40 Years of Fashion Anniversary

30th June 2025

It's not every day you wake up dreaming of being a fashion designer, well actually for most of my life I did...

This blog is about my career as a designer, pattern cutter, dressmaker, grader, sample cutter or as I like to call myself now, a designer maker or creator, but whatever role I have been in since I started my professional life. So 2024 saw me complete 40 years of my career!

I grew up as the youngest of 5 children & my mother was my main influence for my interest in fashion from a young age. As a child I remember fashioning outfits for my Cindy doll from my mother's left over fabrics after she had made dresses for me. She was of the generation when everything was handmade, nothing was wasted & the fast fashion industry was not a thing.

I was inspired by beautiful textures, colours & prints of fabrics. I loved sketching & looking at fashion magazines. I would learn many skills from my mother knitting, crocheting, sewing & embroidery. I enjoyed art, design & graphics which led me in the direction of a career in a creative role. At 16 I went to art college & studied clothing technology & design at Rochester. In the days before the internet we were given lists of designers to research & the easiest way to do this was to either buy a Vogue magazine or to visit London heading for places like Bond Street & Covent Garden to look at the fashion not only in the shops but on the youth. Fashion was much more exciting & creative then, with the young bands of the time wearing fabulous outfits & creating new fashion trends right off the hits from the music video.

I needed to earn some money while I was studying at Rochester & so I discovered my local dry cleaners needed someone to alter & repair clothes, no one ever showed me what to do, I just knew somehow & took everything home to fix. As soon as I completed my clothing course at the age of 18 I found myself a full time position sample cutting in the East End of London. I needed to buy an Evening Standard newspaper on a Thursday or Friday or to buy a Drapers Record, to find vacancies in the rag trade, as it was called then. Neither of those publications were easily available in my village or Kent so I got the train to London & at the station bought a newspaper & rang the vacancies from the tube station lobby on their pay phone. The role I got was for a clothing manufacturer in their sample room. I was 18 & I was cutting samples for a women's wear studio with an electric round knife. This company supplied the mail order catalogues at the time, like Great Universal & Kays, which allowed you to pay monthly for clothing purches so that you could buy the latest fashions on a budget.

This is a picture of one of the pieces from my final collection at college.

In those days nothing was digital, I am talking around the late 1980's & everything was drawn by hand & cut by hand. When I worked in London at the end of the 80's computers were just starting to be utilised by the fashion industry & I witnessed the first computer grading system that had been invented as a friend worked for the company, this was quite a big deal at the time, now most things have been digitised even your shopping experience. Although mailorder catalogues were the forerunner of online shopping and in between that the high street was tking.

The 80's was a very exciting time for fashion as there was an explosion of styles and colour at that time with the British music industry in particular leading the way for the style inspiration. With bands like Spandau Ballet, Culture Club & Siouxsie & The Banshees, then from the USA people like Madonna, Prince & Michael Jackson... I could go on because it was a time like I haven't seen since. Being in London you would see Punks with bright orange mohican hairstyle & silver studded leather clothes, Soul Boys with there smooth looking image, sports labels everywhere from t-shirts to trousers with smart hair, Skinheads with shaven hair tattoos, Doctor Martins & braces, then we had the New Romantics with big bleached permed hairstyles & big blousey shirts & creative face makeup...it really was a great time to be growing up. I guess a part of me wants to inject a bit of that energy into the now & make things more interesting. I think things have dumbed down rather a lot in the decades which followed for everyday wear...

My goal back then was to learn how to create a garment from start to finish without needing the help of anyone else so that eventually I could have my own business & create anything I wanted to. Although I didn't realise it at the time, I think I already had enough knowledge to work for myself, people would ask me to make their wedding & bridesmaids dresses & among other items of clothing, accessories & home furnishings.

After a year or more in that company, I worked in another women's wear manufacturer who made outer garments, like coats, who wear originally a furiers but evolved into making fake fur & woolen outer wear for women. Here I was given the opportunity to work on my own designs, pattern cutting & grading the styles. This was an interesting role which I enjoyed mostly for the design aspect but I wanted to learn more & so had to find a more suitable role.

I was quite often asked to make bridesmaids dresses & wedding dresses

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Luckily I was offered a role at French Connection as a pattern cutter's assistant, again, in the East End of London & here I had a great opportunity for me. I was in a larger sample room now, with many young people all working together, this was a great time for me to learn, my other roles had been working in smaller studios with older people & not such fashion forward companies. I worked on the FC label innitially, but soon I was chosen to work on the company's other brand Nicole Farhi. I started as an assistant & progressed my way up to be a toilist creating toiles, or mock upsof the designs. Then I was given the role of pattern cutter and I had my own assistant, creating the patterns for the sample room. During my time there I worked on mens, womens & childrens wear. It was a lovely time to be part of the Nicole Farhi brand, everyone who worked in the studio was invited to the showroom at the end of each season to a private fashion show of the finished collection which was very special.

I left work to raise a family & started to work from home a bit to keep my hand in. Some years later I went back to work for a local fashion brand in Kent as head of the sample room, back to where I had started, working for a small company. All my experience came in to use as I was working alone with one machinist & as the company grew several more people worked in the sample room & the brand had taken off. It was good to witness this & be part of the success of the business.

One of the working sketches I would have made for the the toile & pattern at Nicole Farhi on the left & a design sheet from Nicole Farhi for me to create the patterns for that season on the right

Maybe it took this bit of time back in the industry for me to get my confidence back but several years had passed working in house & I began to realise I was more than capable of working freelance in all of these roles, so I worked from home again but this time professionally. My health also wasn't so good & so I had to rethink my life choices. Although I wasn't particularly happy creating someone elses brand when I just wanted to create designs of my own, which was the dream, I had always had from a young girl. I set myself up in my own home studio and created my own label, Caroline Bruce Designs & I haven't looked back! For the last 10 years, nearly eleven now, I have worked for so many people, whether it has been garment alterations, creating a collection of samples and patterns for designers, red carpet dresses for celebrities to bridesmaid & wedding dresses to my own designer label, the latter being my passion & goal to make successful. I have worked for several small brands in the UK as well as individuals who want bespoke one of a kind designs made. My driving force is my ability to design & make anything I want, this is what interests me more than anything, the creativity, for me, it's like an art. If you are making beautiful things that make people happy, this is what makes me happy.

A couple of my own designs that I had made a calico toile or mock up of for my own label.

It has been 40 years since I started studying & working in this industry & I still feel inspired & excited by what I can actually create. I feel like I am still learning things & continue to be inspired by everything around me, especially seeing the work of the Haute Couture designers. The fact that I now have access to the internet is amazing in the way that if I want to discover a new artist or designer, I can just look up their work & find out about them without having to go anywhere. The inspiration is endless... the most important thing to me is being able to use my creativity & skills to make unique garments, but ethically.

The reason I decided to try creating occasion wear ethically is because I had realised that at that time it hadn't been done before but also we needed to make a change in the fashion industry, especially after seeing the fast fashion movement growing so fast with very low quality garments being over produced & soon being discarded. I wanted to do things in a better, less wasteful, less harmful & less exploitiive way. So I spent & still do, a great deal of time researching fabrics which will translate into an occasion wear garment but will have as low an impact on the environment as possible. I have designed & made many of my own styles showing them at various fashion shows over the years, as I love to create something uniquely mine & not to follow others. I do enjoy making one off dresses & want to continue to grow my limited edition ladies ethical luxury occasion wear brand, Caroline Bruce.

A bespoke wedding dress I made for a client

In September last year, 2024, I have been sewing professionally for 40 years, I never knew or wanted to be part of any other industry for all that time. I never get bored with design but I would also like to create & design other things in the years ahead as I have so many ideas coming to me. Creativity never gets dull & it is a way of giving a little bit of yourself to the world. As always, I want to give thanks to everyone who has supported me over the years & everyone who has given me a break in my career. Life can be challenging especially in an industry like fashion, but it can also be very rewarding. I have also met so many interesting people & this is one of the things I enjoy, even though I do miss working in a design room full of people.

This was some of the many bespoke items I made for clients but I did not have any photographs of particularly as it was so long ago

The commission was for two full length reversible capes & a trouser outfit for an Abba tribute band. Below that a bespoke silk jaclet for a client.

So that's a round up of the last 40 years of my career life but I still only feel like I am just getting started as I have plenty left to do!

I have been trying in vain to upload the many images from my last 40 years but it has not worked so I leave you with just the oldest ones I could find. I am going to add a gallery page instead so look out for that!

@caroline.bruce.designs

info@carolinebruce.co.uk

June 2025

40 Years of Fashion Anniversary

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