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[30 October 2002]
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The Hemingways turned a Camden market stall into the multi-million squid, British designer label, Red or Dead. Now as Hemingway Design they're helping to build affordable family homes. In two Channel 4 programmes screened in November, Wayne decries designer fashion and challenges Armani to reduce his prices by 75%. Here Wayne talks about the demise of designer labels, punk, affordable design, parenting, and more..
What is the core philosophy of Hemingway Design?
The core philosophy carries on where we left off with Red or Dead, which is, it's got to be affordable. Design should be for everybody. I hate the idea of elitism. And Red or Dead came from the fact that both myself and Gerardine are from poorish backgrounds, certainly working class.
We've both got memories of coming down to London thinking there was this movement called punk, the first real classless fashion thing and then walking into Seditionaries and seeing that Vivienne Westwood was selling her T-shirts for £70, which in 1976 or 1977 was designer prices. I think punk up north might have been a very egalitarian movement, it certainly wasn't down south - it was a typical art school thing. We hadn't realised that and I think that kind of set us up wanting to start something for people like us.
There weren't art schools in Blackburn so punk was just people who had a different attitude to life. We realised it was very different in London and I think that most people admit it was very different, but you wouldn't know that from reading the NME. There was no i-D, Face or Dazed and Confused in these youth cultures, we found it out ourselves and it spurred us on to do Red or Dead. We wanted to do a fashion label for us - for our families and friends and that's what it became. We never got it as affordable as we wanted to get it - it's harder than anyone can imagine - but we sold to Topshop in 1985/6 and were selling to Miss Selfridge in 1988. We did all the things that designers are doing 15 years later, we did it then. Our label was in TopShop and in Miss Selfridge and the fashion establishment hated us because when we tried to get on to the schedule at London Fashion Week (the first time we tried must have been 1988), I remember them saying: 'But you sell to Miss Selfridge, therefore you can't be part of London Fashion Week'.
How did you persuade them?
I've got a big mouth. We'd also started opening up our own shops and shops up north. You couldn't argue the fact that people were buying Red or Dead and eventually, they let us on the catwalk. I think it was spring/summer 90 and we were winning awards. There was no such thing as off-schedule, you were either part of it or you weren't.
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