Getting Dressed: David Mlinaric
Brigid Keenan
Interior designer David Mlinaric is the only person I’ve met whose clothes are already the property of a museum (the V&A) – not altogether surprising since he was practically world-famous for his flamboyant wardrobe back in the Sixties and, in all his 80 years, has never bought a suit off the peg.
‘I went to Downside School, where you had to have your uniform, or regulation suit as it was called, made by their tailor: pinstriped trousers; black jacket; house tie. Then, because someone from school used them, I went to Billings & Edmonds, where their Mr Green made my suits with very tight trousers and odd detailing in the cut of the jacket – and I fussed about the size of lapels and coloured linings. And then I graduated to Blades.’ (Blades was one of the trendiest tailors in the Sixties; clients included Mick Jagger and, surprisingly, Cecil Beaton.)
‘I loved the Sixties – it was all fancy dress and shoulder-length hair. People shouted, “Get your hair cut!” There was extraordinary footwear by the Chelsea Cobbler. I remember having knee-high, yellow canvas boots – it was fun.’
Too much fun for some: Mlinaric was once thrown out of the Cavalry Club for wearing a bright pink shirt by Turnbull & Asser, and out of Annabel’s nightclub for wearing a white suit tailored by Blades.
Mlinaric puts the craze for these fancy-dress fashions down to the art schools of the time. He himself was at the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London, but the Slade School of Fine Art was next door and he noted admiringly that the students looked ‘completely wonderful’ and not like anyone else in London. Mlinaric’s father had come from Slovenia and opened a furrier’s in Bond Street – ‘So I suppose I was always used to the idea of clothes being quite important, and also to the idea of things being made for you.’ After graduating, Mlinaric worked for the fashionable interior decorator Michael Inchbald. ‘I was lucky. My jobs were pretty top-end from the start.’ There he got his first mention in the press – in the Sunday Times, where the home editor Liz Good featured his kitchen design in which there was a never-before-seen central island. After a stint at the British School at Rome (‘Rome taught me everything, including the whole very important business of keeping one’s eyes open’), Mlinaric worked briefly for architect Dennis Lennon and then set up his own business in 1961. ‘In interiors, as in fashion, everything was changing: the days of désordre Anglais – when it was normal to have dog’s hair all over the place and worn-out upholstery and shabby rooms – were over. Decoration was getting quite a lot smarter – though people were nervous. Above all, it must not look like a hotel. Now people say to me, “We’ve just stayed in this wonderful hotel…” and want their house to look like that. It’s called hotel chic.’ Mlinaric’s firm, Mlinaric, Henry & Zervudachi, is described as an interior design practice but that hardly seems to cut it when his ‘interior designing’ includes huge projects such as the restoration of the Royal Opera House – ‘It was closed for three years but I lived with it for seven’ – and Chatsworth. Among his current projects is a treasury for the Rothschild treasures at
Waddesdon Manor in Wiltshire. The manor is managed by the Rothschild family trust, headed by Jacob Rothschild: ‘I have worked for him for years – he is incredibly understanding and knowing. An architect once told me, “Try to work for people who know as much as you do or possibly more. Then it’s like communicating in shorthand.” ’
Mlinaric and his wife, Martha, have three children and seven grandchildren. Their younger daughter has an interior decoration business and occasionally helps her dad out. In a bow to his Eastern European heritage, five years ago he bought a house in Croatia. ‘It all seemed so familiar – and then I realised that it is because everyone speaks like my dad.’
Mlinaric’s dandy dressing ceased with the end of the Sixties, when he adopted the sober uniform he is wearing in our picture: immaculately tailored jacket over T-shirt and Levi’s (he was one of the first to wear Levi’s, buying them from a stall at the end of the King’s Road) with leather shoes or Dr Martens, which he shines to a high polish. His beard is a recent innovation – he broke his shoulder a couple of years ago and the painkillers brought him out in a rash. ‘It was meant to be temporary, but I like it.’