The Future of Fashion: Rose Danford-Phillips
The Future of Fashion series brings you interviews with emerging designers, from across the globe, who The New Edit believe will be the leading voices of Fashion in the Future.
London, United Kingdom
Rose Danford-Phillips creates bold, painterly garments and accessories inspired by nature, for striking women with artistic flair and an appreciation for luxury. Raised in a family of gardeners and artists, a love of the maximalist beauty of nature lies at the core of her design. Through her work she seeks to show nature in all its glory by highlighting the beauty of wild movement, colour, complexity and the teeming life it holds in its hands. Rose blurs the line between art and fashion by using vivid collaged prints as the foundation of every collection. She draws together everything from 16th century Dutch flower and portrait paintings to modern photographs and her own abstract painting to create bold artworks. These artworks are then applied to luxurious silks, eco-friendly organic cottons and sumptuous velvets to create garments that are both beautiful and practical for the modern woman.
Nature, the outdoors and art played a big role in your upbringing, what role did that play in shaping you as a designer? I’m almost like a lazy designer in that I’ve just taken everything from my childhood and shoved it on a plate for everyone else. Both my parents are gardeners and I grew up surrounded by nature, which I as a rebellious teen often tried to avoid because it was so in my face but it has just come out anyway. I grew up with a really bad eyesight which we didn’t realise until I was eleven so it was all really blurry which I always think affects how my prints are quite abstract. My parents’ house which I grew up in has also played a massive role in my work. It’s very maximalist, everything is painted from the walls and floors to weird antiques my dad has decorated up from eBay and there are plants everywhere, everything has been thought about and designed and artistically changed and I channelled all that into my work.
What is it about nature that inspires you? That’s an eternal question. I think if you look at representations of nature across history what almost always comes first is a reverence of nature in art and design and in sacred objects and I just continue that, it is a very primal thing. I’m not religious but I think there is a sense of the spiritual in nature, in life and the movement - it’s everything.
You wanted to be an artist, what made you choose fashion design instead? Growing up, I always loved dressing up but art was always my favourite discipline. So, I started doing lots of portraits of people and I like translating their identity into a painting and getting their emotion across. When I started doing fashion I realised that fashion is the applied version of that, it is taking identity and personality and style and emotion and putting that on people, it is like a practical version, it means your art can live in the world rather than go on a wall.
“because if my brand is inspired by nature and the aesthetic is so inspired by nature then it’s essence has to be sustainable”
What are the challenges you face as a young designer? There are three: the first is exposure because you can make really cool stuff but if no one sees it then you're fucked. Especially in British fashion where essentially as a young designer you have to get Fashion East or NewGen otherwise no one cares. But exposure is something I'm working on and something I hope you’ll help me with.
Then the second one is mentoring on the business side, your uni doesn’t teach you anything about sourcing, manufacturing and all of those sides are difficult. So, you have to wear every single hat and do everything yourself whether you know about it or not because you can create great collections but if you can’t sell them then it is unsustainable. As a designer I only really care about making nice collections so I have to force myself to do the sales side.
Finally, money is a big challenge. Fashion is not a cheap business - you have to pay for all the materials, the prints, the photographs before you know if you're actually going to be able to sell any of the pieces. It can be very hard financially to get going and keep going until you make it.
What are the values of your brand and what are your ambitions for it? I would say the core three tenets of the brand are: Fashion, Art & Nature. As my brand has developed I’ve become more and more obsessed with making it sustainable because if my brand is inspired by nature and the aesthetic is so inspired by nature then its essence has to be sustainable. With my upbringing I have a massive advantage in sustainability. So if I can be a designer that highlights and exposes innovation in plant materials that would be really exciting because a lot of brands even sustainable ones don’t have the same background I do to back up the love and the obsession and the knowledge that we share, so I want to bring that and I think that is my new obsession and value which is going to be at the core of everything.
What I really want to do is make beautiful sustainable work that women love to wear and find comfortable. I want to design pieces that make women feel like the best version of themselves and promote sustainable fashion in an exciting way.
Rose launched her eponymous label with her AW2019 collection in February 2019, as part of the House of Peroni fashion designer project, and showed her SS2020 collection with on OnOff at London Fashion Week. Rose and her work has been featured in Vogue UK, Vogue China, and Vogue Netherlands, as well as Wonderland, Hunger, Glamour, ID and Dazed. https://rosedanfordphillips.com/
Written by Samson Royston, April 2020
