British author and textile designer Alison Willoughby creates gloriously sculptural skirts that look as sensational on as they do hanging in the grooviest galleries of Europe and the USA.

Describe Alison Willoughby as a craftsperson and she’s liable to wince. The acclaimed graduate of London’s Royal College of Art admits she still harbours her old art school association of craft with knitted toilet roll holders
and lavender bags. After finishing her MA in Constructed Textiles and Mixed Media in 2001 Alison immediately launched her own design business with commissions from (UK department store) Selfridges and the British Council. Within a few years she had amassed a number of prestigious awards, commissions and grants, worked with design icons like Alexander McQueen, exhibited her work in art galleries across London, Prague and New York and sold her work in boutiques worldwide, including Ysh in Tokyo, Coco Ribbons in Dubai, Johnny Moke in London and Urban Outfitters in Glasgow.

But the down-to-earth lass from Cornwall is no art snob: when a friend derisively dubbed her ‘skirtgirl’ some years ago she embraced the term, which was soon picked up by art galleries and the fashion and design media who sniffed out her story. “He started calling me Skirtgirl and taking the mickey out of me and I thought, ‘Yeah, this sounds great. When you say you’re a textile designer people think, ‘right, so you work in a mill’ or assume you must make cushions or quilts,” she says.

To Alison the simple, flat surface of a skirt like the classic A-line offers the creative freedom of a blank canvas. Her innovative and varied methods, many of which are outlined in her new book, ‘49 Sensational Skirts: reative Embellishment Ideas for One-of-a- kind- Designs’, involve adding texture and structure to simple new or vintage skirts via a vast range of techniques: moulding and illuminating; screen printing with paper stencils; foiling; embroidering; hand stitching; ruffling; ripping; tailor tacking; corrugating; cording; cutting to create sliced, carved, shaved and chiselled pieces; or attaching found objects such as glass spheres, lighting filters and even an old mourning pin salvaged from her grandmother’s attic.

Spontaneous effects and serendipitous accidents (with printing inks for example) sometimes find their way into Alison’s work but her intricate layering is typically the result of carefully executed processes incorporating both sewing and photography. Often her underlying visual themes come from photographs she takes of the textures and weathered surfaces around her London studio, a space shared with two emerging artists (one of whom has just sold a BMX bike covered in hundreds and thousands to fashion designer, Paul Smith, in New York.)

Alison says she’s continually weaving “collections of things,” into her work. “I go out with my old-fashioned SLR (camera) taking photographs of, I suppose it’s basically surface - all those things you’re taught when you draw: line, texture, colour, placement, proportion, shape, colour... surfaces that are usually quite weathered. You always pick up on different things, especially living in a city with so muchalways going on. It’s usually the environment around me that inspires me, but lots of different artists and other designers are inspiring as well.”

The humble Scottish kilt has also proved influential for a skirt maker who ironically admits she hates pattern cutting with a passion. “When I wrote my dissertation about the kilt it was just amazing to learn that it was just this one length of fabric manipulated in the middle,” she says. “I really liked the fact that it was one length across and it was wrapped around a body. That’s where the pattern that I learnt very quickly (came from) because I hate pattern cutting more than life itself. Putting my techniques and my textile samples, which were about 50cms by 30cms, and transferring them onto this skirt that was this flat shape and just wrapping it around a body or making it up into a skirt to hang on a wall was very satisfying."

Naturally, textiles themselves are a constant source of ideas for Alison, whose eclectic methods seem fitting given her family heritage. The daughter of a boot maker, she hails from a long line of tailors, artists, architects, photographers, gardeners and seamstresses and recalls the contents of her childhood dress-up box with the precision of a woman smitten with fashion from the start.

These days she’s busy with high profile exhibitions and commissions - like the British Council’s My World - New Craft exhibition - she lectures design students part time and is developing a limited edition collection. On top of all this she’s attending to more admin chores than she’d prefer, launching a new range for children and planning a hush-hush new range connected with interiors. Not bad for a girl who says she left art school with a strong drive to run her own business but no idea how to even write an invoice.

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