Catch up with our Conference - Horti:couture - Plants, Gardens and Fashion

The London College of Garden Design’s Autumn 2021 Conference from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Cambridge Cottage

If you are an LCGD Student or Graduate you go free! Please contact the Admin Office for your access code.

For centuries plants and gardens have clearly been influential on fashion sensibility. The fashion industry’s most lauded designers Hardy Amies, Yves Saint Laurent, Christian Dior, Dries Van Noten, Vivienne Westwood, and Raf Simons are known for recurrent themes around flora and gardens and the influence of their own gardens on their work.

The Conference will hear from leading fashion professionals and academics including Amy de la Haye, Professor of Dress History and Fashion Curation and joint Director of the Centre for Fashion Curation at London College of Fashion; Justine Picardie, a contributing editor to Harper’s Bazaar and author of the soon to be published Miss Dior: A Story of Courage and Couture and Hairdressing legend Sam McKnight in conversation with award-winning garden designer Jo Thompson.

Conference attendees will discover the influence of plants and gardens on a much wider creative world than just landscape. Our speakers who are writers, creatives and academics will explore how plants and gardens influence cultural elements such as dress and jewellery as well as fragrance and fashion. You will discover the impact that our professional knowledge of the natural world and design can have on our clients in a much wider sense than purely gardens and through fashion, fragrance, and style in our everyday lives. And you will also hear how two fashion and garden design icons work together.

Amy de la Haye is a curator and writer. She is Professor of Dress History and Fashion Curation and joint Director of the Centre for Fashion Curation at London College of Fashion. Her most recent project is the book (Yale, 2020) and exhibition staged at the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology called ‘Ravishing: The Rose in Fashion’.

• The talk will explore how the rose has influenced the way we look, feel, and fantasize; it aesthetic, symbolic, and political impact.
• It will communicate how narratives – similar and differing - can be constructed to make a book and an exhibition about flowers and fashion.
• It will share the research journey and the multiplicity of research sources drawn upon.
• It will share images from the current exhibition at the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York.
• It will conclude by discussing the evolution of a very different socio-botanical exhibition on roses and fashion I am working on – with Simon Costin - that was launched at London’s Garden Museum in March 2022.

Hairdressing legend Sam McKnight's spectacular career spans nearly 50 years working in fashion. He’s worked with all the greats including A-list clients including Chanel, Fendi, Balmain, Burberry, Tom Ford and Vivienne Westwood. In addition to devising trend-leading hair looks for fashion shows and advertising campaigns, McKnight is a regular contributor to British and international Vogues, Vanity Fair, Harper’s Bazaar, i-D and Love, creating iconographic images with the world’s most pre-eminent photographers: Richard Avedon, Patrick Demarchelier, Nick Knight, Craig McDean, Mario Testino and Bruce Weber among many others. In addition, he’s on-call for a starry clientele including Uma Thurman, Cate Blanchett and Kate Moss, for personal appearances and red carpet events. But perhaps his most iconic client was the late Princess Diana, who he met on a shoot for British Vogue which led to him becoming her personal hair stylist for seven years. 

Mairi MacKenzie is a Research Fellow in Fashion and Textiles at Glasgow School of Art and a visiting lecturer at Glasgow University. Her current research is concerned with the relationship between popular music and fashion and social histories of perfume. She is author of Dream Suits: the Wonderful World of Nudie Cohn (Lannoo 2011), Isms: Understanding fashion (A&C Black 2009), and Perfume and Fantasy: Scent in Popular Culture and Everyday Life (Bloomsbury, forthcoming).

One does not need to be a perfume connoisseur to recognise the scent of a rose. Its liberal use in modern perfumery has familiarised many with its characteristics and made the rose a part of our olfactory language. However, this ubiquity belies its enduring and mythic status. Throughout history, rose perfumes have been variously used to anoint royalty, cleanse heretics, symbolize Gods, express virginity, cure ailments and flavor celebratory food but this correlation between the scent, beauty and divinity is not fixed. Rose perfumes have also embodied immorality, announced subversion, and signified death.

Whilst many of these uses are a distant memory, fashion houses and perfumers still draw upon and reconfigure these contradictory connotations in the development of their perfumes today. The talk will chart this history - drawing upon the collections of the perfume museums of Paris - and consider the role that mythology, religion, horticultural advances, literature and the growth of the popular press have played in the shifting fashionability of the rose and its perfume.

Geoffrey Munn OBE, MVO is a jewellery specialist, television presenter, writer, and historian. He has published several books on precious metalwork and has also contributed to the specialist press on the subject of Nicholas Hilliard, J.M.W. Turner, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Lear. Geoffrey is a Fellow of both the Linnean Society and the Society of Antiquaries.

Justine Picardie is a contributing editor to Harper’s Bazaar, having previously been editor-in-chief. She was formerly a journalist for the Sunday Times, a columnist for the Telegraph, editor of the Observer Magazine and features director of Vogue. She is the author of five books, including the critically-acclaimed memoir If the Spirit Moves You: Life and Love After Death, the bestselling Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life, and the recently published Miss Dior: A Story of Courage and Couture.

Jo Thompson is recognised as one of the UK’s leading designers and plantswomen. She has been the recipient of four Gold and five Silver Gilt medals at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, and in 2017 she won the People’s Choice award at the first RHS Chatsworth Flower Show. Jo is a member of the RHS Gardens Committee and Garden Advisor for RHS Rosemoor, an RHS judge, as well as being a member of the RHS Show Gardens Selection Panel. She lectures both nationally and internationally and is a visiting tutor at the London College of Garden Design.

Andrew Fisher Tomlin is well known for the creation of gardens and landscapes worldwide. He is Founding Director of the London College of Garden Design based in the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew and is the course leader for their unique Planting Design Diploma which attracts students from all over the world. He is also a director of its partner College at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Melbourne and lectures widely. Andrew is a Fellow of both the Chartered Institute of Horticulture and The Society of Garden Designers, and he is also a Chartered Horticulturist.

LCGD Students and Graduates receive this conference free of charge. Please contact [email protected] for an access pass.

Host or Publisher London College of Garden Design