An Interview with Fashion Designer + Illustrator David Longshaw
Q: Firstly, when did your love of fashion design first blossom?
A: At primary school. I loved all the possibilities fashion offered, design-wise and the influence it has - everyone wears clothes (unless you're a nudist).
Q: How would you describe your fashion label in just three words?
A: Fun, creative, wearable
Q: What inspires your creativity the most?
A: There isn't one specific thing that inspires me creatively. I love the constant changes in fashion, each season is a new start, a time to create something different. I find the different projects I work on all help inspire each other and energise me for the next challenge. I love visiting art galleries, the National Theatre (and other theatres), the cinema, watching sport (I used to play rugby at school), animation (watching and making), they all inspire me and bring different elements to my work.
Q: We also understand that you created the fictional (and wonderful) character Maude the mouse and she plays a role in each of your collections. Please tell us more about this?
A: Maude is about fun, about creativity and about being playful with the sometimes overly-serious fashion industry. Maude is a fictional fabric mouse fashion editor at large for numerous publications and Editor-in-Chief of MAUDEZINE. She is what might happen if the late Isabella Blow got together with Daphne Guinness, Alan Bennett, Katie Grand, Anna Wintour, Paula Rego, Tilda Swinton, Dame Maggie Smith, the cast of Last of the Summer Wine and the League of Gentlemen and produced a fabric child.I originally created Maude whilst at St Martin’s. Maude and her fabric fashion team have now been made into a book series (The Maude and Doris Series), launched last year.
Most of my characters have names usually associate with a generation you would expect to find in retirement homes- not the front row of a fashion show. Critters, particularly mice are usually seen as dirty and about as far removed from fashion as you can get - I like the idea of taking these elements and twisting them, stylising them and repackaging them. Which is also something I like to do with my design work - taking something deemed old-fashioned, or ‘non-fashion’ as a starting point to design something new.
Maude books, diaries and notebooks are all available here on Amazon FYI...
Often my collections are inspired by the stories I create about Maude and other such characters, rather than just some surface inspiration like "ooh this year I'm inspired by the 70s" or cliched nonsense that brands spout.
Q: What advice would you give to those wishing to also pursue a career as a fashion designer?
A: Get as much experience as possible, read as much as you can, go to the best fashion school you can get in to, research as deeply as possible in to the industry, it's not just about designing. You need to know about all aspects of the business even if you don't plan to set up your own label, if you have a knowledge of how garments are costed, how they are made and have the skills to make them, know about how stores merchandise collections and how press and PR's work, you work with it or react against it, but if you are informed then you can become a better designer.
Q: Lastly, what do you hope to achieve with your career in the not-too-distant future; do you have any exciting, upcoming plans that you would like to share with us?
A: My aim from the start has been to be as creative as possible, design-wise and business-wise. I'm working on some exciting fashion projects at the moment that I'm hoping to announce soon.
There's also a short film that I'm going to be doing the voices for - which is fun.
As well as this I'm developing a stand-alone animation that I plan to turn in to a short online series - this is a slower burner in terms of time scale - the other projects are more time-sensitive (production of stores and SS17 take president time-wise) but it's something that should be fun and work with my creative project but also be it's own thing. And I'm working on ideas for SS17! Over all - more frocks, more collaborations, more of everything.
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We want to thank David for taking the time to answer our questions and we encourage you to check out more of his amazing work by visiting his website or following along on Twitter. Enjoy!