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Former Stratford High School student has conquered the fashion world in New York and London




A FORMER Stratford High student who’s conquered the fashion world, has praised her schoolteachers as ‘imaginative and encouraging’.

Phoebe English has her own internationally renowned label and is regularly featured in Vogue and London Fashion Week.

Phoebe English.
Phoebe English.

Her work is on show at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Victoria & Albert Museum.

And she recently attended a garden party hosted by the King and Queen at Buckingham Palace, which was a celebration of the UK’s creative industries.

Growing up in Stratford, she was surrounded by artistic talent as dad Simon English is a conceptual land artist known for the Rabbits on Ryon Hill, while mum Wendy Freeman is an abstract painter and poet.

Phoebe told the Herald: “I was always interested in art and design from a very young age.

“It was always something that was my main interest and passion right from the start, so it wasn't a difficult decision to come to and it felt like a natural progression as I grew older.”

At Broad Street primary and then Stratford High, art and design was one of her favourite subjects.

“I had some really great teachers at both schools who were really imaginative and encouraging and who always wanted to see you try more and improve. I had a really great time at both schools,” she recalled.

As a youngster, she really enjoyed acting and going to the theatre.

“There were some fantastic RSC summer groups and activities for children over the holidays that I had chance to join in with a couple of times that really sparked the imagination.

“The costumes were always something I really enjoyed, of course,” she said.

After winning a place at the prestigious Central Saint Martin's, she completed a degree and masters and on leaving, quickly established herself as a rising star.

She’s won many awards over the past 12 years and collaborated with a number of well-known brands, including womenswear retailer Toast.

Her emphasis is firmly on sustainability and ‘slow fashion’, using her skills and creativity to re-use offcuts of fabric and reimagine old garments.

The world of high fashion is notoriously competitive, with most designers keeping their collections and design spaces closely under wraps.

But Phoebe bucked the trend and opened her south London studio to competitors, realising that to reduce waste and boost re-use and recycling, she needed to collaborate with other designers and studios.

Someone who influenced her dislike of fast fashion was her grandmother on her mum’s side, who also lived in the Stratford area.

Watching her really care for her clothes well and look after them, repairing things and storing them carefully, was something that made a deep impression.

She explained: “This is an approach I feel we have moved away from a lot with our modern relationship with clothes, where we just replace them regularly, often throwing them away, even.

“It's a generational difference which I hope we can re-inherit one day and this does feed into my work.”

Talking about how it feels to have samples of her work displayed at the V&A, the Met and the National Museum of Scotland, she said: “It's really, really wonderful to have pieces of our work in those museums, we are a very small studio, so it's very special that some of our clothes can be part of those design archives and that they will be there for a long time.”

Her passion for the environment has been there since she was young.

She explained: “It's only relatively recently that I've started to work out how to start joining the two interests of fashion and environment together in my work and that it can form a better way forward to practicing design within the current fragile environmental and planetary situations.”

Phoebe’s talented partner, Sam Edkins, is also an ex-Stratford High pupil and has gone on to equally impressive things, being well known for his upholstery art.

Although Phoebe now works in London, she still has strong links to Stratford.

“I have many friends, family and extended family living there and it is somewhere I really like to come back to and visit as much as I can,” she pointed out.

“We used to spend a lot of time along the river, so it's nice to go back there during the summer and visit those places with my family now that I am older.”



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