catsuit NO HEADLINE
The same aesthetics go into their creations, she explains. ”Nicholas’s designs have nothing to do with easy chairs or three-piece suites, but a different idea of comfort. It is all to do with the comfort of good posture. And that gets us back to the catsuit or dress, in stretchy fabric. It makes you stand tall.”
The couple met when she was 15 and, despite initial disapproval from her father, who whisked her away to a convent school in Mexico, they married five years later. Their ideas on function and design fuse in their collection of vintage cars, which currently adds up to an Alvis, three Facel Vegas, an E-type Jaguar and a bubble car.
Ms Bruce agrees that her body-hugging spiderman costumes were inspired by the Sixties image of female liberation, projected by Diana Rigg in The Avengers and the strong-armed females of the James Bond films. ”The Sixties were ahead of their time,” she says. To complete the image,Spiderman Costumes, a pair of white and black Chelsea boots stand on the floor of the towering iron structure (designed by her husband) in which her new season’s graphic black-and-white collection now hangs.
Ms Bruce’s design career was born on a beach on Mustique, when she improvised her own swimwear from pieces of silk during a holiday. Having established her design base in London with a tiny legacy from her grandfather, she has built the business into an international empire worth more than Pounds 1 million. Puckered and pleated stretch fabrics that she used in past collections were developed with textile designers from the Royal College of Art. Her clothes and swimwear are manufactured in Cornwall, where the Barkers have moved into a converted barn.
They may be clothes that offer little hope of camouflage and demand fitness from the wearer, but, once pulled on, the stretchy tautness of the matt Lycra crepe inspires the attitude to achieve svelteness. Her friends, including Romilly McAlpine (wife of Lord McAlpine) and Lucy Ferry, have converted to her clingy style. ”It is not a matter of weight. If you feel good in a swimsuit, you will look good in a catsuit,Spiderman Costumes,” she says. ”As with the mini in the Sixties, it takes a while to get used to the look.”
Related topics article: