Educating Rita

Rita Britton, owner and creative director of Barnsley-based fashion label Nomad Atelier, tells how the lockdown must rekindle both new and traditional ways of working.

This season, Rita Britton is mostly wearing fine cashmere sweaters and loose gabardine trousers from her own collection. So, it seems, are a surprising number of cool locked-down Londoners. Because, although the Barnsley shop is shut for now, Nomad Atelier is selling well from its website, and Rita knows why. She has been analysing the websites selling high-end designer fashion.

“It’s very evident that the top end of the market is not selling their expensive summer clothing, because they are not going on expensive summer holidays,” she says. “What is happening with all that stock? What’s happening to the companies providing them with the stock? The big boys are probably going to ride this one out but it’s going to take a lot of people with it.”

The high street, she believes, will never be the same again, with perhaps just three or four big names surviving. “And maybe that’s not a bad thing,” she says. “Maybe that needed to happen because it was getting ridiculous. We were bringing the bloody planet down.

“So where does that leave us, sitting where nobody else sits, manufacturing and designing our own range?”

London’s high-end shoppers are looking for something else – which is where Nomad Atelier comes in. Rita says: “Because, I suppose, I am a Barnsley and Yorkshire lass, there has always been a sense of practicality about the clothes that we do. Yes, they are beautiful silk shirts but they go in a washing machine. People are not coming out to shop but they want our weekend pants and our oversized cashmere sweater because they are not teetering round their apartment in London in high heel shoes and tight little skirts, are they?”

Rita Britton is quite used to upending the style status quo. In 1967, she put Barnsley on the fashion map when she opened the legendary Pollyanna on Shambles Street. She had persuaded her father, a lorry driver, to take her to London to buy from Mary Quant and was selling to friends at the Star Paper Mill in Barnsley, where she had worked since she was 15.

In the 1980s, she brought avant-garde labels to the North for the first time, including Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto and Comme des Garcons. In 1991 she moved to a two-storey shop at Market Hill. Customers came from afar, increasingly to seek out Rita’s own collection, Nomad, launched in the late Nineties.

Pollyanna closed in 2014, after Rita survived a brain haemorrhage and a heart attack. In September that year, aged 70, she was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by Drapers. Dismissing any notion of retirement, she restored The Tobacco Warehouse in George Yard, Barnsley, as Nomad’s new home. In 2015, it opened as a shop with a gallery and cafe.

It is closed for now, but Rita, who lives near Barnsley with husband, Geoff

(they have three grown-up sons), goes