Archive for the ‘Style’ Category

With Diamonds

Posted on: November 24th, 2010 by riddaway 1 Comment

Shannon Denny meets Sarah Owen, co-owner – alongside her sister Lily Allen – of the spectacular new vintage clothing boutique Lucy in Disguise, and hears about renting out masterpieces, dressing up for Bella Freud, and the downside to having a pop star for a business partner

Dressing up is a popular pastime for plenty of young girls, but for half-sisters Sarah Owen and Lily Allen it was more like an extension of the family business. The pair are daughters of the film producer Alison Owen, whose credits range from Shaun of the Dead to The Other Boleyn Girl. When Sarah was four, her mum married actor Keith Allen. Lily was born the next year, and Alfie came along the year after that. After the breakup with Keith, their mum was in a long relationship with comedian Harry Enfield. Lily went on to pop stardom, Alfie became an actor, and Sarah became a producer like her mum. That’s an awful lot of showbiz in one family, and an awful lot of dressing up.

Last year the half-sisters started talking about turning their love of dressing up into a business, and the result is a King Street vintage shop that’s styled as a flat belonging to “Lucy”. Each “room” represents a different era. The 1920s for example is a sitting room in which beaded dresses hang next to handmade lighting fashioned from Terry De Havilland shoes. The 1960s zone is a riot of bling, accented with Bond girl-inspired wallpaper created just for the shop. The 1970s section drips with wild prints and a serious amount of suede. Follow the pink plush carpet downstairs and you arrive in the beauty parlour, kitted out with a Grey Goose vodka bar. Manicures are available at the Wah concession, or you can flip through lookbooks to find vintage styles courtesy of the Bumble & Bumble blowdry bar and Ila Masqua makeup counter. Next door is the super-luxe dressing room that’s available for hire to groups.

A limited-edition Lucy in Disguise poster evokes Alphonse Mucha or 60s album art, but is in fact a collaboration between Tim Watkins of the Gorillaz and Nigel Weymouth, creator of the iconic swinging sixties boutique Granny Takes a Trip. “That’s a real ethos of ours – the fusion of old and new,” says Sarah. “We don’t want to be a dusty old vintage shop where you look like you’re stepping out of a BBC drama. We want it to be vintage in a modern, wearable way.” Make that modern, wearable and covetable. My eyes stinging from the effort of absorbing so many garments I would love to immediately put on, I ask Sarah about how she landed every right-thinking woman’s dream job.

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Devine Comedy

Posted on: March 28th, 2010 by admin No Comments

Tatty Devine is a small independent jewellery brand with more wit and invention than a thousand high street jewellery chains put together. Jackie Modlinger meets its charismatic creators…

“We were 20 when we started up and at first we went a bit bonkers,” says Rosie Wolfenden, looking back at the early days of Tatty Devine – the jewellery company she established in 1999 with her friend Harriet Vine.

And as the company’s new spring collection clearly demonstrates, a bit bonkers they most definitely remain. Paper doilies, Chinese cocktail parasols topped with glace cherries, anchors and chains, scallop-edge love hearts in bright reds and pinks, pearly queen pendants, ice cream sundaes – this may be jewellery, but not as we know it.

The company’s inventive, quirky, witty, kitsch brand of art costume jewellery and accessories is hand-made in London and found in two signature shops in the capital – the first in Brick Lane, the latest baby in Covent Garden’s Monmouth Street, which, with its distinctive rock-candy-pink exterior, looks like an accessory sweetshop.

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Knickerbocker glory

Posted on: June 1st, 2009 by admin No Comments

cross-my-heart

Fine Rees, the woman behind Miss Lala’s Boudoir, on Marie Antoinette, Hollywood and big, glamorous knickers

“When I came up with the boudoir idea, it was all about chandeliers and silk sheets, it was a lady’s private rooms, it was old Hollywood, it was Marie Antoinette trying on clothes and eating cake. My mum brought me up on black and white movies, and my love of lingerie harks back to that Hollywood glamour. I could be wearing something as dull as jeans, but underneath I could be Jean Harlow.”

“I think colour makes people happy. I think sparkles make people happy. I think bows and frills make people happy. Underwear is the first thing that goes on your body. If you’re miserable and you need to brighten your day, lingerie can make you feel better. If you put on a grey pair of cotton knickers, it’s a message to yourself. You should put on really bright silky ones when it’s raining outside. It can really cheer you up.”

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Crowning glory

Posted on: June 1st, 2009 by admin No Comments

Stephen Jones – probably the world’s most celebrated milliner – talks to Jackie Modlinger about Covent Garden, John Galliano and the enduring qualities of the top hat.

When did you first decide that you wanted to be a milliner?
Basically, it was when I was at college having arrived from boarding school – I did an Art Foundation course at High Wycombe School, but I didn’t have a clue what I wanted to do. I really wanted to go to St Martin’s; it was the centre of London, but I wasn’t good enough to enrol on any of the courses like printing, sculpture or graphics. I really loved the idea of doing fashion, and to my complete surprise they accepted me. I was something of a token male – there were only two other men on the course. I was really enthusiastic, but knew nothing whatsoever about designing clothes. After the first month, they realised that my sewing was really bad. I went to Lachasse, a London-based couturier, for a couple of months’ work experience during the holidays. Back at college, I asked for a transfer from tailoring to the hat department and that was that – from the first day I knew that that’s what I wanted to do. The hat is a certain British thing that people do love wearing.

Why did you choose Covent Garden as the location for your shop and what does the area mean to you?
At college, we were just round the corner. I remember when there were only about three shops in Long Acre – Paxmans (the French horn shop), Flip and Paul Howie with his PR guru wife Lynne Franks in the basement. That’s how I first knew Covent Garden. When I left college, we would go to the Blitz club on Great Queen Street. Steve Strange – one of my friends – introduced me to the owners of PX, who asked me whether I would be interested in taking over the basement as a little hat shop.
To get the finance I sold my car – an ex-GPO mini-van – for £150, and that’s how I started the business. Thirteen years ago this property in Great Queen Street came up and I love Covent Garden so I took it. My winter 2008 collection was an homage to Covent Garden. This is where all types of hats are worn, so we looked close to home for inspiration. Like the Opera House, a good bit of My Fair Lady, Aldwych, all different aspects of Covent Garden. There was the Limo – a topper with rose-trimmed underbrim; Assoluta – a balletic head-dress; Costermonger – a vegetable-embellished beret; and Coloratura – a black, operatic confection with clefs and musical notes.
Covent Garden’s a fun place to be, very urban. It has so much personal history for me – Neal Street, the Roxy, Pink Club.

What is your favourite hat design?
The top hat. It’s the Rolls Royce of hats. A top hat in black velvet, folded round and around like a rose in dark red satin – it is my favourite hat of all time. I love the topper on young, old, rich, poor. It’s always racy and sexy too. I adored Schiaparelli and Dior as well.

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Island Paradise

Posted on: May 5th, 2009 by admin 1 Comment

Stone Island has opened its first UK stand alone store on Shelton Street to house the many creations from a label recognised worldwide to be on the cutting edge of menswear design. There’s everything that a boy about town could ever wish for in terms of jeans, footwear, jackets, jumpers, polo shirts t-shirts and accessories.

“That’s all very well, but have they got a night vision jacket?” you scream? The answer is yes. This clever coat boasts a phosphorescent and thermosensitive colouring agent which responds according to whatever environmental elements it’s exposed to. If you managed to stay awake during science at school, you’ll know that the phosphorescent colouring agent gets charged with solar light which is then released at night to allow the garment to be seen in complete darkness and guaranteeing a high level of security in situations of low visibility. And as the colouring agents are thermosensitive they change according to the heat variations. This makes the garment change and evolve continually to create unique colour effects. Therefore, this jacket is an absolute must have, whether you are night hiking through the wilds of Dartmoor or simply having it large with your mates in a nightclub – The kind of fashion technology that those NASA eggheads wish they’d thought of rather than wasting all their time on rockets.

34 Shelton Street
Seven Dials
020 7836 8402
www.stoneisland.co.uk