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YOU magazine
29/07/2007
Its easy to see how Katherine Trigg found inspiration for her new children’s clothing line Vintage Kit: her home is set in a secluded Welsh valley at the foot of the beautiful Brecon Beacons – past lush green hedgerows and a drive way that is signaled by a vintage red American post box, the 15th- century farm house comes complete with barns, fields, and a small patch of Roman ruins. This rural idyll, where her four vivacious children have huge amounts of space to play and explore, is the perfect place for Katherine to create clothes that allow children to be children.
Yet this outpost is certainly not where Katherine 44, once imagined she would be. Having grown up in the urban hustle of Hong Kong (Her father worked for the United Nations), she has decidedly city –girl roots. She moved to London at 18 to study fashion design at the London college of fashion, and initially forged a career as a freelance stylist, working with big-name photographers such as David Bailey and Lord Snowdon.
Katherine’s husband, Chris, a dealer in vintage guitars, already owned the house when they met. The success of Chris’s business-he has two shops, in London and Bath- was such that he was always travelling in search of guitar gems for his celebrity clienteles (including Paul Weller ) and wanted a family home to which he could retreat.
Reluctantly, Katherine admits, she followed, not sure how she would cope in the countryside, fearful of being put out to pasture at 28; she laughs. Her 20s had been filled with a blur of dressing up, new romantic-style, and wild nights out in London, designing for then hot labels such as Pineapple dancewear, and styling for magazines and newspapers.
In the early days I did panic ; Katherine confesses. It felt very extreme, having quickly to learn about country life on my own, as Chris would often be away on business. I remember trying to fix a broken water pipe when I was eight months pregnant and having to waddle down the road to see if the nearest farmer would help; she gave birth to two of her children in the houses kitchen – her child, Kit arrived so fast that the midwife hadn’t yet arrived and had to talk Chris through the birth over the phone.
The house also needed a lot of work. It had been a bachelor pad for Chris, so was not entirely cosy for a growing family, and there was no garden to speak of. Chris could see into the future- could see kind of life we could build here- but I must admit. I never thought in a million years id be doing this. If it hadn’t been for Chris and the kids, I would have given in; she laughs.
Although she is surrounded by a menagerie (chicken, pheasants, ponies, dogs, rabbits, guinea pigs and duck) there’s not much of the farmers wife look about Katherine- she’s sexy and whippet-thin, with a penchant for hot pants and cowboy boots- but there’s more of a tough inner core than she likes to admit.
How else could she of raised four creative children in the middle of nowhere? Josh, 19, a budding film director and photographer (he photographed the first Vintage Kit catalogue), Natasha (Noo Noo), 14, an aspiring ballerina, Kit, 11, who shares his fathers interest in guitars, Beau, four, already a showman, have all flourished in this environment.
The remoteness of their farmhouse-the nearest neighbour is two miles away and their closest convenience store an inconvenient seven miles-hike and the rural life they have embraced have encouraged Katherine to cook everything (from bread to jam) from scratch, and to the children home-schooled three days a week. The lifestyle has also provided the perfect launch pad for Vintage Kit. With three boys, I have always found it hard to find goods quality clothes for kids that are comfortable, unique and handmade. I’ve always wanted simplicity and quality fir my own children;
Katherine has also drawn on ideas picked up over years of joining Chris on annual business trips to the US. Wed explore these huge” meet and swap” events there, and the handicraft were extraordinary-wonderful hand printing and unique pieces, light years ahead of anything we could find here. And being in places such as Texas, we picked up on the whole retro cowboy mood for the boys, she says.
Starting her own collection, however, wasn’t something she had considered until three years ago when a friend’s husband, who manufactures cloths in Hong Kong, asked if shed develop some children’s clothing ranges for him. I had lost a lot of
confidence in myself, having taken time out to look after the children, but I took a deep breath and thought id give it a go; she remembers.
We did three seasons together, but something about it didn’t gel; I wasn’t happy with the fabrics or the way the clothes fitted, so I chose not to continue. I felt that if I couldn’t do it right, I didn’t want to do it all. Yet I learned a lot about the mass market and the technical side of manufacturing, and I’d put so much time into this idea already that it seemed a waste not to keep going on my own.’
Daunted by the prospect of starting again-‘I feared that it had been my big chance and I’d blown it’-but determined to give it a go, she decided to try to print her own fabrics. Chris believed in my designs and suggested I call Laura Ashley, whose design sensibility was quite similar to mine, to see if they still printed their own fabrics, and, if so, where,’ Katherine continues. The call paid off-she found out that Sir Bernard Ashley and his daughter, Emma, ran their own fabric printing works, Elanbach, just down the road from where she lives.
And so Vintage Kit was born. Elanbach produced a small print run of fabric for Katherine-‘it was so fantastic to see my designs on fabric. I finally thought, “my god, I can do anything,” she says-and quite soon the other elements fell into place. Given that much of Laura Ashley’s production was based in Wales for many years, Katherine soon called on the expertise of some of their talented ex-seamstresses, found through ads in the local paper, to make up samples for the new range. ‘I now have a small team of women with more than 70 years’ of experience between them,’ she reveals with glee. ‘ I want to keep it as British-made as possible.’
Katherine’s prints of flowers, shoes, cowboys and animals in slightly faded hues (buttery yellow’s, denim blue’s, soft pinks) come in easy-to-wear shapes, such as pinafores for girls and dungarees for boys. There are also gingham-trimmed denim jackets and motif T-shirts. Apparently, Kate Moss’s daughter Lila Grace is already a fan.
Katherine says it’s important that the clothes can deal with rough-and-tumble of children’s play, so she has sourced the best-quality cotton-denim and silk she can find. She then creates a patchwork of many of the fabrics in contrasting styles and colours, adding motifs for decoration, all of which gives a well-worn well-loved fel to each piece. I like the use of traditional details with a slightly modern twist,’ she enthuses.”I want to make the kind of clothes that you can hand down through generations.They’ll only get better with age.”With the eopening of its first shop in bath,Vintage Kit is quickly gathering a largely word of mouth fan base, which is exactly how Katherine wants it. I am not really in it for the money – we don’t want to take on Gap. Service we can offer is important to me. If we keep things small, we can ensure the collection continues to feel relatively individual and if a customer wants something special, we can do that for them.”
It’s a rather unconventional approach to clothes design, but then Katherine and her family are a rather unconventional bunch.The childrens homeschooling came more from necessity, given their remote location, than froma desire to buck the system, but, Katherine says”it has given them the chance to discover what they are good at. I’ve had moments of panic, worrying that we were doing the wrong thing, so I’d go with kit and Noo Noo to Bath for a week so that they could spend some time at school there. We then got a rythmn of three days at home, two days in Bath.’ ( Noo Noo’s ballet teacher is based in Bath, so it made sense to go to school there on ballet days).
Katherine finds local former teachers to provide the lessons at home (the children have a school room in the house, but balance time spent at home with outside sports). It’s a system that works – Josh completed his maths GCSE at 12 and four others a year early at 15; Noo Noo trains with ex-royal Ballet principal. ‘You can only do your best,” reflects Katherine. Whatever life throws at you, you have to muddle through and it seems to have worked for us.’
Now katherine’s biggest challenge is trying to contain all the ideas she has unleashed since starting her collection. There’s so much I want to do. I worry more about fitting it all in rather than what to do next,’ she laughs. She’s happy with the steady approach she’s taking-it’s not the most economical way to run a business, but it means we can keep it unique’-and enjoy the enthusiastic feedback she gets from her own children as much as customers. ‘I just want it to be fun. As long as I believe in what we’re doing. Then I think we’ll be ok,’ she smiles.
Vintage Kit,11 Queen Street, Bath,tel:01874713177, or visit VintageKit.com