Alice Temperley’s first fashion week experience was a little unorthodox. She managed to get a sales room at the Metropolitan hotel, where many designers show their collections to buyers during London Fashion Week.

The hotel gave her a room, ‘probably’ because she and husband Lars had been living there for six months! Alice recalls how their room became a virtual factory, covered with sewing machines, overlockers, paper and pins everywhere. ‘We’d been there for so long and they’d kind of witnessed the whole experience’.

Her collection was made by printing at the Royal College during the day, and tramping rolls of fabric through the lobby in bare feet each evening; ‘they thought I was a complete fruitcake’.

‘It was very innocent. but then we made the collection, and we sold it, and we delivered it, and then we made another one, and now 6 years later here we are! It just seemed like a natural thing for me to do, I’d always made stuff’.

Alice has always made and sold things, and Temperley London is a huge extension of that. ‘You’re very much doing it for yourself, rather than doing it for other people. So it’s very much a development of myself, as well as to make a business work’.

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