Heart and soul
Isabelle Randall’s tweeds combine the designer's love of tailoring with her respect for the heritage of the fabrics of Yorkshire and Scotland. She tells Stephanie Smith her story.
AT Woodend Gallery and Studios, the Grade II-listed Scarborough villa that was once the home of literary aristocrats the Sitwell family, Isabelle Randall makes her exquisitely tailored tweed clothing. Her designs are underpinned by her experiences of living in Scotland and Yorkshire, marrying the rich heritage of both to create designs that have character, quality and charm, yet are practical, hardwearing and versatile.
Originally from Dewsbury, Isabelle attended her first fashion show – staged at The Frontier nightclub by Batley School of Art, now Dewsbury College – at the age of 12. “I announced there and then that I wanted to be a fashion designer,” she says. “As soon as I could leave school, which was 16, I applied to Batley School of Art to do a BTec diploma, a two-year course, in Fashion Design.”
She attended the college from 1988 to 1990 and became friends with two students in the year above, Christopher Bailey, later to become creative director of Burberry, and Kevan Aspinall, who went on to found his own Halifaxbased special occasion label, Kevan Jon. “Those first two years were just magical because I was surrounded by so much talent,” she says.
After Batley, Isabelle studied for a BA (Hons) in Fashion Design at the University of Leeds. “Leeds was the making of me – the fashion, the individuality, the music,” she says. This was followed by an MA in Fashion Design at the Royal College of Art in London, after which she stayed in the capital and worked in the fashion industry for several couture designers including Roland Klein, Bella Freud and Hussein Chalayan. She learned a great deal, she says, but adds: “London was tough. Unless you had a lot of money, you lived from A to B, B to A.”
In 1997, her brother suggested that she come up to Aberdeen, where he and their father, who worked in the oil industry, were living (as a child, Isabelle also lived in Monaco and Norway, returning to Yorkshire when her parents divorced).
She planned to stay in Aberdeen for a month, but decided instead to stay there. “There was no fashion industry and I thought, what on earth am I going to do?” she says.
Isabelle decided to make use of her design skills by transferring them to the field of web design, and was taken on by a company that agreed to train her on the job. “The late ‘90s was a real boom of multi-media companies,” she says.
Her new career as a web designer took her to Brussels, and she moved there in 1999, running a web unit for an international online bank, staying until 2003, when she moved back to Aberdeen.
All the while, she still had clients who commissioned her to design and make bespoke clothing, as she had since her Batley days, gaining a reputation for tailoring and quality. “My signature style has developed