Seams of gold

Designer-seamstress is the job title that Charlotte Lucy prefers to be known by and, as such, she is reviving an individual, hand-made approach to fashion that all but died out with the High Street chain store.

Charlotte Lucy Barker is a maker of exquisitely tailored shirts and jackets, each one a piece of cut-and-stitch magic, which she creates from her home at Norton, near Malton, in North Yorkshire.

Her flair and skill for tailoring and sewing, discovered while she was still at school, may well be genetic, as her grandfather was a tailor working in Leeds, and her grandmother was a seamstress.

“I pretty much grew up around sewing,” Charlotte, 25, says.

“My gran and mother always did bits of sewing so, for me, it was something I enjoyed and was good at.”

She trained in fashion design at York College and in 2008 was runner-up in the Great Yorkshire Show’s Fashion Idol competition, creating a beautifully tailored, equestrian-inspired outfit, that combined wit with the attention to detail for which she is making a name for herself. She also picked up a top award from the Company of Merchant Taylors while studying for her National and Higher National Diplomas, and she got to join boy band Westlife on tour in Aberdeen, helping them out with tailoring and fitting for their stage show. “I found I loved everything about the whole process of fashion design, from designing to making,” she says. “But I knew I never wanted to move away from home, so that restricted what I wanted to do.”

In 2010, she decided to take the plunge and set up her own Charlotte Lucy label. “I offer clean, simple looks, classic cut garments, with a good fit, not necessarily trend-led, and more of an investment,” she says.

The wool fabrics she uses come from suppliers in Leeds and the shirting comes from Lincolnshire.

“You can’t compete with the High Street and it changes so quickly,” she says. “My customers vary and I don’t like to categorise them too much. I just like people to wear my clothes where they want to wear them.”

She hopes to start making pieces for men, too, and would like to increase output either by finding a small factory or by building up a team of seamstresses working directly for the Charlotte Lucy label.

“It’’s quite hard to find people with the right skills,” Charlotte says. “Manufacturing, of course, went away from England, and children are no longer taught at school, so there are not many people who sew any more.”

Meanwhile, Charlotte Lucy continues to make all her exquisite pieces with her own highly skilled hands – which makes them vey special indeed.

Twitter: @yorkshirefashQ