I grew up in a tourist trap town just big enough that most people have heard of it, but not big enough to have anything of interest in it at all. If you wanted to wear something different in my town, your options were limited; travel two hours to the city or spend your afternoons painstakingly trawling through opshops in the hopes of hidden gems. I started out early, altering pre-loved clothes into something that felt like mine, emulating styles I had seen online or ideas from the inside of books. When I was sixteen I sewed a regency cut gown out of white cheesecloth entirely by hand because I didn't own a sewing machine, and wore it to school.
I only ever started selling because the people around me started offering to buy, and I realised that I wasn't the only one bored to death by everything on offer in the shops down the street.
In my twenties I was lucky enough to meet and begin working for a man who'd spent his entire life doing corsetry and theatre costuming, who was patient and generous enough to teach me everything I needed to know to get it right. With him I started putting together collections and participating in local fashion shows, and started to find my feet in terms of what it was I really wanted to create.
I work with vintage and antique patterns as well as drafting my own, combine new and old fabrics, and am on a constant search for novelty and beauty. I'm hugely inspired by historical fashions and try to bring them forward in a wearable, accessible way - bringing the attention to detail and perfect tailoring of the past into the present. That's why I find cosplay design so delightful; taking a civil war era corset and transforming it into a piece of Doctor Who fan art makes me absurdly happy.
I do it because I love it, because I believe we should all just wear whatever the hell we want and get on with being happy, because I'm not very good at working for other people and because I think if I stopped creating I might actually go completely bonkers.