The Chain Store ChallengeDuring vacations, I worked in the design department of Marks & Spencer,
where Hans Schneider had been head since 1936 and at the end of my second
year of the, then, three-year course, he offered me a permanent position.
This did not appeal to me at all; like many of my contemporaries I was
convinced that you had to be a star by the time you were thirty, otherwise
you really had not made it. I did feel ready, though, to venture out into the
world, so, with some scholarship money I had won, I bought a three-month
return ticket to New York.
With little more than ten dollars a day, I had to find a job quickly, so I
bought a copy of Womenswear Daily and answered an advertisement for a
designer at a company called Jovi. I got the job and although the company
was very small to begin with, it became an overnight success and I found
myself designing a range of clothes bearing my name, Brian G for Jovi. The
exhilarating thing about working for the newly discovered junior sportswear
market was producing a completely new collection every six weeks, for clients
such as Macys, the New York department store. Never particularly interested
in ‘one-off’, or elite products, I derived enormous satisfaction from seeing
racks and racks of my designs in different colourways, ready for dispatch
and I was fascinated by the idea that vast quantities of people would be able
to enjoy well-designed clothes – this was something quite new, particularly
in the United Kingdom. Within a few months buyers were queuing for the
collection and scarcely a day went by when it was not featured in Womens-
wear Daily. The experience of Brian G for Jovi opened my eyes to the huge
potential of the mass market and the revolution that was about to occur in
fashion.
With the success of Brian G for Jovi I felt fairly confident that my education
was complete and I decided not to finish my degree at the Royal College of
Art, but I did return to London and in 1967 I became head of the coat and
suit design room at Wallis. Jeffrey Wallis was the great high-street entre-
preneur of the late 1960s and it was a privilege to work with him. One of
Wallis’s greatest successes was the Pick of Paris range, which featured
inexpensive couture copies and it fell upon me to go to Paris to select coats
from the Autumn 1969 collections. This was a widespread and quite legiti-
mate design practice; we attended the shows as buyers and developed the
garments we chose back in London, modifying the cut, fit and finish to suit
our market and price. This we had to achieve in three or four weeks in order
to get the garments in store for the release date and to secure newspaper
coverage. Most of the 1969 coat collections were short. Every other manu-
facturer dutifully complied with the general trend, but I put a few long coats
into the Wallis collection. There was a huge amount of publicity and within
days they sold out. Jeffrey Wallis demonstrated his great entrepreneurial skills