Forget cottage industries, it's all about castle industries in 2020
In the sun-soaked days of lockdown, once Fulham flatshares had emptied as twentysomethings fled the plague-ridden city for their parents’ country houses, an unexpected surge of industriousness flowered across the land. Furloughed, redundant, or just plain bored, a host of well-spoken young women began designing, sewing, embroidering, block-printing and beading – inadvertently finding themselves at the vanguard of a new wave of British cottage (or, perhaps, castle) industry.
‘It’s quite nice’, says Flora Slater. ‘You’re taking something negative – lockdown – and putting a positive spin on it.’ Some, like Nancy Morrison and Octavia Greig, had set up their brands before the pandemic but found enforced confinement to be a richly productive environment. Others, like Bella Carington – who, it should be said, in the interest of full nepotistic transparency, is this writer’s sister – ’just got bored and realised it was actually really easy to sell stuff to friends.’ All were quick to make money from making things they loved. Bella’s cousin Ruby Falcon started selling prints of pressed flowers, Sophia Fenwick’s daughter Georgia began selling bagels, and Rose Gordon, daughter of the Marquess of Huntly, started taking commissions for her cute foodie illustrations.
Creativity is key to the success of these new ventures, of course, but connections don’t hurt either when it comes to the promotion of a home-grown business. Crichton-Stuarts (Flora and Lola) were instrumental in the take-off of at least three of Tatler’s top sartorial start-ups, cheerfully marketing them to their friends and followers. So too were Daisy Edgar-Jones, Naomi Campbell and David Beckham – the latter two providing moral rather than commercial support to Octavia Greig by publicly admiring her work.
Social networks have proven crucial, but social media networks even more so. ‘I wouldn’t have been able to do it without Instagram’, says Chloe Stewart. As soon as Edgar-Jones wore one of her designs, she was inundated with orders: ‘It was completely mental.’ Bandana maker Esme Lane Fox agrees, saying social media has been ‘a massive player’ for her business.
Women do tend to be wily Instagrammers, but this flurry of pandemic productivity seems to have been led by pioneering girls and not boys: ‘I just don’t think men are very creative’, is one entrepreneur’s flat explanation. Meet the new generation of ladies who launch.
1/6Esme Lane Fox
Rose of the Wild Bunch, Esme Lane Fox’s nascent business that began as a university project produces exuberantly-coloured silk bandanas. Esme, 22, left Leeds Arts University where she studied visual communication, this year (‘I think I graduated’, she says, with a nervous laugh). Rose (named after the only woman who ran in Butch Cassidy’s gang) came about because Esme really wanted a zebra-print silk bandana for herself and couldn’t find one – though, she adds, ‘bandanas don’t even suit me’. The poison-green and baby-pink end result was called Alabama, after the character in the film True Romance. She made more designs and her friends encouraged her to sell them: ‘and so I thought, maybe I’ll start a little business out of it’. She broke even on the second day, and soon was receiving ‘dodgy pics’ from friends of strangers wearing her £30 bandanas. Next up is a new collection of silk scrunchies, and a collaboration with Lola Crichton-Stuart for the charity Eternity – all designed at home in Somerset. ‘And then I’m just going to see where it all goes.’
roseofthewildbunch.com
2/6Octavia Greig
Octavia, 20, started her clothing brand One Generation when she was in her last year at Millfield. ‘I should probably have been concentrating more on my A-levels’, she laughs. She did a lot of art at school (‘bold lines, a bit abstract’) and thought she’d experiment with screen-printing and painting her designs onto T-shirts and hoodies. When she got them professionally printed, she sold out within three weeks. She’s on her third collection, has thrown a sold-out event, and has just started her first year of Fine Art at Camberwell. Her art credentials are impressive – she’s worked with Tracey Emin as a studio assistant, and visited David Hockney’s studio with her father, Geordie Greig. Though lockdown meant the cancellation of her second brand event, Octavia found the involuntary time-out to be very productive – she bought old jeans on the nearby Portobello Road and upcycled them by screenprinting, embroidering and painting onto the denim. They sell for £65. She made wristbands from the offcuts, too, which she sold to raise funds for the NHS. She also began a letter correspondence with Frank Auerbach: ‘He told me I should draw every day, because that’s the key to being a great artist.’
onegenerationclothing.com
3/6Chloe Stewart
‘I’ve had this idea for ages of drawing faces onto jeans, but I never did anything about it’, says 26-year-old Chloe. When she was younger, she’d spend days making ‘dodgy’ clothes on her sewing machine, and she studied textiles at Leeds, but her happily hectic life working for celebrity stylist Nicky Yates meant that she never properly explored the idea. When lockdown hit, she moved to her parents’ house in Suffolk, where she set aside the jeans idea, and began hand-embroidering bright, modernist line drawings onto T-shirts, ‘taking some from Matisse, some from Picasso, and changing them, and doing some of my own,’ she says. Friends went mad for them, as did ‘complete randomers’ on Instagram. ‘People seem to like them’, she says, self-deprecatingly. Normal People, too – Daisy Edgar-Jones (one of Yates’s clients) wore one for a shoot with Paul Mescal. The £40 T-shirts, in white, navy and black, are all made to order, and embroidered at Chloe’s house in Brixton, while she listens to Desert Island Discs.
chloestewart.co.uk
4/6Flora Slater
‘It’s just mental’, says Flora Slater, considering how, in four months, she went from redundancy to launching her own fashion brand. Suits You, born in lockdown but first conceived when the 23-year-old was studying fashion design at Parsons in New York, makes candy-coloured, super-contemporary tailored three-piece suits for women, which cost £250. ‘I was petrified. I also thought it wouldn’t really turn into anything’, she says, and yet she plugged away at it every day. The top floor of her parents’ house in High Street Ken became her headquarters, friend Lola Bute promoted the brand on Instagram, while her great pal Jean Campbell helped with tiny details, like button sourcing – then wore one to Milan Fashion Week. Flora is already hard at work on new designs (a tweed number for winter), and future plans include other possible sets, such as cardigans and vests: ‘I’m keeping it within the theme but branching out.’ Her spare time is also spent stylishly: ‘A huge part of my day-to-day routine is online shopping and shopping in general,’ she smiles. ‘I absolutely love fashion.’
suitsyoulondon.co.uk
5/6Hon Isabella Carington
A year ago, Bella, 25, used to joke about moving to Guatemala to start a sunglasses chain business. This year, on furlough, she actually did start the business – though, alas, the global travel ban made the Guatemala part of her plans unfeasible. Thus Chillichainz (named in honour of the chillies she’d also started growing in the garden in their dozens) came into being – and she started making colourful, quirky beaded sunglasses chains, that, says Bella, ‘remind me of my childhood’, and which she sells for £15. At first she made them for friends and family, then as demand increased, she set up a brand Instagram. Her friend and lockdown lodger Flora Crichton-Stuart helped with marketing, and soon they were selling in the upmarket boutique Paper Maché Tiger (‘for much more than I sell them for’). Now that the pandemic winter is upon us, Bella has branched out into chains for face masks, plus more jewellery – ‘anything you can put around your body, anywhere’.
chillichainz.com
6/6Hon Nancy Morrison
Sometimes Nancy, 25, spots a pair of gingham-frilled socks by NM Design poking out of a stranger’s trainers. ‘I want to run up and say something but then remember I must try and be chilled and cool about it’, she says, laughing. Nancy was always on the lookout for funky socks, but never quite found what she was looking for. ‘I thought, I can’t find any, so I’ll take the matter into my own hands’. She bought ‘bits and bobs’ from her local haberdashery in Fulham, and quickly magicked them into ‘really amateur’ socks. Friends started asking to buy them, so she took a sewing course and started her business in earnest, launching in 2019. Next came make-up bags made from off-cuts, scrunchies and, when the pandemic hit, face masks. Hugh Stanley put in a big order for customised masks for the staff at Stanley’s, his new restaurant in Chelsea. Lockdown – which was spent at her father Lord Margadale’s house in Wiltshire – gave Nancy the space to think about next steps (a pattern-making course so she can start making clothes and children’s accessories). For now, she’s back in London, her flat ‘full of fabric and sewing stuff and it’s kind of carnage’. And when she’s not sewing, she’s cooking, playing piano and looking forward to when her beloved ice-skating lessons start again. Though, she adds, at 6ft, ‘it’s a long way down.’
nmdesign.org.uk
