Vintage was not a word I connected with clothes in the ’80s, when I started wearing older pieces constantly—I think I thought of wine or cars as vintage, but not clothes. I had always dressed out of the dressing-up box as a child, pulling out my great-aunt Helen’s Poiret coat or her shredded opal Fortuny; I would dress my brothers up and make them hold couture poses while I finished the tableau myself. (My mother must have wanted these pieces to remain in our lives somehow, even if, in the ’60s and ’70s, she wasn’t going to wear them herself.) This didn’t last very long, though, and soon I had to content myself with drawing whole fashion magazines of shapes and stories.
But the glories of those dresses and capes and coats stayed with me like a language of feeling. I couldn’t afford fashion as a student at Oxford in the late ’70s, so my punkish trousers from the London label Boy ended up paired with an embroidered Chinese dressing gown from a thrift store. My greatest find at Oxford was a citrine, slippery bias-cut dress—probably 1930s—which I wore constantly against the grain of puff-ball mutton-sleeve taffeta, which was what everyone else wore to a ball.
The thrift stores of this time were, of course, Aladdin’s caves of jewel-level vintage, but at the time, nobody really wanted any of that. Somehow, though, the example of my courageous and beautiful great-aunt Helen—a whip-thin rebel and muse to artists, and a pioneering suffragette in World War I–era London (along with the Fortuny dress and Poiret coat, I also kept her taffeta frock coat and a marvelous striped velvet bias dress)—meant I wanted to dress like her too.
After Oxford, when I had the job of shopping bazaar editor (a very junior fashion editor) at Harpers & Queen magazine, I discovered the Japanese designers spearheaded by Rei Kawakubo at Comme and Yohji Yamamoto, who were showing in London. Their investigation of the workings of couture via the frock coat, or a Charles James, completely enthralled me, and I scoured the Gallery of Antique Costume and Textile and auctions of theatrical costumes to find frock coats and waistcoats, and began wearing an Artful Dodger look, with a top hat or vintage tea dresses, to work every day.
For a shoot with Mario Testino, I desperately wanted the feeling of an 18th-century portrait, but I couldn’t find that ruffled shirt or waistcoat anywhere—until I discovered John Galliano’s 1984 graduate show for Central Saint Martins. That Les Incroyables collection not only inspired the shoot (with the incredible model Susie Bick): Having now met John and fallen in love with him, I found my fashion world.
It was through working with John that I began to understand the power of Vionnet’s bias cut: how it connects to your skin and holds it so sensuously; how you have to let a dress warm to you, to almost grow on you like a living sculpture. I learned so much from John—about the inner workings of a tailored hunting jacket, and how the quilting and seaming actually engineers form; or how different shoulder padding creates incredible volumes minutely. I also began looking for parallels to contemporary fashion in vintage pieces—the joy, for me, was wearing something 100 years old with something contemporary. It’s a pleasure that has never really left me—although, in 2025, it may be about pairing a pant from last year with, say, an Azzedine Alaïa jacket from 1986.
There were so many extraordinary vintage stores in the London of the ’80s and ’90s: Cornucopia, Antiquarius, Mairead Lewin, Lunn Antiques, and the Gallery of Antique Costume and Textile, where I found my 19th-century wedding dress of Spitalfields silk embroidered with wild flowers. By the time John moved to Paris in 1989, the flea markets were treasure troves of delicate turn-of-the-century voile blouses, 1910s slinky black skirts and long coats, and 1920s shimmering slips. I had a favorite dusted-gold Halston halter that I wore all the time, along with a striped, nearly nude mousseline jumpsuit.
