MY LIGHT BULB MOMENT

Bag Designer Lulu Guinness

In a career spanning nearly three decades designer Lulu Guinness, 56 has produced everything from a bag that looks like a tiny cage holding a singing bird to one with oversized red lips to her famous basket of roses. She has two daughters, Tara, 24, and Madeleine, 19, and lives in London. I NEVER thought I’d end up working in fashion. I did all sorts of jobs in my 20s. I wanted to be an actress and when I got married I was working for a company that made corporate films. But I didn’t want to be out of the house for such long hours so I decided I needed to invent something like the Filofax — which was the thing everyone had at the time — which would make me a fortune. It was the late Eighties and all about showing off your Ray-Ban sunglasses or Sony Walkmans. So I came up with a briefcase that had clear pockets that allowed you to display your belongings. I managed to get it into Browns, Liberty and Joseph. But then people started asking me if I could design other bags. I hadn’t studied at Central Saint Martins or Cordwainers colleges, where all the fashion people went. All I was doing was coming up with concepts that I liked. I actually felt a bit of a fake. That all changed in 1997 when the V&A museum asked if they could put my Florist’s Basket bag — a black silk bucket bag in the shape of a vase with red velvet roses on top — into their ‘50 Years Of Fashion’ exhibition. It wasn’t until I saw it on a poster on the Tube, alongside a Vivienne Westwood dress that it really hit home that I was being taken seriously, that I could do this. The Florist’s Basket came about because I loved roses and I wanted to design a bag that let you carry a vase of roses around with you. I suppose when you’re in fashion you really have to have a lightbulb moment a couple of times a week. But it was that one back in 1997 that made me believe all the others were worth taking seriously.

LuLu has designed a dog bowl, £60 (luluguinness.com), to celebrate the new dogs welcome policy at Daphne’s restaurant in West London.