Bespoke Is The New Black

Katie Mulloy meets Chester fashion designer Matthew O’Brien to unpick the process of made-to-measure luxury

Three minutes into our first consultation and I’m starting to fear I may be the trickiest customer fashion designer Matthew O’Brien has encountered in a while.

‘Do you like lace?’ he asks. No.

‘How about pleats?’ No.

‘What about some sort of embellishment?’ Absolutely not. Which begs the very reasonable question, what exactly do I want? It’s just that rather frustratingly for him, I imagine, I don’t really have the answer to that.

I’m rather hoping he does. His patience apparently knows no bounds. It’s okay, he assures me as he rubs out his latest sketch once again – that’s his job. ‘When someone has booked in for a consultation, they’ve come to me for a reason,’ says Matthew, 29. ‘I have to figure out what it is they’re really looking for. I want them to end up with something that’s beautiful and fits them perfectly but is also individual and looks like it’s been made just for them.

‘So they might ask for something simplistic,’ he says referencing my vague brief of ‘something long and black’.

‘But I think it’s important, during the design process to push that boundary a little. If it doesn’t work, no problem, we’ll start again. I’d rather put more on and then take it off.’

This is my first foray into the world of bespoke dress buying. It wasn’t something I’d really considered, or even known about, until a recent search for an awards ceremony dress (you can read all about it in my editor’s letter) led me to Matthew’s showroom – a plush three-story shop-cum-bridal-studio-cum design-house in the heart of the Chester Rows. If he’d had a little more time, he’d said, he could have made me one.