British designer Alice Temperley's fashion wonderland
Coming up roses: after entering the trade almost by mistake, Alice Temperley has made her mark with a romantic English style, writes Gemma Soames
When Alice Temperley launched her first collection in 2002 - just 25 dresses she had assembled in a garage on London's Portobello Road - little did she think that 10 years later she'd be running a fashion empire with shops in the British capital, Dubai and Los Angeles. Even the Middleton sisters are fans.
But here Temperley is today, visiting her Hong Kong office, co-ordinating the logistics of her eponymous global brand - one created, she says, almost by mistake.
"I knew nothing about the fashion industry to begin with," she says, laughing. "I'd studied fabrics, and I knew what I liked, and I just made up a collection with one seamstress and one pattern-cutting table. And for some reason we had great support. I guess people saw an innocence and a point of view that was different, but I wasn't even aware of that. I was just making clothes!"
Strangely, for such a quintessentially British brand, Temperley actually has some roots in Hong Kong. Brought up on her parent's cider farm in Somerset, she led a charmed, very rural English life before moving to London to study fashion in her 20s. In 1999, however, aged 24, she moved to Hong Kong with her boyfriend Lars von Bennigsen, who she married a year later. They now work together on the label, with her husband managing the finances.