Getting Dressed: Emma Foale Brigid Keenan
Sparkling Lady Emma Foale, portrait painter and cape designer
My husband loves the company of women but he doesn’t usually notice what they are wearing. Still, he isn’t as bad as the man who came to dinner with us who hadn’t noticed that the back of his wife’s hair was still rolled in curlers.
So when we met the portrait painter Lady Emma Foale, 65, at an exhibition in France last summer, and I heard him telling her how much he liked her outfit, I was quite taken aback – but not altogether surprised. I had also been secretly admiring it.
Since the age of 11, when she was sent to boarding school, Foale has made all her clothes herself: ‘My beloved mother, wonderful ceramicist and least maternal of mothers, announced that the exorbitant cost of my school uniform meant that I was going to wear it in the holidays. This was in 1964. Unthinkable. However Ma had an ancient Singer sewing machine and a box full of fabric remnants from her own dressmaking, and was prepared to give me rudimentary lessons. My first effort was a purple tweed miniskirt.
‘We lived in a truly isolated place and, though my parents were endlessly social, there was no television; art, books and music ruled. So I had all the time in the world to develop creativity. I drew and painted all the time, and dressmaking was one other facet. I just loved making things.’
Foale did a foundation course at art school (which she hated) and then got a place at St Martin’s but there was no grant – and no funding available from parents. So she decided to pay her own way by selling chokers and belts which she made in her flat with a girlfriend. When this unexpectedly took off, she abandoned art school, teamed up with a fashion graduate, bought a Bernina sewing machine and opened a workshop making suede and snakeskin clothes. Later, she started a company making evening dresses for Harrods, Fortnum & Mason, Selfridges and a host of boutiques. ‘In those days, the big shops got away with not paying for months… and we had a huge outlay on fabrics, wages, rent and so on. It was hellish and I got through it on minimal sleep and Dexedrine. I’d had enough. I wanted a paying job.’ Foale somehow persuaded the advertising agency J Walter Thomson to take her on as a junior account director and began to enjoy life – she married an Australian cardiologist and went to live in Boston where he developed angioplasty at the MIT. ‘We arrived in the autumn and it was cold. So I made myself a brilliant blue, quilted cape, appliquéd all over with birds of paradise. I wore it on my bicycle – my blonde hair had big pink and turquoise streaks then – and, by the end of the journey, I had three commissions for capes’. (She still bicycles everywhere.) At a New York exhibition she shared with her mother and botanical artist father, the Marquess of Aberdeen, she was given a huge order for capes by Henri Bendel – which she completed back in London, where her husband now worked.
In Boston, she had taught herself to gild in order to decorate their apartment. With a new baby, finishing off the cape order in a damp London basement studio, she decided to go back to the gilding. Then, after completing a portrait of a friend, she launched herself as a portrait painter. She is now married to the artist Johnny Dewe Mathews: ‘We are so lucky… you can paint, gild, cook, garden and dress-make for ever. There is no retirement and never boredom.’
The beloved old Bernina machine comes out on Sunday evenings, when Foale makes or adapts her clothes (she has 20 reworked Uniqlo cardigans, mostly edged in red braid). She buys her fabrics in Berwick Street, Soho, or at Joel in north London. She also goes to Barnett Lawson in the West End for trimmings; or Southall, ‘a great destination for anyone making things: shop after shop of glorious Indian fabrics and mindboggling trimmings’.
She sticks to her own tried and tested ideas: long, appliquéd waistcoats which she wears with cardigans and stretch velvet jeans for winters, sparkly skirts for evening, and long skirts in summer. ‘If I can’t get a fabric in the right colour, then I dye it. I like to make dramatic winter coats so people can see me on my bicycle, and all my shoes get customised – red patent with maroon bows. Above all, I want my clothes to be fun.’