>>London Fashion Week is just so exciting because it's the culmination of months and
months of really, really hard work.
The shows appear to be this sort of effortless 15 minutes of beautiful models walking around
down a runway and, um, knowing that they've taken so much creativity and so much work
to get them to that stage, I don't know, it's just the culmination of all of that makes
it the most
exciting time.
>>The thing I'm most excited about the show today is that, um, in Whistles we've never
really focused very much on our evening wear, so we decided right from the very beginning
that, that in this show we would show that we can do evening wear but also in a very
effortless Whistles way I suppose.
So the show is all about the mixture of colour and textures and print, and the prints that
we've chosen are these beautiful blanket checks.
So the blanket checks starts off on the coat then get printed onto pleated silks for dresses.
We've used a beautiful shade of lilac as our kind of base colour, which is a colour that's
kind of quite unusual, it hasn't been seen in fashion for a while and has sort of slightly,
um, nannyish connotations I suppose.
Well I think we've hopefully redesigned it and taken it somewhere a little bit different
in this show and I hope it comes across as a very, as an elegant but effortless and easy
way of dressing in the evening.
>>We've been at Whistles now since 2008 and we've been honing the collection, trying to
make it perfect so that it really reflects the, the direction and the vision that we
had in the first place and I think we've got to the stage now where we feel that it's about
there, that it's consistent.
So we also, we know that we're expanding the brand overseas and we're selling to international
press and buyers so this is a perfect opportunity for us, so yeah, I think we're ready now.
>>I think the most surprising thing for me at Fashion Week is when I learn't that actually
so many of the garments that are in the show were finished only a few hours before.
In fact, yesterday we made two scarfs, we remade a coat, um, and basically refitted
another 25 garments.
I mean it's just such a frenetic whirl of activity the day before, it's kind of hard
to image.
It's, I guess it's like a Swan, there's all this action going on underneath that nobody
see's and it just looks beautifully perfect and elegant on the surface.
>>I actually used to make, um, clothes for my younger sister and I used to force her
to wear them and, um, ever since, I don't know why I made clothes for her and not for
me.
Maybe it was she was a better shape than I was but, um, ever since then I've, um, I've
either wanted to either make clothes or, or be responsible for, um, for creating, um,
a look or a style.
Yeah it's a, it's an exciting business to be in.
>>I think the most important thing that I've learn't, um, kind of both in fashion and in
business I suppose is always to, um, find and employ people who are much, much better
than you would ever be at anything.
It just makes it so much easier, I've got a team of people who are absolutely brilliant
and I could never do what they do but that's how it should be.
>>I think if you're starting out, um, in fashion, um, you should probably try and stick to your
instincts, try not to compromise where possible, um, because there will be a lot of people
trying to sort of push you in different directions, um, and I think your vision is probably the
most important thing and if you stick as close to it as you can do, um, then I think that's,
that's a good lesson.
>>Technology's made a real difference, or it's made our lives much, much easier, um,
we tend to manufacture not in this country because all the factories are closed.
So we're manufacturing in either in the rest of Europe or in China, um, and it just allows
us to do fitting sessions directly with our manufacturers instead of them having to send
samples over, us fitting them and sending them back again.
We just save a huge amount of time in the whole supply process, in fact when we buy
cashmere from, um, a manufacturer in the edge of China near outer Mongolia, it takes 7 hours
to get there from Shanghai and if we can speak to them directly we can have a proper conversation
with each other, we can actually see how the garment fits, um, it just makes the whole
process much, much quicker.
>>I last used Skype with, um, having, um a meeting with my Marketing Consultant Jo Farrelly
who lives in Dublin with her two small boys and, um, it's great, we do it very often but
the thing that always slightly puts me off is that she is always sitting there in her
pyjamas what ever time of the day.
I don't know what that says about her.