Once upon a time in the late noughties, there was a fabulous vintage & vintage inspired clothing, jewellery & accessories, and bespoke dressmaking shop in the Northern Quarter of Manchester, called Rags to Bitches, that ran their own vintage-inspired clothing label. For a few years in a row, they won the "Best of Manchester" Award for the best indie boutique. I worked for them as a head designer and maker and I also taught dressmaking for a year, until unfortunately they had to close due to customer's changing shopping patterns and the like- namely the fashion giants around the corner pushing boundaries until the small business drown powerlessly. Shame on Primark and the lot! This is what you get when you give your hard-earned cash to corporations instead of local businesses. Corporations do not invest in the local economy, let alone inspire anyone nor make anyone happy and not even pay their workers a living wage, but that is your choice of what you do with your cash. You give your money to Primark, you get massive soulless stores in the city centre full of chavs fighting over the cheap garments that they will wear once and then bin. And the small businesses around the corner, the ones who inspired you and were sustainable and paid their workers a living wage even when the owners earned peanuts (but hey, they were living a dream so that's okay), those had to close down because you could not afford to pay a little bit more for responsibly-sourced garments that you could proudly wear for years and years to come before you passed on somebody else, or recycled into a newer item of clothing, or even donate to a museum if the garment was, like many of the garments sold at Rags to Bitches, a historical garment that maybe should be put in a glass box to admire, but never never fill the land with.
Rags to Bitches was one of the most beautiful boutiques I know. The building was a late 19th century store in the historical Northern Quarter neighbourhood in Manchester city centre. The Northern Quarter was a pivot of industry during the Industrial Revolution, with over 100 mills in the area, but after WWI, the rising price of cotton forced most mills to close, and the empty buildings were converted into bars, restaurants, independent businesses and venues during the 1980's and still going strong, although many of the businesses are always at risk of closure due to rising rent charges (landlord's greed strikes again), whilst trying to keep the monsters at bay (the big corporations 5 minutes walk away around the corner in Piccadilly like Primark, Mc Donalds, H&M, Uniqlo etc etc.).
The BBC wrote an article about Rags to Bitches in 2008, the year before I started working for them, you can sead it here:
The fashion industry insider's magazine Drapers covered the closure of the store, you can read it by clicking on this link:
The Rags to Bitches shop kept all its original features like the cast iron beams, large bay windows, polished wooden floorboards and high ceilings. It spanned down two extra floors in the basement: there was a little consultation room where I met clients to discuss their bespoke wedding dress needs, some storage rooms (one of which held the biggest collection of vintage sewing patterns I have ever seen and made my eyes water with excitement), and a large workshop where many of the clothes sold in the shop floor were being made or upcycled and sorted.
The decor could have not been more vintage nor glam, Hollywood star approved by 1920's standards, with lots of velvet drapes, antique furniture, gold accents and vintage artefacts everywhere: a collector's delight. Vintage jazz music would be playing in the background and the staff was knowledgeable and cool. The shopfront was delightfully arranged with vintage mannequins wearing exquisite 1950's ball gowns that were changed seasonally. Before I worked for them, I used to go out of my way to admire their window arrangements and take pictures of them (who would have told me that a few years later my designs would be displayed on that exact window shop?). You walked in and you were instantly transported to a world of dress to impress, where less is definitively not more. They even offered vintage styling packages where for instance a bride and their bridesmaids could get the Hollywood treatment by ways of hair styling, make-up and clothing, and even a photoshoot, coming out of the shop ready for a vintage wedding in style. I loved that.
It was the Rags to Bitches world. Rags to Bitches, or Rag Corporation as it was their business name, was more of a lifestyle brand than a shop! I was fascinated by it and could not have been more fitted to my taste for old findings that I have since I was a kid. My dad used to tell me off for wearing "dead people clothing", as he used to call my flea market finds that I wore to death and you got camphor whiffs from in a hot day. I do not see anything wrong with wearing clothes that were worn by people who are dead now, and you? In fact I can feel the history in them, if clothes could talk, some of them could tell you some tales. I still wear them, although, I am a fat biatch now and the old size 16 is like a size 10 to today's standards so my array of vintage clothing is very limited, but I still keep them just in case one day I can fit into them again LOL!!!
One of my jobs as a freelance at "Rags" was to design vintage-inspired collections of special occasion womenswear, which customers could order from to be made-to-measure for them. I also designed and hand-made bespoke vintage-style wedding dresses for their clients, as well as ran vintage dressmaking courses in the evenings after the shop was closed. Just call it my dream job OK?. I could not have been more suited for the job, in fact there wasn't even a job opening or anything like that, I actually showed up at the shop one day, out of the blue, with my portfolio, just after they just won the "Best of Manchester" Award for the second time in a row, and since I was freelancing at the time for a different boutique in the Northern Quarter as a product developer and bespoke dressmaker that it went bust, I decided to show up and show them what I do and see if they could give me a job as a designer. I created that job: I put a price on me which they accepted and off it went!! That is how I landed one of my dream jobs. My grandad Manuel would have been proud to see me walking in, abundant in confidence and bursting with happiness of having found my niche, showing them my beautiful drawings of vintage inspired dresses. From that day they called me "our beloved dressmaker" although I consider myself more of a designer than a dressmaker. I need to design like I need to breath, but the need of making what I envision comes after. But they still gave me credit for it and my job title was head designer, which I proudly wore and still show off even though it has been a lifetime or two ever since, or at least it feels like.
Three of the collections I designed for them were "The 1930's", "The 1940's" and "The 1950's", which were mainly silk dresses and some coats and accessories inspired by those decades; these could then be reproduced for their clients in their own measurements, even for brides in their special day, and the fabrics were sourced locally from luxury Stockport silk manufacturer "Bennett Silks", which makes the best 100% silk fabrics straight from outside of Manchester in Cheshire. "Rags" did a good job of employing local sewing machinists that beautifully sewed my designs with such a difficult fabric to work with as 100% silk satin and crepe. They produced all the dresses as samples in the premises and did a wonderful job of it, and a fashion show was then planned to show the collections.
Here is some of the illustrations of the designs I did for "The 1940's" collection:
Simon Buckley, who co-owned Rags to Bitches together with his then wife, the columnist Flic Everest, was a photographer so we also had a photoshoot of the 1930's collection with some of the winners at the World Swimming Championships '09, you may find some familiar faces in there!
 "The 1930's", "The 1940's" and "The 1950's" collections were shown to customers, fashionistas, to the press and influential peoples, at the Manchester Museum in Manchester, together with the "Bernardo's" charity and we called the event it "A Night at the Museum". The stunning neo-gothic building and courtyard holds the main archaeology, anthropology and natural history museum in Manchester and it has this spectacular staircase and balustrade leading straight into the museum's Fossils and Dinosaurs galleries, which it is framed on either side by the skeletons of two massive (2 meters long) sea spiders. There was a raffle, a glass of bubbly or two were served, and prizes were won. Then, the models had to walk down the staircase and then walk straight into the gallery whilst live jazz music was being played from a corner of the room in the dark. It was nighttime and they only had the catwalk light on but you could see the moon light shining through the big windows that surround the gallery. You can't get much classier than this, really! The show showing my collections went on beautifully and it was followed by a real vintage collection shown from a special guest designer: Ossie Clark, a very influential British fashion designer from the swinging 1960's and 70's in London, who designed beautiful women's dresses with beautiful prints, and who is one of my favourite designers too. Ossie Clark passed away many years ago but his family holds an amazing collection of his designs, which nowadays are museum pieces and kept in pristine condition, as important parts of history of fashion that they are. This was followed by a few bands playing live music and finished with a Charleston dance teacher doing a group dance lesson that everyone followed and enjoyed!
Here there are some pictures of the night and my designs of silk dresses for the
 "The 1930's", "The 1940's" and "The 1950's" collections. I hope you like them!
I met lots of lovely people that night and the show was amazing. At one point in the night, I met Ossie Clark's granddaughter who was super nice and told me how much she loved my designs, and also how much his grandad Ossie would have loved meeting me. Apparently Ossie Clark was the inspiration for the British comedy series "Absolutely Fabulous" which I have always been a great fan of, so I'm sure Ossie, had he been alive and had met me, would have got on with me like a house on fire!
Unfortunately I did take many pictures of the night, but they are blurry because apparently I am not able to take pictures after I have had two glasses of champagne, but can see some from Ossie Clark's designs and the bands that performed in the night, as well as the Charleston dance group lesson here:
I hope you enjoyed this blog, thanks for reading!
Silvia
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