David Longshaw.

Since taking home an impressive number of international awards, David Longshaw has hit runways, wardrobes and creative minds with enough pizazz to make the front row smile. I'll gladly put my hand up as a huge fan of his FW10/11 collection that went down London Fashion Week runways (blue high-waisted pants? I love you), and even more gladly introduce you all to an exceptional designer with a head full of talent:

Hi David, how’s it going?
Busy but good.

London Fashion Week and seems like such a long time ago now, but your pieces were definitely a hit – can you tell us a bit about the inspiration behind them?
The collection was inspired by a short illustrated story I created specially for the collection. It's called Escaping Emily (you can read it on my website). The story's about a rather disturbed fashion designer called Emily who discoveres an abandoned puppet.

The collection takes its inspiration from various parts of the story and some of the prints are illustrations from it.

What would you describe as the David Longshaw vibe?
I think it's hard to describe the vibe of your own label. I'd say it's modern, feminine with an edge. I like to mix traditional feminine aspects like soft sculptural pleating with sports elements.

What are you working on at the moment?
I'm designing my new S/S collection for September Fashion Week and sorting out production for the orders from my 'ones to watch' show. It'll be selling in Debut (New York), Sister (Japan) and youngbritishdesigners.com (UK).

I'm also writing some articles for different mags like Disorder, where I interview young designers through Maude- the fictional fabric fashion mouse, who's appeared on vogue.com and th efront page of the London Fashion Week newspaper.

We know you can’t give away too much, but what can we expect for your next collection?
Well I'm just designing it at the moment, so who knows. I'm starting to tentatively finalise designs. The collaboration with Kirsty Ward with the jewellery went really well- we will probably be working on pieces for my new collection again and I'm planning to have my first David Longshaw hand bag in this collection so that will be exciting exploring more accessories.

What do you think of the new wave of bloggers coming through?
I think it's great that theres so many enthusiastic people out there who want to share their passions with a wider audience than just their friends. Bloggers now seem to be much more clued up about the subjects there talking about and are really challenging th econventional magazines, especially because of the speed and folowing some have.

One of our previous interviewees, Kim (designer of Kymare), would like to know: Would you make the same decisions again?
I think I probably would, theres always things you could do differently on an individual garment basis, but over all, carear, education and direction of collection wise, I'd probably do it the same way.

And last of all, what’s a random question you would like to ask the next interviewee?
What's the best piece of advice you've been given in your career?



Thanks David!

Check out more of his work HERE.

*love*

xx