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Licence to frill

The man who dresses Helen Mirren lets us spy on his larger-than-life clients looking for their dream dress

- Nicole Lampert The Posh Frock Shop will begin later this month on Channel 4.

There’s a glamorous mother of the groom who seems to be on a mission to upstage the bride, an adopted woman about to meet her birth family, a blind bride – and someone who wants a ‘mother of the bride’ outfit for her dog. These are the customers of the dress shop at the heart of a new fly-on-the-wall TV series.

Channel 4’s The Posh Frock Shop is ostensibly about beautiful dresses but really it’s a wonderful study of human behaviour, of women interactin­g with each other, supportive families and the power of feeling beautiful.

At the heart of it all is Ian Stuart. Designer and ego-soother extraordin­aire, he presides over a mini clothing empire, which includes his central London bespoke store The Blewcoat and a huge factory making his designs for top-end outlets all over the world.

‘It’s amazing to see the happiness of someone finding the right outfit,’ says Ian, whose wedding dresses sell for around £3,800 and other frocks for around £1,300. ‘For a long time I sold through outlets but I opened my shop to meet the women wearing my dresses. I’m so pleased I did, even if people can say shocking things.

‘My dresses are like Marmite – no one likes everything. One lady threw a hat on the floor like a frisbee, but she’d probably just had a bad day. You don’t know what’s happened, but part of my job is calming people down.’

From a young age, Ian knew he wanted to design dresses. He once made a kaftan out of bedsheets for his mother – to her horror, as the linen was new. He favoured theatrical outfits but after failing to find a job in theatre he chose a career in wedding dresses, apprentici­ng for high-society salon Bellville Sassoon, a favourite of Princess Diana in her early married life.

‘I then started selling my designs wholesale but I wanted to meet who I was dressing,’ he says. ‘I meet largerthan-life characters who change how I design. They might be young size eights, gorgeous size 20s or frail 82-year-olds who still want to be fabulous.’

The cameras went into his store, housed in a beautiful building dating from 1709, for three months. Some of his aristocrat­ic regulars and celebrity fans, including Helen Mirren and Katherine Jenkins, declined to be filmed but other women from across the country were happy for the nation to see them choose their perfect outfit.

In episode one, we see a blind girl, Sassy, ahead of her big day. She lost her sight a year ago due to arthritis. ‘It was very emotional helping her,’ says Ian. ‘She chose the dresses she liked by the feel of the fabrics, and her fam- ily were her eyes. A lot of customers have had mastectomi­es or other reasons for losing their confidence.

‘Our job is to give them that confidence back and make them feel like a million dollars.’

Teresa, a 55- year- old saleswoman from Dudley, needed to feel particular­ly special. Months earlier, while clearing her late mother’s home, she found paperwork showing she was adopted. As an only child, she had never suspected her parents had adopted her aged two – they even gave her a fake birth certificat­e when she got married. When she visited Ian’s shop, she had recently been in touch with her birth family – both parents were dead but she had two full siblings and two half-siblings. They were throwing a huge party for her to meet the entire family. ‘I needed a dress that would make me stand out,’ says Teresa. ‘As soon as I tried the dress on, I felt amazing. It has a corset but you can sit and eat; it moves with you. It had the impact I wanted.’

But for one mother, in episode three, none of the occasionwe­ar had the right look she was going for, for her son’s wedding. Ian was shocked when she headed towards the bridalwear.

‘She really liked a one-shouldered, very sexy wedding dress,’ recalls Ian. ‘I thought, “How can you wear a wedding dress to your son’s wedding?” But then we talked about dying the lace grey and removing the train.

‘It will look great. I wouldn’t sell an actual wedding dress to anyone other than a bride. To me, that’s unethical.’

Odd requests like this are quite normal for Ian. ‘Some people want their dress to be detachable in strange areas. One woman wanted a mother-of-thebride dress for her chihuahua.

‘Commonly we have a bride who absolutely loves a dress but her friend or sister says, “I hate it”. It’s awful. It’s hijacking someone’s special moment.

‘We’ve had a husband choose the dress for the bride to try on – I wonder what that relationsh­ip is based on. I’m intrigued by the psychology of it all.’ There is a good chance that after seeing this show, you will never see dress shopping in the same way again.

 ??  ?? Dress designer Ian Stuart
Dress designer Ian Stuart
 ??  ?? The Blewcoat, Ian’s bespoke store in London
The Blewcoat, Ian’s bespoke store in London

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