brand she founded in 1972 with three other
women designers. Their first creation was a
see-through mackintosh made from shower-
curtain material as modelled by naked women
and photographed by Helmut Newton. They
used curtains and car upholstery as fabrics
and their famed “amorphous” dress – a sort of
sexy, slinky tube with sections cut way; there’s
one in the V&A collection – was made of
Lycra before anyone used Lycra other than
for swimwear. They made one for Dame Edna
Everage to sing Disco Matilda on Top of the
Pops. (You can look this up on YouTube; it’s
worth three minutes of anyone’s time.)
Jarvis Cocker wrote a song about them:
“There was a shop called Swanky Modes/ Just
off the top of the Camden Road.” I can confirm
their shop was at the top of Camden Road as
my first job was in an office almost opposite
and I was scared of it. You had to ring a bell
to get in and I was never brave enough. “Oh,
I wish you had come in,” she says. But Esme,
I say, I bought a beret about 20 years ago
and have never even had the courage to wear
that. We laugh, but then she can afford to. She
hasn’t had a beret (red) hanging on the back
of a door for two decades now.
Let’s spool back to the beginning. She
was born in Bedford. Her father, Brian, was
an RAF pilot shot down over Belgium in- His fuel tank ignited and he was badly
The Times Magazine 67I have to tell her, truthfully, that it’s great
and fascinating and Sewing Bee fans will fall
upon it. I’m a Sewing Bee fan, weirdly. I don’t
sew. I’ve never sewn. But I love that show. It’s
up there with The Great British Bake Off, in
my book, yet with vastly better innuendos.
(“Flange” is guaranteed to get everyone
going and “a lovely smooth flange” is a killer.)
It’s Sewing Bee that first alerted to me to
“hungry bum”, coined by Esme to describe
what happens when the distance from crotch
to waist on a pair of trousers is too short.
(The seam is eaten by the bum. If you put on
weight during the lockdowns, as I did, you’ll
have noted your bum getting very hungry
indeed. Mine is still quite ravenous.)
Can she explain the show’s magic? “It’s
very positive and they all support and help
each other,” she says, and there is that, but
also there is the great chemistry between her
and her co-judge, the bespoke tailor Patrick
Grant, who is hot, sublimely elegant and as
tall as she is short. “It’s quite amusing. We’re
like Little and Large.”
They hit it off from the outset even
if he sometimes complains she plays her
music too loud in the green room they share.
“I play things I can dance to. I love to dance.”
Because she couldn’t come up with any riders
for the green room – “I couldn’t think of a
single thing” – the production team decidedon Mini Cheddars, which is odd, but she likes
them well enough now. If he tells you to turn
your music down, do you ever crunch your
Mini Cheddars louder? Do you weaponise
your Mini Cheddars passive-aggressively?
“Good idea!” (Sorry, Patrick.)
We settle where we can. She shares the
space with two costumiers and the workshop
is crammed floor to ceiling. She stores certain
clothes here, like those that once belonged to
her mother. She was a Jaeger woman but had
a lot of dresses made for her, as people did
back then. “It was cheaper, not like now.”
She still has the navy bespoke lace dress
of her mother’s that, as a teenager, she was
dying to get her hands on to transform into
something unique. “I was desperate to chop it
up.” She was always after her mother’s clothes
to chop them up. So much so, “My mother put
a lock on her wardrobe door.”
This is also where she keeps her Swanky
Modes archive. Swanky Modes is the fashionTHEIR FIRST DESIGN? A
SEE-THROUGH SHOWER
CURTAIN MAC SHOWN
OFF BY NAKED MODELS
TOM JACKSON