The Times Magazine 65“I have,” she says, “always approached life
with every intention of living it,” and that’s
her in a nutshell. For instance, her siblings
offered her a good piece of jewellery for her
60th birthday. A ruby ring, say. But she traded
that for a trip across Iran.
Sewing Bee, the reality contest, came out
of the blue, and she doesn’t have a television,
hadn’t seen the show – she joined for the
fourth series – but that didn’t faze her in
the slightest. She has hung out with David
Bowie, made the famed bunny suit for the first
Bridget Jones film and, as a fashion designer,
came up with conical bras 15 years before
Jean Paul Gaultier did that for Madonna.
(She called the look “torpedo tits”.) She could
have taken her “torpedo tits” and gone the
way of Vivienne Westwood, very possibly,
“But I’ve never cared about money or fame,”
and she still lives in social housing.
Plus she’s the best fun to be around.
Joe Lycett, who until recently hosted Sewing
Bee, has said, “Every time I go for one drink
with Esme I lose three weeks of my life,”
and I can well imagine that’s how it goes.
So there’s all that and more. I haven’t even
touched on “hungry bum” yet. (I hope mine
isn’t too hungry today. Why didn’t I check
before I left home?)
So we meet at her workshop. She’s already
there when I arrive and music is belting out.
(Fine Young Cannibals, I think.) She is, of
course, looking terrific today. It’s hard when
you’re older. You don’t want to go the “big
linen” route, as I call it, but also you don’t
want to be twee or mutton-dressed-as. The
ideal is edgy but not zany (heaven forbid), and
it’s edgy not zany that she always pulls off. She
is now 73, with the bob that rules all bobs (sit
on that, Anna Wintour!), while the lipstick is
MAC (Ruby Woo), the glass frames are Hoxton
Market, the enamel flower brooch is vintageand the sequined wool dress is from Cos. I’d
supposed she made her own clothes, and
mostly she does, she says, but if it’s ready-to-
wear then Cos is generally her first port of call.
I say I’m amazed. I’m as short as her (5ft)
and their stuff swamps me. She says, “But
I can always alter it.” I’d assumed that because
I’m short I can’t carry off clothes but she
has disproved that, goddamn it. I had, indeed,
been minded to ask for style tips but can now
plainly see style is something you have or
you haven’t. As the writer Patrick Kinmonth
once put it, “Chic is nothing but it’s the right
nothing.” Would you ever have a day when
you think, “Sod it, I can’t be bothered. I’ll just
wear tracksuit bottoms?”
“No, no, no. I don’t have any tracksuit
bottoms.” A pyjama day? “I don’t have any
pyjamas either. I wear vintage nighties.
Because they’re so old they keep getting
holes and I keep having to patch them.” How...
um... sexy? “I know!”
However, sometimes her standards do
lapse. During lockdown, for instance, she
lapsed. Go on, I can take it. “I sometimes
wore the same trousers two days in a row.”
We are meeting because she has written
a memoir. It astonishes her that she’s written
Beyond the Seams, just as it astonishes her
that she’s now a TV celebrity: “I started
a new career when I was nearly 70.” In
fact, she’s so astonished she’s written a
book that she sometimes forgets she has.
When she mentions, for example, she has a
niece who is a stand-up and I say, “Caroline?”
she looks baffled and horrified, as if I’m a
stalker who has been through her bins. I know
this information, Esme, because I’ve read your
book. “Oh yes. The book!”
She is worried the book is “rubbish” soWith Joe Lycett and
Patrick Grant on The
Great British Sewing BeeWOULD YOU EVER
HAVE A DAY WHEN YOU
JUST WEAR TRACKSUIT
BOTTOMS? ‘NO, NO, NO’
LOVE PRODUCTIONS/MARK BOURDILLON, LANDMARK MEDIA/ALAMY, VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM
Young in the Seventies. Below, from left: her design for
Bridget Jones’s Diary; her ‘amorphous’ dress in the V&Ameet Esme Young, who is
a judge on the BBC’s The
Great British Sewing Bee
as well as, to my mind and
many others’, the definitive
style icon for older women- sit on that, Prue Leith! – at
her workshop in the East End
of London, where I proceed
to hang on her every word for
four hours and counting. (I’d
only come for some style tips.
And to ask if she’d shorten
my shirt sleeves.)