At the end of September we celebrated the unseasonably good weather with the Bermondsey Street Festival. This is an annual celebration of everything that makes the area so wonderfully creative and diverse – from fantastic food, to great music and of course the fashion show which brings together local designers as well as the Fashion & Textile Museum which is at the heart of the street.
The whole road is closed off for one day only so that the hoards of visitors can roam the street to peek inside the local shops, studios and restaurants to see what is going on. The entire community always gets involved and we collaborated with as many people as possible for the day!
Our friends at Creamer & Lloyd always come up with strange and wonderful ideas for their stall and this year the theme was ‘memory’. They asked people to write down memories based on senses such as smell, taste and touch and then made stories from fragments of each person’s contribution. They also gave visitors a ‘Memory Stick’ (a literal wooden stick!) to walk down ‘memory lane’ with and collect treasures along the way! Our contribution to the memory stick was tags with faces of iconic people on – from Fred Astaire to Liz Taylor – that visitors could choose from and use a memory of that icon to channel for the day. Of course, I was Grace Kelly….
We also collaborated with local artists who organised an ‘art ramble’ along Bermondsey Street, where a different artist left a piece of work in various shops along the street that people had to find and tick off their list. An art treasure hunt if you will. We had a painting by local artist Neil Paterson which was beautiful and a joy to have alongside our dresses for the day.
Of course central to the day was the catwalk show which this year was held on the tennis courts of Tanner St Park and great fun as always. All the local designers and fashion studios got involved, from Zandra Rhodes and Andrew Logan to the fantastic team at Bermondsey 167 whose menswear is simply gorgeous. We showed a range of our garments from the sexy ‘Ingrid’ wrap dress in wool crepe to our favourite silver metallic kaftan and it all went down a storm!
The day itself is always brilliant fun with so many new people discovering the street we love so much for the first time. There were so many different stalls to showcase the variety of creative businesses on the street, as well as some weird and wonderful special treats – my personal favourite had to be ‘Oompa Loompas’ serving green candy floss… The party kept going well into the evening with live music and films being shown on the big screen at Bermondsey Square. One thing is for sure, this is a community who knows how to have a good time.
