel Foundation, and A Safe Haven for Newborns, with a Palm Beach event benefiting the latter on the horizon. Becoming a mother changed the shape of that empathy: she finds it hard to look away from a child in crisis, or a mother fighting for her baby's life.

Her approach to choosing causes is instinctive rather than strategic — she's pulled toward organizations supporting sick children, foster youth, and mothers in hardship, on the belief that changing even one life is enough to ripple outward. One memory in particular has stayed with her: a mother whose young son is alive today because of medical research funded by donors like her. It's the kind of story, she says, that turns philanthropy from an abstraction into something real.

Asked why people so often describe her as warm and grounded, she doesn't dress up the answer — she simply says she's being herself, a little more openly now than before. It's a fitting close for a profile of a woman who has never seen much reason to separate couture, motherhood, and purpose in the first place.