I was always doing art and textiles in school. After that, I commuted to Ipswich, London, to do a foundation degree at London College Fashion. That’s where I had my year of properly studying fashion. From there I picked up knitwear and did a degree in fashion design with knitwear at St Martin’s. I soon got involved working for [British designer] Gareth Pugh and started doing showpieces for him while I was studying. When I graduated that was when I started my own label.
What inspires you?Everything, really. It can be from where I grew up, to the lights and colours of a place. It can be really obvious things like a texture that somebody’s wearing or some kind of odd glove that’s on the floor. I just pick it up and see what it is. It’s also grabbing things that you see from art galleries and museums, to the random textures of trees, sand or whatever is there. I also get my inspirations from feelings. I need to be in contact with these things and feel them and see them and touch them. So I think places that I grew up in are really important.
The main starting point for me is picking the fabrics. I start off with things like a cotton piece that you can buy at a haberdashery shop. I go to these shops, DIY shops, to try and find different types of material and experiment with them, do some samples to see what it looks like in different types of knit.
What’s the fascination with knitwear?I was drawn to knitwear because I’m a bit of a control freak in a way. With knitwear, I can pick the yarn and make my own fabric. So with knitwear, there’s always an extra level of experimentation and deciding how a jumper’s going to look.
My gran was the first person who taught me how to knit. We’d go up for the week to visit gran in Scotland. I would be bored watching daytime TV, and it’s raining outside, so she taught me how to hand-knit. That’s where I got the hand-knitting bug. That was the first thing I ever made.
I think there are endless possibilities with knitwear. You can pick up any yarn, any fabric, cut it up and do what you want with it, and you can knit it into something that resembles some kind of garment. The experimentation is the thing that’s always going to fascinate me and keep me going.
To what extent does pop culture play a role in your design?Pop culture is really important, because movement is always something you have to consider, like a performance piece. So that’s a really good way of moving in the knitwear direction; to think about how it would look on stage and how it would look in context with a pop star and the feel of the music.
The pop culture influence has more to do with the spirit and visualising the spirit of people like [English singer-songwriter] Patrick Wolf and Björk and trying to regurgitate that spirit in a visual way and help create a visual effect with that overall mood.
The Hong Kong Fashion Extravaganza will be your first show in Asia. What can we expect from you at the show?I’m showing my spring/summer 2012 collection, which was based on Felixstowe, my seaside town. So it’s all sandy, creamy colours, mixed in with some rose gold and some pastel colours as well. So it’ll be dead slick, dead summery.
I’m really excited. I’ve always had really good press and support from Hong Kong, and it’s really nice they’re supporting British designers, and that they’re interested in people that have got slightly different points of view on fashion design. I think it’s really exciting to come and to show it for real instead of people just being able to see it in magazines.
What made you decide to start your own label so early in your career?I didn’t think about it, because if I had second thoughts about it, I probably would just have got a job in some fashion house. But I just did it because I didn’t think I was going to get employed with big ribbon knits, so I didn’t really leave myself with any choice.
To be a good designer, you need to go with your instincts. The magic thing is just not to follow any trends and try to do what interests you. From that, hopefully, everybody else likes it.
