The Fashion Businessby halting production on everything short and turning it over to the longer
styles. Wallis had never experienced such a successful season; we put every
fabric we had into Maxi coats, as they were christened, and they all sold
out. What lead me to go against the grain, and how did I know that long
would beat short that season? The answer is that the prediction of future
trends is an instinct and the career of a designer is made or broken on a
hunch about the length of a coat.
In 1969, I left Wallis, to go to an American company manufacturing in
the UK but my instinct served me less well on that occasion, and they went
out of business within a year. After a few months spent teaching with Daphne
Brooker at Kingston, I went to Cojana, an upmarket tailoring manufacturer
whose biggest customer was Harrods where I stayed for four years until I
heard that Monty Black,^14 the entrepreneur who had built Baccarat from
nothing in three years, had purchased the moribund reversible coat manu-
facturer Weatherall. I was immediately struck by the idea of revamping this
old-fashioned company which had, for years, been selling blue and brown
reversible coats, so I wrote to Monty Black who then offered me the job. By
updating the fabric and style, we produced a new classic, the camel and
white reversible which was still worn twenty years later.
Cojana and Baccarat made excellent products but no longer exist. This, I
believe, is because they did not fully understand how design could differentiate
them from the competition. I have always felt this is an English disease and
one of the reasons we have been unable to grow great brands like the Italians.
This brings us to 1976, when for the second time in my career, I was offered
a position at Marks & Spencer, but this time as head of the Design Depart-
ment, since Hans Schneider had retired. At the time, Marks & Spencer was
certainly not noted for design innovation, and most of my contemporaries
were horrified that I should work for a volume chain store. But my career
up to that point had done everything to strengthen my belief in the future
importance of the mass market, and I was convinced that at Marks & Spencer
there was huge, but as yet untapped potential. It is at this point in my story,
then, that the extraordinary creativity, the appetite for innovation and
originality unleashed during the 1960s feeds directly into national culture,
via Britain’s biggest retailer. Not only had the 1960s created the art school
culture which, I believe, revolutionized attitudes to design, they spawned a
- Monty Black worked with Jeffrey Wallis at Wallis shops and then went on to start his
own business, Baccarat, where he hired designers like Bill Gibb, John Bates, Gina Frattini to
design collections (a very new practice at the time). The company made beautiful tailored
garments with high work content, like leather trims. Following the success of this, he bought
Weatherall, the reversible coat manufacturer, which was in the doldrums.