Chantal Mallett - Introduction page, information about Chantal's background & history of the company. .

Chantal's DIARY

I have keep a diary of fashion, wedding & work related musings & anything else I'd like to share with my visitors.

You can access my diary by clicking the diary link above.

HISTORY:

I had wanted to be a Fashion Designer since I was very young � before I technically knew such a job existed & that's not so strange as it sounds!

Remember the 'old' days when children didn't have access to glossy fashion mags aimed at moneyed, fashion conscious teens & pop videos were relatively new, 'Celebrity' as it is now did not exist & not all kids were allowed to watch Dallas & Dynasty (the epitome of '80's Glamour)? Well I was a kid that was not allowed to watch those TV shows & my parents would go to M&S, without us, to buy most of our clothes, so perusing a clothes shop was a rare occurance. I never so much as glimpsed a copy of Vogue & for years I stayed blissfully ignorant of exactly what fashion was. That is until one night when I was about 9, I was up ill & had been allowed to come back downstairs to sit with my parents & watch television - Miss World was on & I remember watching it, soaking up all the glamour / looking at the gowns & realising this designing dresses thing I used to do was a real thing, it was something people got to do!

I already had a sewing machine (I'd had one since I was 8) & my Gran used to make a lot of our dressier, more period inspired, clothes like the outfits in the middle of the picture below & I would tack for her & watch her work (my Mother will argue that those dresses pictured are not 'wench outfits' for children but I say, throw those blouses off the shoulder & stick mop caps on our heads & we could have been extras in Moll Flanders). As I got older, I became more focused & Fashion Design became the long term goal. I was the teenager with a subscription to Vogue & W Magazine & when it came to GCSE's I naturally choose Needlework & Art & then at 16 I applied for a place on a National Diploma course in Fashion, which I was offered unconditionally.

So where does all the Theatrical styling come from?

Well, yes the theatre does play it's part here too. My Mother was a classically trained dancer & danced in the West End & even had her few minutes of fame on television demonstrating 'The Cockerel' on Ready, Steady, Go - a dance that for some reason never caught on (well there's a surprise!). Growing up I was sent to ballet lessons & drama school on a Saturday mornings & in the Summer my friends & I would dress up & put on shows & plays for our families.

Photograph: Mum & Dad taken whilst my Mum was on tour with Camelot, me when I was younger (my sister's the short one) & my cat 'Chicken' who's at the top of my favourite things list.

At 13 I was enrolled in The Arts Educational School, Tring Park - I didn't exactly fit in with the high maintenance wannabe ballerinas & drama queens but did get to go to school in a Rothschild Mansion complete with marble fireplaces & secret passages & spending lots of time in such an amazing place is certainly a more inspiring environment than any of my previous schools. And I may not have exactly enjoyed my time - I discovered I was far too self conscious for performing in public & an hour of Ballet every day did take on the form of torture for me but there was certainly a focus on vocation & career & those sort of schools do instil an awful lot of discipline, confidence & drive (well that or they make you a basket case). The actress Thandie Newton was in my year at school & over the years the school has had it's clutch of famous faces - Caroline Quentin, Jane Seymour, Julie Andrews....... there are probably some famous designers, scientists & business women, etc. in the list too but they don't tend to be celebrated as stage school successes stories.

On the technical side, I should also give some credit to my Father's genes which have come in quite handy - he's an Engineer & thankfully I inherited a problem solving, practical design brain too, which is just as well because corsets & real, non-standard, wonky bodies can present a challenge!

So I did my 2 years NDD & then went to Berkshire College of Art & Design in Maidenhead to study for a Higher National Diploma (equivalent of a Degree).

I choose to make four bridal gowns for my Final Collection as I most definitely wanted to create glamorous clothes & bridal was the only avenue where a designer could still create elegant gowns. When I think about it I was probably suposed to have done research into what the Bride of '93 was wearing & it might have been sensible to design a bridal range that was 'for the moment' & might have got me a foot in the door working for a big manufacturer but my head was in the clouds & I designed what I wanted:

I took my lead from one of my favourite films, The Wicked Lady & created leather bodices in Blue, Purple, Green & Yellow teamed with Champagne & White brocades & trimmed with rich coloured ribbons & black beadwork & lace. Three of the four were separates. My Grandad gave me �500 to buy the fabrics & Clarkes donated the leather (BCAD had contacts with Clarkes via the footwear design department).

Photographs: My sister modelling my Final Collection on the on the main staircase of my old school & a still from the Wicked Lady.

It took Bridal Fashion a long while to catch up & a change in the law but what do brides of today buy? Colour & separates & especially for civil services (which didn't exist in '93) more theatrical & period styles. The Marriage Act of 1994 has permitted civil marriages to take place in licensed venues since April 1995.

When I left college in 1993, after studying Fashion Design for 4 years, wedding gowns looked a little different to my final collection. A rule of thumb was that they were white, satin, featured: lace, sequins, pearls, bows, fabric roses & often puffy sleeves & yes, often, they did resemble a meringue (Four Weddings & a Funneral was made in 1994).

After college I pursued the idea of securing a design job in the bridal wear sector but upon discovering nearly all bridal wear companies (well the ones I wanted to work for anyway) are run by designers & therefore there are never any design jobs going, I eventually took the decision to work for myself. I arranged meetings with the buyers at Libertys & Harrods to get feedback & Libertys particularly were very supportive & asked me to create a gown for their 1994 Valentine's Fashion Show - Libertys sponsored me & I was able to keep the gown. I originally called the design Of Lust & Love but have for a long time now just called it Liberty. I am very grateful to Libertys for giving me that early opportunity to create whatever I wanted without the restraint of a budget & for obviously having confidence in me. Liberty was also my first go at an 18th century corset. Making the dress gave me chance to do something really creative & theatrical & to also examine how I might like to proceed in the Bridalwear Industry. From chatting with my sponsor it became obvious that with several hundred per cent mark up on bridal gowns, I could not make what I wanted, to the couture standard I wanted to work to & make a living doing it. The option, by default, was to start my own business & become a Couture Designer working direct with clients.

The road to where I am now was not easy. In 1994 armed with my portfolio & designs & with my Liberty dress commission in the pipeline I went to see a couple of wedding magazines. A fashion editor at what is now Wedding magazine took a shine to one of my illustrations & offered to give me some editorial & in January, as the Liberty fashion show was fast approaching, the February/March issue of Wedding & Home came out with an editorial & my illustration. All very exiting!

Well, yes is was exiting, except that wedding dresses in 1994 still did not look that different to1993 dresses & the design looked a little radical. Below my design from 1994 & typical examples of dresses from that issue of the magazine (granted there were designer dresses too but these were still very plain & very white).:

After I had made & photographed my Liberty dress, I did the rounds of all the bridal magazines & was told by one Fashion Editor, referring to my Liberty dress, that "only Arab girls would wear that" & at another magazine I was told to "come back Dear, when you've made something in white". The corsets too, did not help get me editorial because they were sexy not virginal & with editorial photo shoots the magazines want to call in 6 dresses that all have the same theme & other designers were not making corsets, colour or separates. Even very recently my Elizabeth dress was called in but not used for a shoot because it was 'too gold & didn't fit in with the other 'gold' (cream) dresses.

1996:

It would have been so much easier to give in & make safe, white dresses but I kept making what I liked & by 1996 I was picking up the odd order from shows & through continuing to contact editors, one of my sketches had caught the eye of a new editor at Bride & Groom (now Cosmopolitan Bride) & she asked me to make it up in ivory for an editorial shoot. When you don't have an advertising budget because there is no money for one, you sieze opportunities like that & even though it was plain & it was ivory, it did have a corset & the photograph brought in some orders. That dress is Venus & is still a dress that forms the basic design for client orders & it is still, as my other designs are, timeless.

Pictured:

Left: Venus (1996) - I very quickly learned that if you don't want stylists re-styling your designs, you bone the off-the-shoulder straps OFF-the-shoulder, so they can't butcher your necklines! Right: Liberty (1994).

2006:

I still continue to design what I like when it comes to new samples & I am lucky to attract clients that want what I do so I do not need to compromise my own ideas & make dresses I hate. The only down side with anyone that is ahead of the trends is that you & others like you do all the work & struggle along until the market catches up with your ideas & then other people pop up & start emulating your style, undercutting your quality & prices & try to make your signature their own. It happened with the gowns & happened again in 1998 with the accessories & now, unless you have a back catalogue of bridal magazines to hand, you wouldn't have a clue who's designs inspired everyone else.

It took me a very long time to come to terms with copying but then, my initiation was brutal. Venus from the Bride & Groom shoot (my first photo shoot) was replicated & I believe the London based designer even came to my showroom to try it on (& I laced her into it!) & the first crown I had featured in a magazine was copied & later photographed next to mine (as a pair) in another magazine (the editor told me she thought they went well together!). Lot's of people can't understand what the problem is with copying - it's the way markets are & I do understand that too. But the problem is, if like me, you're passionate about what you create & it took a long time to get recognition for your work & you are not as hard as nails, copying someone's design is like stealing one of their babies & 'copying' to a real designer, along with copying to make money, are such alien concepts that it's really hard to get your head around it all. It would be like someone at your work getting all the credit & a pay rise for work that you did & I do have a problem with people making a living off of my back.

These days I am more chilled about it. You have to make a choice, either you turn a blind eye & keep going or you get out. With the onset of the internet, as a designer I made a choice knowing in doing so my copyright would be infringed more, to put my entire portfolio online with nice, clean, large images. It is a commercial site & I wanted it to be a proper online portfolio for the vast majority of genuine visitors who don't come to the site with the intention of commissioning copies. Infringement of my copyright is still difficult to digest & occasionally I do crack - especially when, like me, you have the equivalent of a designer stalker using you as the blueprint for everything they do & even an accessory name that I coined because the name exactly reflected the shape of the crown I'd made, suddenly appears as a dress name on the other site ;) If the person in question is reading this, please note my Terms of Use & in particular clauses 5.1 & 5.2.

Working as a couture designer is long hours & I am facing a crazy '06 schedule but I will be popping over to Jersey to get a client ready for her wedding later this year (I've never seen Jersey), I grabbed four glorious days away in Venice at the beginning of April to recharge & I have a growing number of really great ex-clients whom I had fun with while they were coming to fittings & continue to meet up with as friends. The social angle of the job, making a client look the best they could look, getting to make up new designs & the fabulous endorsements my clients give me make up for having to ball out delivery companies for non-appearance or worse, crushed accessories & all the late nights & sore finger tips.

Writing this page & revisiting my first editorial has been interesting. I can see details in the design I have used - the caught up pannier sides on Bo Peep & Liberty, the scallop beading on Ice Queen, the wrapped sleeves on Fleur de Lys, the fishtail & it's reassuring to see I have stuck to my roots & not conformed. I redrew the design in the 1996 illustration for this page & though I admit there is a lot of detail on the skirt & it would help to be over 6' & a size 10, the design is a great design. So if any Bride-to-Be wants to glide down the aisle or through the doorway of a grand Stately Home in something like it or the variation I have drawn on the right, I would love to make it.

2007 onwards:

This Biography was written in 2006. At that time I also introduced a Diary page & updates on me & my work can be read there.