Words by tamsin blanchard
Photography by Tara Darby
The window ledge in Louise Gray’s studio tells you almost all you need to know about her. It is piled with stuff – clutter, colour, pattern, vitamins; nail varnishes, in shades of blue, green, yellow, orange and red; marker pens; bags of badges with smiley faces; a jar filled with bottle tops, and jars overflowing with used cotton buds, their ends covered in bright flashes of red, pink and glittery green eyeshadows. “I love the colours,” she says, “I can’t throw them away.”
Taped to the window above the chaotic madness is a photocopy of a multicoloured patchwork of fabric, two pages of a year planner – August and September – with a big red cross on 19 September, the day of her show; a handwritten note that says, simply, “You can do it!”; and a list of women, written in capital letters, who are the inspiration for her Spring/Summer 2012 collection: Gypsy Rose Lee, Pamela Des Barres, Cynthia Plaster Caster, Gala Dalí, Viva Hoffman, Marianne Faithfull, Poly Styrene and Patti LaBelle. All of these women – along with her other heroines, Mary Quant and Coco Chanel – share one thing in common with Gray: a highly individual streak.
Gray herself could be a pretender to the Quant throne. Her fashion is all about youth (in outlook, rather than years). It is bright, fun and, in its own crazy way, really quite revolutionary in its mixes of pattern, colour, texture and reference points. The designer sits before me, in the slightly anarchic-feeling shared studio space at the Centre for Fashion Enterprise in Hackney, dressed in a riot of print and colour. There is something of the young Vivienne Westwood about her – not least a slightly fierce and wilful look in her eyes. She has a black and white turban around her head, a red and white stripey jumper underneath a printed smocky dress from her S/S 12 collection, a knitted patchwork jumper by Christian Lacroix worn around her neck as a scarf, a pair of black and white embroidered trousers (a present, she says, from Balenciaga) worn tucked into black socks with green spots, and a pair of high heels. Her eyes are covered in an asymmetric, expressionistic paint-fest of seemingly random smudges of pinks and blues, with a little lightning squiggle of yellow.
Nothing escapes her mania for pattern. The keys of her white MacBook are covered in pink, yellow and blue dots, green crosses, black stripes over a blob of orange, a smudgy heart, and random doodles like you might find on a schoolgirl’s exercise book. On her pin board, alongside swatches of fabric blown up on the photocopier, there are images of more of the women Gray gravitates towards, “a big old mixture”: arty, intellectual, tattooed and burlesque types, from Edith Sitwell to, again, the late X-Ray Spex singer, Poly Styrene. Her women like to make use of a good soft eyeliner. “This season is definitely about being individual, and alluding to women who are like that already. I try to think about the importance of being a woman in fashion. You have to find that thing that makes it your personality.”
Gray is serious about what she does, but she is also a good-time girl – the Cyndi Lauper of fashion – and her shows reflect that. She takes everything she has and throws it at the catwalk, and then adds whistles and balloons just to make sure she gets her message across. For A/W 11, that meant bondage balloon headdresses by Nasir Mazhar, mismatched polka-dot thigh-high wellingtons, tartan, BacoFoil, stripes, paper chains, knickerbockers, Aran knits, padded bras, the list goes on… For some, it sounds like a nightmare, but her Up Your Look show was upbeat, fun and hedonistic, and tapped into the season’s feeling of individuality. Take any one of these pieces and your wardrobe will be anything but bland or boring. Even Vogue Editor Alexandra Shulman couldn’t fail to be impressed, post-show. “I thought it was clever how she mixes her pattern and colour in ways you’d never imagine working, but it does…”
Gray grew up in Fraserburgh, Scotland, the second of four sisters, making things, embroidering, finger knitting, knitting squares and putting them together. “I used to make pinafores and T-shirts, waistcoats
and stuff. I would wear it and it would fall apart when it had served its purpose. I would embroider my dad’s slippers.” Her mum would buy lots of clothes and try to make the girls match. “We shared a room,” she recalls, “everybody’s stuff was all jumbled in.”
Gray went on to study embroidery at the Glasgow School of Art, where she was inevitably inspired by Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Arts and Crafts movement – “women artists, folk embroideries, the Glasgow Girls”. She honed her fashion skills at Central Saint Martins, finding a way of making her textile experiments into clothing, under the disciplined eye of Head of MA Fashion Louise Wilson. “I loved it. I left art school with large-scale hand-embroideries and I wanted it to be much
more fashion. It also made me think, what would be relevant? What would people want to wear? All the things you like, like colour; it was about finding a way of putting them together.”
Her graduation show caught the eagle eye of Fashion East Director Lulu Kennedy, who invited
her to show in what was one of the most memorable catwalk extravaganzas in the Old Truman Brewery for S/S 08, sandwiched between House of Holland’s first outing, with Agyness Deyn opening the show, and the subversive underbelly of recycling, Dr Noki. “Her work felt new,” recalls Kennedy. “The way she put colour together and embellished her dresses in such an extreme way – her references felt really fresh. I was knocked out by her as a person. She is sensitive and ballsy; she doesn’t adhere to protocol and hierarchy.”
Kennedy is a great poster girl for Gray, often to be seen wearing one of her vivid creations, usually from those early collections (“I own about 14 pieces, including a dress from the graduation collection – an amazing blue silk coat she gave me”); she worked with Gray for her own first collection, Lulu & Co, reissuing a black and white gown; and, after Gray’s A/W 11 show, she couldn’t wait to put on those polka-dot wellingtons by Nicholas Kirkwood for Pollini (Gray is married to Kirkwood’s business partner, Christopher Suarez). She also ordered the tartan coat with metallic foiling, a jumper and “loads of jewellery”.
Gray showed with Fashion East for three seasons. Although Kennedy was convinced by her talents, the rest of the fashion world was a little slower coming forward. Her fourth show was a static installation in a room at Soho House with about 20 editors, to whom Gray was able to explain her collection in person. “That’s when her career took off,” says Kennedy. She received support from On/Off, which helped her to present her last two shows on the catwalk, and has been part of the London Show Rooms initiative, which takes designers to New York and Paris; her work has been particularly well received in America. Now, Gray has one assistant and 10 interns. She manufactures her collections in the UK, and her knitwear comes from Wales, which she likes as she can keep tabs on it.
This is the first season she has received catwalk sponsorship as part of Topshop’s NEWGEN initiative “It’s a bigger venue, and each time I try to up the game. I definitely think about it in a different way – what will come across on the catwalk visually and in photographs. It’s fun, I love it. Bring a party to a party – more stuff. I try it all on endlessly, because there is such a sense of how you want to wear those things.
“I much prefer Spring/Summer. It just needs to be a complete mix; it’s not such a ruled format any more… It’s that element of fun and dressing up.”
In the meantime, she has built up a healthy working relationship with Caren Downie, the womenswear Buying Director at asos.com, which has collaborated with her on special pieces, as well as buying into her mainline collection. This summer,
it partnered with Gray on Asos Inc, a support initiative to encourage and sustain business growth
by developing and producing a new product category to their existing portfolio. For Gray, this has meant producing a substantial collection of bad-girl jewellery (whistle earrings or a smiley-face pendant, selling for around £150), which she previewed on the catwalk in February and is now available to buy on the site. “I wanted them to be fun and poppy,” says Gray. “Like everything else she does, [her designs are] bold, unique, fearlessly creative and instantly recognisable as being a Louise Gray creation,” says Downie. “That’s the talent that makes her work so distinctive.”
