A CREATIVE CALLING

The founder of Made My Wardrobe, Lydia Higginson, talks quitting the high street for home-made and accidentally becoming a business owner

- Lottie Storey

Lydia Higginson is sitting behind a sewing machine at Made My Wardrobe (mademywardrobe.com) HQ, a Grade II listed building in central Bristol. The noise of the buzzing machine competes with loud Brazilian music playing on the stereo in this warm and cosy studio, the sun streaming in through huge windows. Although happy to be where she is today, none of this was in Lydia's life plan. So how did it happen? "I didn't intend for Made My Wardrobe to be a business," she explains. "This all started out as a personal creative project which has just naturally grown into a business because I wanted to share all the things I had learnt along the way."

That creative project began six years ago on 1 January 2016 when Lydia made a decision to stop buying fast fashion. Current estimates suggest that the planet already has enough clothes for the next six generations, and Lydia decided to use her creativity to find an alternative by making her own clothes instead. Never a fan of New Year's Eve, Lydia tells us the story of that life-changing morning: "I hadn't gone out the night before. I got up at the crack of dawn and cycled down to the studio. No one else was in that week." The first things Lydia made were intricately embroidered and detailed, fitting with her evolving style which she now describes as 'folk-meets-utilitarian'. "I started by making underwear, then a coat, then some high-waisted trousers."