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“You’re more likely to see an alien on screen than an Asian woman.”

I interviewed the actress Gemma Chan and talked about roles for ethnic minorities on British TV, her decision to turn down parts requiring nudity, and still getting spots at 31. 

Published on Never Underdressed, May 19, 2014.

Gemma Chan is much more reserved than your usual actress. She is the antithesis of those luvvie types who easily and quickly offer cheeks to be kissed while reeling off anecdotes replete with celebrity names and swear words. Instead, she is circumspect, articulate and reserved, choosing her words carefully, using an elongated middle-class and diplomatic ‘uuuum’ to politely gather her thoughts before answering any question that could be construed as contentious. She read law at Oxford before going on to drama school at the Drama Centre in London and although she never practised the subject, it seems to make sense that she was drawn to it.  

‘I’m not shy but I don’t feel the need to be the centre of attention in a social situation. I like watching other people and observing,’ the 31-year-old, who has appeared in UK TV shows like Sherlock and Fresh Meat as well as the 2014 US blockbuster Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, says when we catch up after the Never Underdressed photoshoot. For although Chan is reserved – surprisingly so for those of us who erroneously (and ridiculously) thought we knew her simply by looking at her CV and scrutinising pictures of her on the red carpet with her comedian boyfriend Jack Whitehall – she is resolutely professional and sometimes her profession involves standing around in beautiful clothes (today they come courtesy of east Asian designers like Huishan Zhang and Issey Miyake) while turning her face to and from a camera that clearly loves her. She modelled for a time between Oxford and drama school and she still knows how to take direction from a photographer, adjusting her long limbs (she’s 5’9” and a perfect size eight) gracefully, training her intense deep brown gaze on the camera when requested.

She is most comfortable, however, when acting – on screen and on stage. ‘It’s quite liberating to play characters that are nothing like me. You can access those parts of your personality that are more eccentric or quirky or funny or outrageous. I do things in character that I would definitely be too shy to do in real life,’ the actress, who has played a latex-clad dominatrix in Secret Diary of a Call Girl, says.  

Currently appearing in the critically acclaimed Yellow Face, a play that examines the experience of the Chinese diaspora in America, at the National Theatre, she takes on a variety of roles, flitting from an elderly Chinese-American mother to a loved-up star, all the while being very funny and quirky, proving her own point that she is somehow more at ease on stage than in person.    

’Yellow Face is a very political play with a lot of serious points to make,’ she says, ‘but comedy is a great way to get people to engage with the ideas.’

The political issues raised in Yellow Face, namely the central conceit of a character being cast or not cast in a show because of his race (the play uses the 1990 controversy of Jonathan Pryce playing an east Asian character in Miss Saigon as a starting point), are something that Chinese-British Chan – who was brought up the eldest of two daughters by her Chinese-born parents in Kent, attending a school with a ’handful of black and ethnic minority students’ – can easily relate to.

She refers to a ‘really sobering and depressing’ Guardian article she read recently, which claimed that audiences of mainstream films are as likely to see an ‘otherworldly’ female character portrayed on screen as they are an Asian female character. ‘Otherworldly being some sort of fantasy or alien character,’ she explains. ‘So you’re more likely to see an alien on film than an Asian woman on film. Which is kind of tough.’

Although she keeps abreast of Chinese cinema and loves the work of Ang Lee and Wong Kar-wai, she is more interested in seeing women like her, members of the diaspora, being represented on British screens and stages. ‘For me, as someone who has grown up in the West, I think it’s important that we make stories that reflect our experience, stories where ethnicity doesn’t come into it; where, as an actor, I’m just playing parts [that don’t reference ethnicity].’

She’s part of a new campaign, fronted by actors like Ruth Wilson, Lenny Henry and her boyfriend Jack Whitehall, called Act for Change, which aims to examine diversity in British TV drama. ‘In America, when you get a casting breakdown it will say, please submit all ethnicities for this part, unless stated otherwise – you know obviously unless they’re casting a family or whatever, all ethnicities get submitted,’ she says.’ ‘But we don’t have that at the bottom of our breakdowns here [in the UK] so the presumption is Caucasian I suppose.’

Chan, who happily self-identifies as a feminist (‘It just means that you believe that women and men should be equal. It’s as simple as that. If you believe that, you’re a feminist. Men can be feminists too’) is also part of the No More Page 3 campaign and speaks passionately on the subject: ‘[The Sun] is a newspaper that should be informing readers, not objectifying women. It’s tough when it’s the most widely read newspaper in the land: it really affects the culture that young people grow up in, and the roles that men and women have in society.’

She says that she has rejected roles on the basis of gratuitous nudity (‘I turned down a big potential series because we couldn’t agree on the nudity. I mean there are actresses who are very comfortable with it and that’s absolutely fine but for me it’s got to be about the character and the story’) and she admits that the internet has limited how willing she is to appear naked on screen.

‘It’s tricky now because you know that people won’t just watch it and see it in the show. There’ll be screen grabs taken from it and potentially it ends up on dodgy sites; even stuff that I did in Secret Diary of Call Girl, there are pictures taken and then it’s out of context.’

Would she feel more comfortable appearing nude on stage than on screen, I wonder?  

‘Yes … On stage, photography is banned and obviously people can see you but it’s part of that story that’s being told. It’s not something taken out of context, something for people to gawp at.’

Politically engaged and reserved and polite as she is, Chan is still very much up for a natter, however, and will happily chat about the silly stuff too. Gazing upon her perfect heart-shaped face, I can’t help but wonder if she has ever had a spot. ‘Yes! YES!’ she exclaims, ‘Yeah I get spots, I don’t get loads but yeah of course that happens. It’s strange, you think it should have stopped by now, it doesn’t seem fair.’

When a spot does appear, she covers it up with Laura Mercier Secret Camouflage (‘It can hide a multitude of sins. It is the best, the best’) and she also rates Clinique’s Stay-Matte Sheer Pressed Powder (‘It’s not too heavy but it just keeps the shine away all day’) as well as NARS bronzers and blushers and MAC eye make-up.   For red carpet events, which she describes as ‘terrifying’, she has so far mainly eschewed the services of a stylist, picking her own clothes, sometimes enlisting a friend to help.

I don’t think I have one look for the red carpet. I think it’s good to change it up depending on the event, sometimes go for glamour, other times go quirkier,’ she says. ‘An outfit can look different if it’s under flash or if it’s a daytime event with natural light and something might just not come across in a photo. It can just look really flat or not be flattering. I get a friend to take an iPhone snap once I’ve decided on an outfit, just to see what it looks like in an image. Especially if I’m wearing something see-through or sheer.’

On the subject of Fresh Meat, she does away with her usual diplomacy to admit that yes she does have a favourite character. ‘I love Howard. He’s just brilliant,’ she says, echoing the feelings of many a viewer. Her favourite comedians, meanwhile, are Louis C.K. and George Carlin.

She’s warming up, revealing herself to be sweet and friendly, funny and a bit of a laugh, so I ask her to tell a joke. ‘NO! No, no, no, definitely not,’ she squeals. ‘I leave the stand-up to Jack.’

Photo: Jonny Storey

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Esther Teichmann’s tremendously affecting nudes

I interviewed the fine art photographer Esther Teichmann about her work: nudes that seem to get to the heart of what it is to be a woman, a mother, a daughter and a lover. 

Published on Never Underdressed, May 3, 2014.

As soon as you step into fine-art photographer Esther Teichmann’s lovely light-filled, perfectly appointed flat in Kennington, south London, it is obvious that she is a) very nice and b) very brainy. She is a sweetheart, quickly offering a variety of herbal teas and preparing a bowl of popcorn before settling down to speak to me across an antique table by the window. Her dainty white bookshelves are filled with academic and intelligent tomes – there is lots of 20th-century French philosophy as well as novels, essays and poetry that suggest a thoughtful reader concerned primarily with love – and it’s almost demoralising how many times you have to say ‘Hmm I’m not sure I’ve read that one’ or ‘I haven’t got to that exhibition yet’ as she talks about her influences and references, the things that move her and interest her. Her work though is neither sweet nor overtly brainy. It’s sexy and sexual, primal and honest, beautiful and troubling. Her photographs – nudes set against nature, mainly – get to the heart of what it is to be human: to be a woman or a man, a mother or a father, a sister, a daughter, a brother, a son, a lover.

‘That relationship between sisters and the mother’s body is something that has been in the work since the beginning,’ she says ‘I grew up with two sisters and I’m really close to them and their children. I grew up in a very female-oriented household even though my father was present. I’m the middle child and we always slept in the same bed. It’s interesting: since they became mothers, there’s a sense of sharing children or sharing the love for children, it’s like an extension of being sisters.’ Indeed some of her most affecting work depicts her sisters with their children, beautiful nude women and fat-bellied children juxtaposed against trees and swamps.

Why does she always choose to photograph her subjects nude, I wonder. ‘It’s several things,’ she says. ‘For a long time I was working just with my mother and partner and I was interested in this slippage between bodies – the mother’s body and the lover’s body being the two that you are most afraid of losing, and that are the most threatened in a way. You will inevitably be separated from them at some point, through death or through separation. I’ve always been interested in eroticism and desire that isn’t just sexual. I’m also interested in work that is slightly outside of time or place, in trying to have this fantastical, almost mythological space, and obviously bodies aren’t coded.

She pauses. ‘There is something cultural too maybe: I love going to saunas and steam rooms. I grew up swimming in lakes naked.’ ‘That’s very German,’ I say. ‘It’s totally German,’ she says, laughing, before clarifying: ‘It’s not the “nudist” tradition of Germany I’m talking about; it’s more about kids swimming in underpants.’ Teichmann, 33, grew up in the Rhine Valley, the daughter of an American mother and a German father, both academics, so she calls herself German-American but her nationality is harder to pin down than that. ‘Germany, that house, that lake, that forest is home to me, no question but I don’t feel 100 per cent German. I grew up with parents who rejected any form of nationalism: obviously my father’s generation of Germans are super-conscious and are, rightly so, anxious about nationalism and pride. And my mother’s generation of Americans is quite critical of that too. I went to a European school funded by the EU and then, in the early 1990s, it was drummed into us that we’re European citizens and there aren’t borders, we’re different cultures but we’re one.’  

She moved to England to study art in 1998 – ‘I came to study at Kent and it was just magical, falling in love, being away from home, doing life-drawing, learning from older art students’ – and has more or less stayed here ever since. After completing a degree in photography she worked for Rankin, when he was still based at the Dazed & Confused offices (‘A really exhausting year but also really eye-opening. I learned so much’ she says), before going on to an MA and a PhD at the Royal College of Art, and now she manages to pursue a successful academic career alongside side her work as an artist.

The themes of her work and its overriding aesthetic have not varied wildly since she started snapping her family as a teenager; the subjects however have changed. She was married for ten years so back then she used to photograph her husband a lot; her later work, work undertaken since her separation, has concentrated more on women and the autoerotic.

Towards the end of the interview, as we discuss Blue is the Warmest Colour, a film we both love, she tells me something that grants her work an almost unbearable poignancy. ‘I suppose in a way underpinning all the work is at the end of that magical foundation year, the first relationship, this amazing love I’d had – he died really suddenly in a car crash,’ she says. ‘So I know that helplessness, there’s nothing you can do and you know there’s nothing you can do. Other than just keep living until you’re alive again. You just keep living until you’re alive again. There’s a numbness and you have to give into that and not be afraid of that.’ She articulates it beautifully, of course, because she is a) very nice, b) very brainy and c) somebody who seems to really truly know what it is to be human.

Pictures: Esther Teichmann

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The Portobello Road Market keeps west London cool

Even as globalisation and gentrification engulfs Notting Hill, the Portobello Road Market remains. I talked to the designers and fashion figures (Celia Birtwell, Bay Garnett, et al) who still shop at the market – and found out why it’s integral to the spirit of the area. 

Published on Never Underdressed, June 10, 2014.

There are few stretches of London that sum up the city and its style so succinctly as Portobello Road in West London, which unfurls from Pembridge Road near the busy junction of Notting Hill Gate, stretching northwards, intersecting with bijou Westbourne Grove and fun Westbourne Park Road before slinking under the Westway, the elevated section of the A40 dual carriageway.

Antique shops line its sides at the ritzier southern end while, as you move north, you’ll come across newsagents, high-street shops and, of course, London being London, a Tesco Metro. All along the way, there are market stalls selling, depending on the day you visit, fruit and veg, antiques and vintage fashion.

The market is what makes Portobello Road so quintessentially ‘London’, the stalls are what set it apart from countless other pulchritudinous thoroughfares in the city. The shouting and rummaging and bargains offset the grandeur of the nearby houses, allowing even those with just a few quid in their pockets to buy themselves something stylish, to pick up a unique bargain. It’s high-meets-low, that glorious juxtaposition on which London is built, a place where working-class communities (the area traditionally attracted the Irish and Caribbean diaspora) live and work and shop alongside the rich (nowadays many of the rich are American bankers), a place where you can buy a second-hand shawl from a stallholder for less than £10 before calling into the two-Michelin-starred Ledbury restaurant for your supper.

The market began in the 1860s – possibly as a result of Romany gypsies trading horses on the street, according to local historian Blanche Girouard, author of Portobello Voices – and was then, as now, considered to be a convivial meeting place as well as retail destination.

‘It’s groovy. It’s always been groovy,’ says the stylist and photographer Bay Garnett, a woman who grew up rifling through the second-hand clothes at Portobello Road Market, on the subject of its eternal appeal.

‘There’s a spirit, an animation,’ she says. ‘You can pick up ideas but it’s not somewhere that you see trends, and that’s what I like about it. It feels fresh.’

Celia Birtwell is another fashion figure who has drawn inspiration from Portobello Road Market. ‘It was very instrumental in my career,’ the fashion and textile designer says. ‘Because I used to go there and find all sorts of things, particularly when I worked with Ossie [Clark]. I’d find wonderful old 1930s dresses, or interesting shapes; even if it was moth-eaten, [it didn’t matter] because the shapes were good. It was quite an inspiration for me.’

‘It’s always been my favourite area,’ she says. ‘I like the hotchpotch and the craziness of it. I still have a soft spot for it and my hope is that it remains similar for the next generation really.’

She recalls a Portobello Road before Richard Curtis’s sunny paean to the area, Notting Hill, was released, a time when the area could genuinely be described as ‘bohemian’ rather than ‘boho-chic’.

‘Oh it was fun,’ she remembers. ‘So varied. There were places where people said, “Oh you mustn’t go down there, it’s dangerous.”  It’s become super-smart but in my heyday, it was full of interesting people and it was quite artistic and musical and I think it’s been a bit wiped out.’ She reminisces fondly about the type of pub – ‘Old Irish pubs that had jukeboxes and you wouldn’t really go into too easily. There was a kind of crowd that I wouldn’t be able to relate to’ – that were to be found on Westbourne Park Road, where she operated her business, pubs that have since been replaced by smarter destinations like the Tom Conran-owned Cow, a joint that serves ‘handmade tagliolini’ to its supermodel and celebrity patrons.

Garnett, who recently sought to capture the spirit of the Portobello Road area in a photography project for Sony, concedes that gentrification has altered the character of the neighbourhood, but there is, she says, an abiding aura of real fun and joy to be found at the market. ‘It feels kind of the same as when I started going there in my teens. Yes, more gentrified, but the same sort of experience. You can go there and spend the Friday rummaging and it’s such a genuinely lovely experience. It’s about eclecticism. And individuality. A little bit of anarchy. It’s about London.’

The Portobello Road remains a massive inspiration for fashion designers, especially those who favour a sort of British boho glamour, and Alice Temperley says that she continues to trawl the market for finds. Her spring/summer 2015 collection was inspired by a book of photography by Seydou Keïta she came across while hunting through the stalls. ‘My office is right by the market and it has always been one of my best sources of inspiration,’ she says. ‘The perfect time to go is 7am on a Saturday morning when the dealers are just setting up, you can find the most unique pieces at that time before anyone else snaps them up.’

It is sadly inevitable that an area that so embodies London would come face-to-face with gentrification and globalisation – we are after all a city of people who whoop when a Waitrose arrives in our neighbourhood – but Portobello Road is bravely holding out. Of course it’s changing, bending to accommodate the desires of its rich inhabitants, but as long as the market is operating, you can be sure that its spirit – and its style – remains.

Photo: Bay Garnett  

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I have really big feet (size eight)

Growing up with big feet impacts on two things teenagers hold dear: fashion and sex appeal. I reflect on growing up with, and finally coming to terms with, gigantic feet. 

Published on Never Underdressed, January 29, 2014.

When I was six, I made my First Holy Communion and despite the fact that, as a child imbued with a premature cynicism, I was having something of a crisis of faith at the time and felt altogether fraudulent about the whole procedure, I was very interested in the specifics of my outfit.

My dress was quite plain: bought in the children’s boutique in the town I grew up in, it was an unadorned rebuff to the beaded satin atrocities I expected most of my peers would turn up in. I wouldn’t wear a veil or gloves, I decided, and my only concession to pomp and ceremony was to be a pair of slip-on shoes. Slip-on shoes suggested grown-up glamour, a sophisticated world away from everyday laces and buckles. The problem was that when I went to the shoe shop to buy the slip-on shoes I’d seen in the window and knew would be just perfect for the occasion, the slip-on shoes didn’t fit. I had really long, really narrow feet – bony and lanky with toes like fingers; far bigger feet than the average six-year-old – and I just slipped out of the dainty pumps. Perhaps it was karmic punishment for my godless precociousness, for my outfit-obsessed inclinations, but the only shoes in the shop that I could walk in were an altogether ugly-looking pair of T-bar sandals. It was the beginning of a painful relationship with my feet and, by extension, my shoes.

Going to the shoe shop in my hometown became a twice-yearly agony, way worse than going to the dentist (never really got the hatred of dentists myself), far worse even than visits to elderly relatives in too-hot faraway nursing homes. It was humiliating as the man who owned the shoe shop (I still remember his name and his fat belly and his general spitefulness) chuckled at the sheer length of my feet, mirthful at the overdeveloped span, before he suggested a pair of Start-Rites or, worse, a pair of adult Ecco shoes. My cheeks stung with indignation and my throat clogged with the beginnings of sobs as he explained that, due to my oversized feet, the homely navy lace-up shoes – the type you’d expect to see on an elderly nun – were the only suitable pair in the shop. I looked on with rage and envy as other girls my age picked out pretty styles, daintily placing their small plump feet into various designs from the Clarks Magic Steps range. I sometimes stuffed my massive feet into shoes that didn’t fit but generally had to concede defeat after an afternoon of wear induced winces and blisters. I came across a passage about Chinese foot binding in a novel and became obsessed with the notion, spending hours in the local library researching the phenomenon, fretting about its efficacy on a pair of feet already so grossly overgrown, before my mother explained that it was misogynistic torture, and nobody did it nowadays anyway.

As I got older, my feet got bigger so the problem didn’t go away.  By the time I was 11, they were a big size 40 (UK seven, US nine) or a small size 41 (UK eight, US 10). Buying shoes in my teens was still an ordeal because even though I had at this stage stopped frequenting the shop owned by the fat laughing tormenter, it was difficult to find shoes in my size. Yes, the shoe shops claimed that they went up to a 41 but they seemed to produce a paltry number of styles in the larger sizes. Ask for an eight, and nine times out of ten, the shop assistant would return from the stockroom empty-handed. Embarrassed of this physical flaw, this podiatric idiosyncrasy, I avoided shoe-shopping as much as I could.    

Shoe designer Olivia Morris, the head of footwear and accessories at Hobbs and a woman I girlishly bonded with after discovering she wears a size 42, recalls a similar experience.

‘By the time I was in my teens I had size 42 feet, that’s a UK nine, so they certainly provided me with a modicum of teenage angst,’ she says. Was she awfully self-conscious too, I ask her, big-foot to big-foot. Well, no, not really, it would seem.

‘It was more about not being able to find fashionable shoes in my size,’ she says pragmatically. ‘It was something I got used to fairly quickly, and to be honest at 5’9” my feet have always felt in proportion to my height.’ Aha, yes, well there’s the rub for me. I am not tall. Morris is a statuesque woman; I, on the other hand, am shrimpy. Back when I was 11 with size seven or eight feet, I was 5’1” or so; now, aged 30 and still in possession of size seven or eight feet (although I swear they’ve shrunk slightly after years of cramming them into shoes that don’t quite fit), I’m a small 5’4”. My feet are an anomaly, a weird freakish defect.

As a teenager, my friends and family teased me mercilessly for my outsized feet; it’s the kind of minor insult you can get away with. It’s not like calling somebody fat or ugly or laughing at their acne; it’s just gentle joshing, isn’t it? I suppose so and yet there was something stinging of it. It wasn’t just that I hated how my feet looked and how out of proportion they were; it was also to do with the fact that they impacted on two aspects of life that teenagers hold dear: fashion and sex appeal.  Fashion because well, obviously… When the shop assistants consistently returned empty-handed from the storeroom, my shoe choices were quickly whittled down to what was actually in-store rather than the styles that I wanted to buy and wear. And then of course, there is the problem that some shoes – pointy-toed courts, certain types of flats, anything too bulky – look ridiculous in larger sizes. It’s a point even sanguine Morris concedes. ‘I love the very flat elongated points that Prada and Miu Miu have been doing,’ she says, ‘but  the reality is that there are simply some things that unfortunately just don’t look good on a long foot.’

High heels, I discovered, are the style that look best on a long foot, and so I became a pro at walking in four- or five-inch heels. As other teenagers bought modish, almost faddish, shoes like Kickers one year and Dr Martens the next, I stuck to the shoes I knew suited me: very high, quite ladylike Mary Jane styles. I found succour in fashion generally, as although it was quite obvious the high street cared little for my plight, barely bothering to make shoes in my size, high-end fashion magazines were full of people complaining about their big feet. I devoured profiles of Uma Thurman, Sophie Dahl and Kate Winslet, all of whom told Vogue or Elle or Vanity Fair about the pain of being in possession of a pair of exceptionally large feet. ‘I read that both Audrey Hepburn and Jackie Kennedy had very large feet,’ my mother, herself the owner of a pair of sensible size 39s (it is a mystery how I ended up with such big feet), would offer kindly.

But then there was sex appeal and the notion of being attractive, so vital to a teenager. It was obvious that big feet were up there with braces or psoriasis in the I’m-not-a-sexy-teenager-am-I stakes and while a confident, self-assured teenager might have laughed it off with a quip, I was the kind of neurotic girl who spent hours researching Chinese foot-binding in the library alone, the kind of girl who didn’t have brothers or self-effacing shtick. A turning point came when I was 17 and chatting up two American brothers in an Irish country nightclub with a friend. One brother was obviously better-looking, like a young Edward Furlong, and it was clear that both my friend and I wanted to kiss him. I was doing better though, we were getting on well, I was pretty much in there. ‘Lynn has really big feet,’ my friend interrupted, desperate to derail my progress. ‘Like, they’re massive,’ she said, a 17-year-old stew of jealousy and hormones and spite. The Furlong-alike, who was from a small town in New Jersey and was just about to join the army, grabbed them. ‘Woah those are some big feet.’ And then we spent the rest of the night kissing and laughing while my friend got off with the brother who looked nothing like anybody who had ever appeared in Terminator 2 or American History X.

At times I am still self-conscious about my feet: I hate filling out forms with my measurements – 5’4” with size eights just seems ridiculous – and I still dread the moment the shop assistant heads towards the fitting room, anticipating the inevitable disappointment, but the high street has improved, with stores like Hobbs stocking shoes up to a 42, and as Olivia Morris says, ‘We spend so much time as women analysing and criticising ourselves physically but in the end, you can’t change what you are, so it’s probably better to learn to love what you have been given.’ I don’t think I’ll ever love my feet but I manage a begrudging affection

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God is in her details: Katie Hillier

I had the pleasure of interviewing the astoundingly talented and altogether lovely Marc by Marc Jacobs creative director Katie Hillier in a 2,000-word profile for the big glossy fashion special of Stylist magazine in September. (You can download the Stylist app here, btw – well worth doing.)

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Danielle Romeril is going to be big

Fashion designer Danielle Romeril has just been awarded British Fashion Council NEWGEN sponsorship for spring/summer 2015. I have been telling anyone who’ll listen she is brilliantly talented for quite a while now. Published on Never Underdressed, August 18, 2013.

There’s a thrill to being an early adopter, a cachet earned through association. I like to tell people that I’ve been drinking coconut water for years, that I saw a preview of the hit play Jerusalem before it was reviewed and long before it transferred to the West End, and that I knew that Ryan Gosling was going to be a star way back in 2004. I felt that bragging-rights-by-proxy effect again this month when I discovered that designer Danielle Romeril was to be stocked on the luxury retail website Avenue 32 and that her autumn/winter 2013 collection had been featured on Style.com and in top US magazines, including Elle and Cosmopolitan. I first came across Romeril over a year ago at a boozy party in Dublin when I saw a woman dancing in a white skirt and top with laser-cut detailing and approached her to ask her where she got it. She told me she had designed the pieces herself.

That outfit was part of Danielle Romeril’s spring/summer 2012 collection, her first for her own label, which she established after leaving her job as a designer for Alberta Ferretti. It was a collection of two halves – there were separates with intricate leather and laser-cut detailing, and then there were silk dresses with strong, vibrant graphic patterns – but what it lacked in cohesion, it made up for in bold audacity. These were unusual pieces, the type of design that made you cross the room and approach the wearer with a compliment.

She showed the collection at the designer showrooms at London Fashion Week in September 2012 and it was warmly received, by retailers in the Middle East and China, and by stylists and editors in Romeril’s native Dublin. Six months later she presented her autumn/winter 2013 collection in London and in Paris, and very quickly it became apparent that this one was going to be even more successful. ‘Immediately I could see the difference,’ Romeril tells me over the phone from Dublin, where her studio is based. ‘Paris is a great location to sell from, we picked up Avenue 32 and a few other stockists. I could tell immediately it was going well. When other designers at trade shows are coming up to you congratulating on your work and telling you how beautiful it is … well, there’s no reason or need for them to do that.’

Romeril puts the popularity of her second collection down to the fact that she trusted her own instincts more when designing it. ‘It’s much more me than the summer collection was,’ she says, ‘I was probably still channelling Ferretti for the spring/summer one. With autumn/winter, I wasn’t worrying about customer profile and sales and all the things that you have to worry about when you work for somebody else.’

At Alberta Ferretti – she was scouted for a design job at the Italian label after completing an MA in womenswear at the Royal College of Art in Kensington – Romeril had been ‘doing a lot of draping’ but her own aesthetic is tougher, sleeker, fresher. The autumn/winter collection is inspired by skateboarder culture and features leather, wool and silk pieces that are brilliantly original and utterly wearable all at once. They are the type of clothes that adjust to the wearer, they can look ultra-chic or edgy-street depending on the styling and that is why the label has proven popular with Middle Eastern customers as well as with musicians like Natalia Kills, who has been photographed in the autumn/winter 2013 collection.

Romeril didn’t always know that she was going to design her own line and before Ferretti she had worked with Amanda Wakeley but a chat with a friend made her see what she had to do. ‘I was talking to a friend of mine who works for Margiela and she was asking who I wanted to work with and I said ‘I don’t know’ and the two of us just stared at each other blankly and that’s when I thought, ‘I might need to work for myself.’’

She says she didn’t have role models within the industry – ‘You can’t be guided too much by what others have done. They weren’t successful because they copied someone else; they were successful because they listened to themselves’ – but focused on the practical, getting a studio space, writing a business plan (she dissolves into wild giggles at the memory), creating a strong brand identity.

And resolutely following her own path has got her where she is now: a designer on the precipice of big things, a woman to watch with interest (her upcoming spring/summer 2014 promises to be just as exciting as last season: ‘It’s inspired by collage and sticky tape and bubble wrap. It’s very girly meets very sporty’), a name you know you’ll be hearing a lot of. Just remember that I told you about her first.

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Designer Danielle Romeril is going to be big

Fashion designer Danielle Romeril has just been awarded British Fashion Council NEWGEN sponsorship for spring/summer 2015. I have been telling anyone who’ll listen she is brilliantly talented for quite a while now. Published on Never Underdressed, August 18, 2013.

There’s a thrill to being an early adopter, a cachet earned through association. I like to tell people that I’ve been drinking coconut water for years, that I saw a preview of the hit play Jerusalem before it was reviewed and long before it transferred to the West End, and that I knew that Ryan Gosling was going to be a star way back in 2004. I felt that bragging-rights-by-proxy effect again this month when I discovered that designer Danielle Romeril was to be stocked on the luxury retail website Avenue 32 and that her autumn/winter 2013 collection had been featured on Style.com and in top US magazines, including Elle and Cosmopolitan. I first came across Romeril over a year ago at a boozy party in Dublin when I saw a woman dancing in a white skirt and top with laser-cut detailing and approached her to ask her where she got it. She told me she had designed the pieces herself.

That outfit was part of Danielle Romeril’s 

spring/summer 2012 collection

, her first for her own label, which she established after leaving her job as a designer for Alberta Ferretti. It was a collection of two halves – there were separates with intricate leather and laser-cut detailing, and then there were silk dresses with strong, vibrant graphic patterns – but what it lacked in cohesion, it made up for in bold audacity. These were unusual pieces, the type of design that made you cross the room and approach the wearer with a compliment. 

She showed the collection at the designer showrooms at London Fashion Week in September 2012 and it was warmly received, by retailers in the Middle East and China, and by stylists and editors in Romeril’s native Dublin. Six months later she presented her autumn/winter 2013 collection in London and in Paris, and very quickly it became apparent that this one was going to be even more successful. ‘Immediately I could see the difference,’ Romeril tells me over the phone from Dublin, where her studio is based. ‘Paris is a great location to sell from, we picked up Avenue 32 and a few other stockists. I could tell immediately it was going well. When other designers at trade shows are coming up to you congratulating on your work and telling you how beautiful it is … well, there’s no reason or need for them to do that.’

Romeril puts the popularity of her second collection down to the fact that she trusted her own instincts more when designing it. ‘It’s much more me than the summer collection was,’ she says, ‘I was probably still channelling Ferretti for the spring/summer one. With autumn/winter, I wasn’t worrying about customer profile and sales and all the things that you have to worry about when you work for somebody else.’

At Alberta Ferretti – she was scouted for a design job at the Italian label after completing an MA in womenswear at the Royal College of Art in Kensington – Romeril had been ‘doing a lot of draping’ but her own aesthetic is tougher, sleeker, fresher. The autumn/winter collection is inspired by skateboarder culture and features leather, wool and silk pieces that are brilliantly original and utterly wearable all at once. They are the type of clothes that adjust to the wearer, they can look ultra-chic or edgy-street depending on the styling and that is why the label has proven popular with Middle Eastern customers as well as with musicians like Natalia Kills, who has been photographed in the autumn/winter 2013 collection.

Romeril didn’t always know that she was going to design her own line and before Ferretti she had worked with Amanda Wakeley but a chat with a friend made her see what she had to do. ‘I was talking to a friend of mine who works for Margiela and she was asking who I wanted to work with and I said ‘I don’t know’ and the two of us just stared at each other blankly and that’s when I thought, ‘I might need to work for myself.’’

She says she didn’t have role models within the industry – ‘You can’t be guided too much by what others have done. They weren’t successful because they copied someone else; they were successful because they listened to themselves’ – but focused on the practical, getting a studio space, writing a business plan (she dissolves into wild giggles at the memory), creating a strong brand identity. 

And resolutely following her own path has got her where she is now: a designer on the precipice of big things, a woman to watch with interest (her upcoming spring/summer 2014 promises to be just as exciting as last season: ‘It’s inspired by collage and sticky tape and bubble wrap. It’s very girly meets very sporty’), a name you know you’ll be hearing a lot of. Just remember that I told you about her first.

[enrightlynn-blog]

Designer Danielle Romeril is going to be big

Fashion designer Danielle Romeril has just been awarded British Fashion Council NEWGEN sponsorship for spring/summer 2015. I have been telling anyone who’ll listen she is brilliantly talented for quite a while now. Published on Never Underdressed, August 18, 2013.

There’s a thrill to being an early adopter, a cachet earned through association. I like to tell people that I’ve been drinking coconut water for years, that I saw a preview of the hit play Jerusalem before it was reviewed and long before it transferred to the West End, and that I knew that Ryan Gosling was going to be a star way back in 2004. I felt that bragging-rights-by-proxy effect again this month when I discovered that designer Danielle Romeril was to be stocked on the luxury retail website Avenue 32 and that her autumn/winter 2013 collection had been featured on Style.com and in top US magazines, including Elle and Cosmopolitan. I first came across Romeril over a year ago at a boozy party in Dublin when I saw a woman dancing in a white skirt and top with laser-cut detailing and approached her to ask her where she got it. She told me she had designed the pieces herself.

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