Anto Shirts.

Colourways in every direction and an archive of patterns which includes former presidents, members of the Rat Pack and any actor you care to mention.

I had two spearpoint collar shirts made to measure in four days.

A great LA experience, Anto has been in business since 1955.

My last job was about the Suffragettes and in order to reproduce their sashes and medals we worked with Toye Kenning and Spencer, a company with a fascinating history which traces back to 1685.

These photo's are of our Votes for Women sashes, we also ordered medals which the women received from the WSPU after serving time in prison and hunger striking. Toye had made the original medals and were able to delve into their archive, incredibly finding the actual dies that had been made to cut the medals at the time, bringing an authenticity to our film which none of us had foreseen.

The ribbon was woven and the sashes embroidered to the most pleasingly high standards. When the delivery arrived on our costume truck and we finally handled the material that we had been looking at reference photographs of for months, we felt very much in touch with the women who had inspired our story

Freddie Toye, who helped us throughout the manufacture, kindly invited us to do a site visit to see the whole process and so I think a couple of us are going to do a field trip this summer - can't wait.

I went to see Mr.Dometakis last week for the first time in ages. He is as busy as ever and I enjoyed a biscuit with him as we discussed the shirts I wanted to order.
I guess he is our London equivalent of Anto's in L.A. and in a very typical, old-school British Film Industry style he has no website and only one, discreetly hung, signed photo of a celebrity on the wall of his studio. Charming.

Make Do and Wear - a new resource for costume types.

One of my very best friends and fellow Costume Designer, Natalie Ward, has started a blog.
Natalie is sharing her costume and clothing manufacture contacts and related shop finds whilst living in L.A. for three months - I'm looking forward to many more posts, especially the one about Hollywood shirtmaker Anto.

I had reason to visit Keith at Gamba Theatrical Shoemakers this week and managed to get my camera out for a quick blog post, multi-tasking as ever.

What a treat; clown shoes in progress at the theatrical shoemakers - isn't that exactly as you'd imagine?

Last week, Jo Gordon and I took a trip up to Annan to visit Stuart at Esk Cashmere.

Jo and I have been collaborating on a small knitwear project so we caught the train to Scotland with our designs for the first-stage samples.
A knitwear factory was new to me, usually I work with much smaller studios who can do one-offs or short runs in impossible time-frames, sometimes hand knitted, sometimes machine, but always small scale set-ups. I was keen to be shown around and to see what was possible on Stuart's machines.

I'm now impatient to see the results but this being fashion not costume, we have to wait a little while.