Molly Goddard’s studio is on the top floor of a former warehouse in Bethnal Green, and it is, on the morning I visit, a riot of tulle. Bolts of it — in shades of pink that range from the palest blush to a colour that can only be described as ‘birthday cake’ — lean against every wall. A rail of dresses in progress occupies one side of the room, their skirts so voluminous they seem to be taking up more than their fair share of space, like guests at a party who have had one glass too many and are expanding to fill the room. And on a large cutting table in the centre of the room, there are flowers. Not the neat, restrained arrangements you might expect in a fashion designer’s studio — a few stems of something architectural in a bud vase — but a wild, blowsy, almost chaotic heap of garden roses, sweet peas, and viburnum, as if someone had upended a country garden onto the table and walked away.
‘I cannot design without flowers,’ Goddard says, pushing a pile of pink tulle to one side and sitting down opposite me. She is wearing one of her own dresses — a smock-like shape in acid-green tulle, which should look ridiculous and instead looks completely natural, like a particularly chic gardener who has somehow wandered into a fashion studio. ‘They are not decoration. They are part of the process. When I am stuck — when a collection is not working — I go to Columbia Road on a Sunday morning and buy whatever is in season. By Monday, the problem is usually solved.’
The tulle-flower connection
This connection — between the unstructured, slightly unruly quality of Goddard’s dresses and the unstructured, slightly unruly quality of the flowers she surrounds herself with — is not accidental. ‘Tulle behaves like a flower,’ she says. ‘It has a natural volume. It wants to expand. You cannot control it completely — you can only guide it. The best dresses are the ones where the tulle has been allowed to do what it wants to do, within a structure.’ She picks up a garden rose from the table and holds it next to a piece of pale-pink tulle. The colours are almost identical. ‘See? The flower is the brief.’
Goddard’s most famous dress — a tiered, floor-length confection in hot pink that went viral after Killing Eve’s Villanelle wore it — was, she tells me, directly inspired by a peony. ‘I saw one at a flower stall in Bethnal Green, this enormous, blowsy, over-the-top pink peony that was so heavy its stem could barely hold it up. And I thought: I want to make a dress that feels like that. Like it is too much, and it knows it is too much, and it does not care.’ The dress took six weeks and seventy metres of tulle. The peony cost four pounds and lasted four days. ‘The dress will be in a museum,’ Goddard says, grinning. ‘But the peony was better.’
Imperfection as aesthetic
The word that comes up most often in conversation with Goddard is not ‘beautiful’ or ‘elegant’ but ‘wonky.’ She uses it approvingly, as a term of praise. A dress that is too perfect, she explains, is a dress that has had the life designed out of it. A flower arrangement that is too symmetrical is an arrangement that does not understand flowers. ‘The joy of imperfection,’ she says, ‘is that it leaves room for the viewer. A perfect thing is closed. An imperfect thing is open. You can see how it was made. You can see the decisions. You can imagine making it yourself.’
This philosophy extends to her approach to colour, which is fearless and slightly unhinged. Her collections routinely combine shades that conventional colour theory would forbid: coral with fuchsia, lilac with acid yellow, mint green with rust. ‘Flowers do this all the time,’ she says. ‘Look at a cottage garden in June. There are colours next to each other that would make an interior designer cry. And it works. It always works. Because the colours are alive — they are not flat, they change in the light, they have depth and texture and transparency. A tulip is not one colour. It is twenty colours, depending on the light. Tulle is the same. That is why I work in tulle. It is the only fabric that behaves like a petal.’
Before I leave, I ask her what flower she would be, if she had to choose. She thinks for a long moment. ‘A sweet pea,’ she says finally. ‘Not the most important flower in the garden. Not the one you notice first. But the one you come back to, because it smells like something you remember from childhood, and because it keeps flowering long after the roses have given up. And because’ — she gestures at the chaotic, glorious heap of flowers on the cutting table — ‘it looks like it is having the most fun.’
