Holly Fulton for Radley launch party

Holly Fulton launched her collaboration clutches collection with Radley London at the Sanderson Hotel. The four clutches had Holly’s distinctive prints beautifully showcased in leather with an incredible attention to detail. We got the chance to interview Holly Fulton and this is what she had to say about the collaboration:

How are you feeling tonight at the launch of your collection – Holly Fulton for Radley?

Holly Fulton: Good thank you, really excited. It’s nice to see the collection cleanly displayed and not in the studio.

This is exciting! Tell me about your collaboration with Radley London.

Well I first met Lowell Harder – the founder of Radley – at the start of the summer. She was an incredible inspiration; she’s still really passionate about what she started years ago and I found her really infectious. We started talking about working together and fortunately it happened. It was the case of marrying the best of what Radley do with leather and their expertise in that area with our signature style.

What was the process of creating this collection like?

All of the bags are handmade and I worked very closely with the team in London. The team took their ideas to the factory and brought me back three samples, which is a lot for a project like this. This gave us the opportunity to change things if we needed to, but they got it every time so we were very lucky on that.

What made you decide on this print?

I wanted to really focus on what Radley could do with leather and use techniques that we hadn’t explored ourselves as a label. I was very conscious of making it something new both for us and for Radley. We used weave as a way of interpreting our signature black and white designs. The collection was inspired by our own clutch bags; I wanted that to really translate, and have a sharp and geometric edge as we do in our own collection.

For the colour palette, leather was a really good material for it; some colours don’t translate very well on leather. Red, black and white is the most perfect leather colours you could pick. That was accidental but worked out good.

Are you part of any other projects right now?

We’ve got a Christmas-based “something” coming up and another couple of things that are happening next year. I’m about to do a show in Brazil this Saturday to show the spring/summer collection, and I’ve just got back from Singapore. I’m touring it around to see what people think of it.

How was the show in Singapore? It must have been amazing!

It was a really fantastic experience; there weren’t a lot of international designers there so we were the centre of attention, which was quite nice. We were able to show the collection on an all-Asian cast of models, which I was incredibly siked about because I love Asian models and we usually can’t get very many of them in our runway shows.

Niten Thakor