INTERVI EW I SABE L MANNS
“ 14
I STARTED LOOKING FOR WORK BUT TO BE
HONEST, AFTER JUST TWO TO THREE WEEKS I REALISED THAT WASN’T WHAT I WANTED TO DO, I WANTED TO DO MY OWN BRAND
“I just fell in love with it and knew that was the right place for me. Unlike many of the British fashion courses, it was a much broader based course and allowed me to study both women’s wear and print design alongside a millinery module which I was quite interested in.”
Looking back, she recalls her time there as being very intense (the drop-out rate by the end of the course is over 50 per cent) but acknowledges it gave her the very best grounding.
Much as she loved New York though, her heart was always in the UK and specifically her home county of Herefordshire, which she loves. Much of her work has British influences and her final year thesis show took Royal Ascot for its inspiration.
At the end of her degree course, she was taken on by the highly regarded couture designer Alexandra Vidal working as part of a small team as an assistant designer as well as freelancing as a print designer.
She looks back at this period as one where she really learned the ropes of the fashion industry.
“Alexandra was amazing, like a big sister and a mentor, not at all ‘fashiony’ like you might expect. “
“I’m a real country girl at heart. I used to ride horses and always loved being around animals. I’d always dabbled with painting but it was a bit of a shock when I announced I wanted to do fashion.
“I loved painting and I realised that creating clothes and the fabric design was just another extension of that, another expression of my art,” she explained.
Clearly ambitious at an early age, she also realised that if she wanted to succeed at her chosen career, she needed the very best training.
“Fashion is a really tough industry and it’s hard to succeed. I had intended to go to fashion school in London but a friend of mine, who was a year older than me, was at Parsons in New York and I decided that was where I went to go.”
Clearly a persuasive youngster, she convinced her parents to let her go on a week-long trip to New York to decide if that really was where she wanted to study for the next four years.
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Alexandra offered to sponsor Isabel to allow her to stay in the States at the end of her first year but at that point she felt it was time to return home.
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