The Tulle and the Tulip
There is a photograph of Molly Goddard, taken in her Dalston studio sometime in the late winter of 2019, that I have returned to more times than I can explain. She is standing behind a worktable piled with tulle in three shades of raspberry, and in the foreground, spilling out of a fat ceramic jug that looks as though it might have come from a school pottery class, is an arrangement of ranunculus, fritillaries, and something pale and trembling that I think is a hellebore. The stems are too long — they always are in her studio — and they lean towards the window with that particular urgency of flowers that know they have only a few days to persuade you of their beauty. It is, in every sense, a Molly Goddard arrangement: slightly too much, slightly too tall, completely unapologetic, and exactly right.
I have come to her studio — now in Hackney, a former piano factory with ceilings that seem to go up forever — on a grey Wednesday morning in late spring, to talk about flowers. Not fashion, or at least not primarily fashion. Goddard, at 37, has been one of British fashion’s most recognisable names for a decade, ever since her first standalone show in 2015 sent models down a raw Soho catwalk in voluminous hand-smocked tulle dresses that seemed to owe as much to ballet costumes and Victorian underwear as to anything in the contemporary fashion conversation. But flowers, I had noticed, follow her everywhere: on the printed cottons of her earliest collections, in the table arrangements at her fashion week dinners, in the slightly overgrown window boxes of the studio, and, most tellingly, in the way she talks about her work — as something seasonal, something alive, something that cannot and should not be pinned down too precisely.
“I think I’ve always needed flowers around me to work,” she says, settling into a chair that has clearly served as a temporary home for several bolts of fabric. She is wearing a navy cashmere sweater with a hole in the left elbow and a pair of black trousers that have seen better days, and her hair is twisted into a clip that is losing the battle. The effect is not careless but focused — the appearance of someone who has been doing something more interesting than looking in a mirror. Behind her, a dress in construction hangs from a rail: layers of pale yellow tulle, each one hand-gathered, the whole thing hovering somewhere between a cloud, a peony, and an eighteenth-century court gown. “When I started the brand, I was working from my flat in Bethnal Green, and the only things that made the space feel like somewhere you could make something beautiful were the flowers. I’d go to Columbia Road on a Sunday — this was before it became completely impossible — and buy whatever was cheapest at the end of the market. Usually things that were a bit past it, honestly. Things other people had rejected. And I’d put them on my cutting table, and they’d be these little messy explosions of colour, and I’d think: yes. This is how it should look.”
“I’d buy whatever was cheapest at the end of the market. Things other people had rejected. And they’d be these little messy explosions of colour, and I’d think: yes. This is how it should look.”
The Beauty of the Slightly Wrong
This instinct — for the imperfect, the overblown, the just-past-its-prime — is, I have come to understand, the organising principle of Goddard’s entire aesthetic universe. In fashion, it manifests as dresses that celebrate volume without structure, colour without restraint, and a certain kind of English eccentricity that is often imitated but rarely matched. In her relationship with flowers, it translates into a philosophy of arranging that is profoundly democratic, quietly subversive, and far more sophisticated than it first appears.
“The problem with most flower arranging,” she says, “is that people think there are rules. You know — odd numbers, varying heights, foliage first, all of that. And those rules come from a very specific tradition, which is floristry as a trade, and I have enormous respect for that tradition, but it’s not the only way. It’s not even the most interesting way.” She pauses, and I watch her rearrange the jug on the table between us — a single branch of flowering quince, which she had cut from the garden of the house in south London she shares with her husband and two small children, and which she had brought to our interview wrapped in damp newspaper like a fish. “I think about flowers the way I think about clothes. What matters is whether they make you feel something. Whether they have presence. Whether they look like they belong to the person who chose them, and to the room they’re in, and to that particular Tuesday in April. That’s it. That’s the whole brief.”
This approach — let’s call it anti-floristry, though Goddard herself would never be so pretentious — has roots in the particular ecology of the London flower market. Columbia Road, Portobello, and the smaller neighbourhood stalls that still survive in pockets of the city all operate on a rhythm of urgency: flowers arrive on Thursday or Friday, are at their best by Saturday, and by Sunday afternoon are being sold at prices that feel almost apologetic. “The end-of-market flowers are the ones I love most,” Goddard says. “They’ve got something to prove. They’re a bit wild, a bit unpredictable. A rose that’s fully open is a thousand times more beautiful than a rose in tight bud, but floristry has trained us to think the opposite. It’s mad, really. We’re all being sold flowers that haven’t happened yet.”
She has a point. The commercial flower industry is built on the promise of potential — the bud that will open, the bloom that will last, the arrangement that will still look fresh in a week’s time. Goddard’s approach, by contrast, is built on the acceptance of transience. “When I’m cutting flowers for the house, I never think about how long they’ll last. That’s not the point. The point is that this tulip, right now, on this particular morning, is doing something extraordinary with its petals — they’re starting to separate, and you can see the black centre, and the stem has curved towards the light in a way that’s completely unpredictable. That’s the moment you want to capture. Tomorrow it’ll be different, and that’s fine. That’s the whole thing.”
Brown Flowers and Other Taboos
I ask her about her much-discussed affection for brown flowers — she mentioned it in a 2018 interview with The Gentlewoman, and it has followed her ever since as a kind of shibboleth, a litmus test for whether you understand what she’s doing or not. Brown flowers: the hellebores that fade to parchment, the chocolate cosmos that smell of vanilla and look like they’ve been dipped in cocoa, the ‘Café au Lait’ dahlias that are neither pink nor beige nor cream but something altogether stranger, the ninebark foliage that turns the colour of old leather in autumn. These are not flowers that sell at retail. These are flowers that require a second look.
“People think I’m being provocative when I say I love brown flowers,” she says, laughing. “But I genuinely do. A brown flower is a flower that’s not trying to impress you. It’s not performing. It’s just being what it is, and if you’re not paying attention, you’ll miss it entirely. There’s something very elegant about that.” She leans forward slightly, warming to her subject. “The fashion equivalent would be the clothes that don’t photograph well. Every designer knows which pieces those are — the ones that look like nothing on a hanger and magic on a body. The ones that move. Brown flowers move differently from red ones, if that makes any sense. They catch the light in a more complicated way. They’re more interesting to look at over time.”
“A brown flower is a flower that’s not trying to impress you. It’s not performing. It’s just being what it is, and if you’re not paying attention, you’ll miss it entirely.”
This interest in the overlooked, the unfashionable, the slightly difficult, runs through everything Goddard does. Her collections have always featured colours that other designers avoid — mustard yellows, murky greens, the particular shade of pink that is one degree too bright to be tasteful — and her flower choices follow the same logic. “I once did a whole table for a dinner party using nothing but seedheads,” she says. “Honesty, nigella, poppy pods, some dried grasses from the garden. Everyone thought I was making some kind of conceptual point about mortality. I wasn’t. I just thought they looked beautiful, and I was right.”
Fashion and Flowers: The Shared Language
The parallels between Goddard’s approach to dressmaking and her approach to flowers are not coincidental; they are, she says, two expressions of the same instinct. “When I’m designing a dress, I’m thinking about volume, proportion, how the fabric moves, how it catches the light. When I’m arranging flowers, I’m thinking about exactly the same things. A peony and a tulle skirt — they have the same relationship to space. They both take up more room than you expect. They both change shape as you move around them.”
She gestures towards the dress-in-progress behind her. “This one — it’s been on my mind for weeks, because I can’t get the proportion of the sleeves right. They need to be big enough to feel generous, but not so big that they overwhelm the bodice. And I was stuck on it until last weekend, when I put a branch of flowering cherry in a bottle on the windowsill, and the way it balanced — this heavy mass of blossom at the end of a thin, curving branch — suddenly made me see what the sleeves needed to do. They needed to curve.” She shrugs, as if this kind of interspecies collaboration is perfectly normal. “Flowers are the best teachers, honestly. They’ve solved every design problem already. You just have to pay attention.”
I ask whether this way of thinking — this porous boundary between the garden and the atelier — is more common in fashion than people realise. “Oh, absolutely,” she says. “Every designer I know has a relationship with flowers. It’s almost impossible not to, when you work with colour and form all day. Christian Dior was obsessed with lily of the valley — he had it embroidered into the hems of dresses, he wore a sprig in his buttonhole at every show, he even named one of his perfumes after it. Yves Saint Laurent’s garden at the Jardin Majorelle in Marrakech was as much a creative act as any collection he ever designed. And then you look at Rei Kawakubo — her use of roses at Comme des Garçons is not decorative, it’s almost violent. She piles them on until they become something else entirely, something almost threatening. That’s a completely different conversation with flowers, and it’s just as valid.”
The Studio as Garden
Goddard’s own studio has, over the years, become something of a garden in its own right. The windowsills are lined with terracotta pots of geraniums and scented-leaf pelargoniums — “the ones that smell of lemon and rose and mint, depending on which one you brush against” — and in the corner by the cutting table, a galvanised bucket holds whatever branches are in season: pussy willow in February, cherry in April, copper beech in May, something dark and architectural in the months between. “The studio is where we make things,” she says, “and I think the things you make are influenced by what you’re looking at while you make them. If you’re looking at a computer screen all day, you’ll make things that look like they were designed on a computer. If you’re looking at a branch of flowering quince, you’ll make things that have a bit of that irregularity, that organic quality. It’s not mystical. It’s just what your eye absorbs.”
The team seems to have absorbed the philosophy. During our conversation, one of the pattern cutters wanders over with a length of emerald silk crepe and asks Goddard’s opinion on a sleeve detail; the discussion, which lasts perhaps ninety seconds, is conducted in a language of volume and drape and “letting it do what it wants to do” that could as easily describe a clematis vine as a garment. Afterwards, Goddard turns back to me. “See? We talk about clothes like they’re plants. It’s completely ingrained now. I can’t even separate them any more.”
How to Arrange Like Molly Goddard (If You Must Have Instructions)
Reluctantly, because she finds the idea of giving instructions faintly absurd, Goddard agrees to share some principles. They are not rules. “Rules are for people who don’t trust their own eyes,” she says, “and you should trust your eyes. Your eyes have seen millions of flowers. They know what looks right.” But for those who need a starting point, here is what she offers:
One: Buy what moves you, not what matches. “The worst arrangements are the ones where every flower is the same colour. It’s like wearing a dress, shoes, bag, and lipstick all in the same shade — it looks like you’re trying too hard. Buy the flower that makes you catch your breath, even if it doesn’t ‘go’ with anything. Especially if it doesn’t go with anything.”
Two: Stems should be longer than you think. “Every arrangement I’ve ever loved has had stems that were too long. There’s something about a flower that’s reaching — it has more presence than a flower that’s been cut down to fit the vase. Let them be tall. Let them be awkward. Let them take up space.”
Three: One beautiful thing is better than ten ordinary things. “We have this idea that more is more, and of course I love that — look at my dresses — but more only works if every element is pulling its weight. If you have one incredible branch of magnolia, or one perfect stem of forced rhubarb with its leaves still attached, that’s an arrangement. That’s enough. You don’t need to add anything.”
Four: Vases should be interesting, not expensive. “My favourite vase is a jug my daughter made in her pottery class. It’s wonky, the glaze is patchy, and it holds flowers better than anything I’ve ever bought from a shop. I also use laboratory glass — beakers, flasks, the kind of thing you’d find in a school science cupboard. They’re cheap, they’re beautiful, and they make tulips look like they’re conducting an experiment.”
Five: Let things fall apart. “The last few days of an arrangement are often the best days. The petals start dropping, the stems curve in ways you didn’t expect, and it goes from being something you arranged to something that’s arranging itself. Don’t tidy it up. Don’t throw it out. Let it have its whole life.”
The Children, the Garden, and the Ordinary Extraordinary
At home in south London, Goddard’s flower habit has expanded to fill the available space. The garden is not large — a typical London terrace patch, perhaps forty feet long — but it has been pressed into service with the same intensity that she brings to everything else. “We grow cutting flowers, mostly,” she says. “Dahlias, cosmos, sweet peas, zinnias, the things that keep producing if you keep cutting them. And the children are completely involved — my daughter, who’s six, has her own patch where she grows sunflowers and calendula, and she arranges them in egg cups and puts them on the breakfast table. She has a much better eye than I do, honestly. Much less inhibited.”
I ask whether having children changed her relationship with flowers — whether the daily practice of cutting something for the house took on new meaning. “Completely,” she says. “When you have children, you become very aware of time. You watch them change from week to week, and you’re desperate to hold onto every version of them, and you can’t. And flowers — they’ve always been a way of marking time, haven’t they? The first snowdrops, the first tulips, the first roses. They come back every year, but they’re never exactly the same. And the children notice. My son, who’s four, will say, ‘Mummy, when will the daffodils come?’ and I’ll say, ‘When it’s spring,’ and he’ll say, ‘But when will it be spring?’ And I think that’s the question, really. That’s the question flowers are always asking.”
“The children notice. My son, who’s four, will say, ‘Mummy, when will the daffodils come?’ and I’ll say, ‘When it’s spring,’ and he’ll say, ‘But when will it be spring?’ That’s the question flowers are always asking.”
What Tulle and Tulips Have in Common
Before I leave, I ask the question I came with: what do tulle and tulips actually have in common? She thinks about it for a moment — a genuine pause, not the performative kind — and then she smiles. “They both look like they’re about to fall apart, and they never do. That’s the whole thing. A tulle dress — when it’s well made, when it’s smocked properly — it has this incredible structural integrity, but it looks like it’s held together by wishes. And a tulip, especially one that’s a few days old, with the petals starting to flare and the stem starting to curve — it looks like it’s collapsing, but it’s actually entering its most beautiful phase. They’re both about that tension between structure and dishevelment. Between control and release.”
She walks me to the door of the studio, past the rack of lemon-yellow tulle and the bucket of copper beech and the windowsill of scented geraniums, and as I step out into the grey Hackney morning, I realise that I have been given not so much an interview as an education. An education in looking, in trusting, in letting things be what they want to be. An education in brown flowers, and too-long stems, and the particular beauty of an arrangement that is just beginning to come apart.
“One last thing,” she calls after me. “When you write this — don’t make it sound like I know what I’m doing. I don’t. Nobody does. That’s the secret. You just keep looking, and you keep cutting, and eventually something beautiful happens. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.”
“You just keep looking, and you keep cutting, and eventually something beautiful happens. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.”
Molly Goddard’s SS27 collection will be shown at London Fashion Week in September. Her studio flowers come from Columbia Road Flower Market, the New Covent Garden Market, and the cutting garden behind her house in south London.
