Bruce OLDFIELD
Bruce Oldfield was forced to close his beloved shop during Covid. But he’s already back, writes Paula Reed
Acourse in Bruce Oldfield should be on a curriculum somewhere. The past year has tested everyone, many to their limit. And in general, most people think making a decent jug of lemonade from the lemons life has dealt is reason enough for celebration. But Mr Oldfield OBE got mouldy fruit and made fine wine.
In July 2020, the fashion designer celebrated his 70th birthday in lockdown, in a borrowed basement flat, with an inbox brimming with emails headed ‘Bruce Oldfield Ltd: liquidation’. After 30 years with a shopfront in Knightsbridge, the combined forces of declining footfall, rocketing rents and changing shopping habits, thanks to Covid, forced him to fold his company.
In the precarious creative industries, bankruptcies are like old war wounds: painful and common. After 50 years in business, this was Oldfield’s first. The Beauchamp Place shop was not just his shop. It was also his studio, the workroom for his staff and his home. He lost it all in one weekend.
The first lockdown was an overload of bewildering rumours. One, that the Army were gathering on the M25 to help enforce the stay at home message, worried Oldfield’s removals company enough that he was left with 24 hours to pack up and move out before they stopped working. A battalion of friends mobilised to help.
As a two-time cancer survivor, Oldfield was in the vulnerable category so his lockdown was total. Anyone in this situation would have been forgiven for flipping an elegant finger at the rat race and retiring with memories, accolades and a Border terrier to the country. Instead, one year on, he has emerged with a new business, a new website, an elegant Thames-side home, a new studio and is in the process of re-employing his old staff to manage order books that are filling up in spite of no one having anywhere to go.
“I am not exactly doing things on the cheap but we have adapted to this new world,” he says. “I am working on a collection of 10 or 12 pieces of standalone dresses, so our customer doesn’t need to spend as much as for a suit and only needs a few accessories to be good to go.”
He has noticed that people are beginning to plan again. If big weddings make a comeback in 2022, any one of them could mean a six-figure bonanza for the business. And there have been enough celebrity and royal brides over the years – Jemima Goldsmith, Queen Rania of Jordan, Violet Naylor Leyland – to keep the social columns full.
But Oldfield’s bread and butter are the ladies for whom dressing up is a daily habit. For them, elasticated waists are a capitulation. With empty lockdown diaries, they may have caved in to a cashmere tunic or palazzo pant in extremis, but tracksuits don’t feature in their wardrobes. He knows them and their requirements intimately.
“The girl who goes to Ascot is different from the girl who goes to Cheltenham,” he explains in the mock cut-glass tones of a butch Miss Brodie. “I know their lifestyles: the flat racing crowd and the jumps lot; what you need for Ripon and what you need for Goodwood.” Before he started up again his first move was to write individual letters to 50 clients.
He got 46 responses. And then he set to work. “Nothing I do is of the moment, so it’ll be as good next year as it is now.”
The years have taught Oldfield to take triumph and disaster in his stride. But this was different. “It was traumatic to let Beauchamp Place go. But in the end it was a blessing. Of course, it didn’t feel like that when I burst into tears in my basement flat with nothing but a couple of suitcases and the dog,’” he says, looking fit and happy on a Zoom call from his elegant new home. Cool Britannia has always been brilliant at birthing talent, lionising it and, within five years, turning away in pursuit of the next big thing. Surviving in a notoriously precarious business for 50 years is not often discussed but it is the supreme test of strength: proof of adaptability as much as of business nous and design talent. Where does he think that comes from? “Barnardo’s,” he says, without hesitation. “I have an instinct for selfpreservation.”
Born to a single Irish mother, Oldfield never knew his Jamaican father and was brought up in care: arguably the most famous Barnardo’s boy there has ever been, going from an antsy kid with a debilitating stammer (“it took me forever to order a one-way thruppenny bus ticket to Ferryhill”) to royal and celebrity confidant.
“I know I drove the staff mad. I was so headstrong, they couldn’t cope with me. My file shows they considered putting me in reform school. They were always asking, ‘Who do you think you are?’. ‘Well, I am certainly not the person you think I am,’ I’d say. I had ideas well above my station but I knew I wanted something and I had every intention of getting it.”
After grammar school he started teacher training in nearby Rotherham. “I was a terrible teacher. I had no patience. I was 18 and the students were big bruisers of 16. I stuck it out for three years and then asked Barnardo’s for help to get to art college.”
He was cocky there, too. “I always think of myself as the Gene Kelly character in Singin’ In The Rain carrying a suitcase, banging on doors, saying ‘Let me in. Let me in’.”
He was spotted, early on, by Judy Britten, an editor at Vogue, and Joan Juliet Buck, the Women’s Wear
Daily London correspondent, who recommended him to the president of Bendel’s, the iconic department store on New York’s Fifth Avenue, which commissioned a collection. So, having fought to get to St Martins, he quit before graduation. “It had given me a fabulous platform but I was getting places and thought ‘What’s the point of wasting my time here?’”
Bendel’s put him up in the luxurious Plaza Hotel. “On my first weekend I wore a Hawaian shirt, blue linen shorts, green jelly shoes and a big afro. I got some funny looks [but] to this day, if I am required to dress a certain way to get in, I just won’t go. No trainers at the Ritz? Ties compulsory at the RAC? Forget it!”
New York was a round of uptown glamour spots such as Elaine’s and Chow’s and Pearl’s and then “all the naughty stuff downtown”. Britain was then deep in economic depression yet it was back in London, in 1980, that he got the most important customer of his career, when he started to dress the young Princess Diana.
“That relationship lasted almost 10 years. It was really important for me. She was the perfect client. When I look back, it was relentless for her. We did dress her up like she was going to a wedding every day.”
It was for a dazzling benefit in support of Barnardo’s that he created his most famous dress for Diana: a form-fitting, backless goddess dress of shimmering silver lamé with shoulder pads and a sweeping skirt. That night, Dynasty Di cast everyone else in the shade, even Joan Collins. “No one could upstage her in that dress,” Oldfield remembers fondly, “she [was] exactly what she wanted to be … like an old-school Hollywood star.”
Yet the pattern of his career has always been cyclical, and he weathered being in and out of fashion until about 1990. “Then I was totally out. When Diana quit royal duties she left us, too. I dug in, bought out my shareholders and focused on building up the couture. “Back in 1975, Annabel Astor was my first nob client. I had huge plans but she said, ‘You must always do the couture and don’t think you can go off and delegate it to someone else, because they want to see you and your business will work because of you’. At the time, I didn’t like the idea at all. But, you know what, she was and is absolutely correct.”
‘I’m not exactly doing things on the cheap, but I have adapted to the new world’