When Maia Norman was growing up in Orange County, California, she loved sitting on the beach with her shortwave radio, listening to the foreign chatter and thinking, Wow, what’s out there? Today she still spends a lot of time at the beach—at home on the rugged coast of northern Devon, England, or in Mexico or Bali, chasing waves. But who has time these days to listen to the radio when surfing, motocross racing, tooling down the Thames on a 260-horsepower Jeanneau powerboat, fishing with the kids, collecting antique Native American textiles and designing a ready-to-wear collection? Norman is even talking about crossing the English Channel on a paddleboard for charity, and it’s all so seemingly effortless. “I like to take things slowly and gently—get some air,” the petite bronzed designer says facetiously. After all, this is a woman who customized a wetsuit so she could surf while five months pregnant. “You know that defiance that comes over you?” she asks. “Like, ‘Don’t mess with me; this is not going to hold me back!’”
Nor does she let other inconveniences hold her back. Last summer Norman relaunched Mother of Pearl, the ready-to-wear collection she and her former partner, designer Sue Foulston, founded in 2002 and ran until 2007, when artistic differences fractured the alliance. “It was kind of heading into afternoon cocktails, going a little bit Doris Day for me,” says Norman, 47. “It needed to be tougher and sexier.”
If people are judged by the company they keep, the fact that Norman’s taste veers toward edgy is hardly surprising. She is the partner of Damien Hirst and mother of his three sons—Connor, 14, Cassius, nine, and Cyrus, four. Norman, who studied fine art at Parsons Paris School of Art & Design, met Hirst in the late Eighties through a former boyfriend, gallerist Jay Jopling. At the time, she was designing rings—big ones set with semiprecious stones—and Hirst’s star was on the rise. Before long Norman was accompanying the artist on expeditions to slaughterhouses and maggot farms and gathering old medical supplies for his famously gruesome works. She also found herself falling for him. Over the years, she has watched Hirst become wildly successful and has stood by him during his battle with drug and alcohol addiction and his subsequent recovery.
“I was pretty much head over heels in love, so I leapt at any chance to spend time with Damien,” Norman says of the prefame years. “We are well suited in that we share morbid curiosities. I mean, I didn’t even know a maggot farm existed, let alone [that I would] go see how the whole place works. Fascinating. I must admit, though, the abandoned hospitals were pretty scary. We would go in at night, and I didn’t know what we might run across.”
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