Curtain call

Celia Birtwell unveils two new fabric and wallpaper designs at her Westbourne Park Road shop

Above: Birds and bees fabric

Celia Birtwell is busy. Yesterday she designed four scarves for Topshop and today she’s considering making
one of them into wallpaper. She’s just launched two new textile prints and is branching into wallpaper for the first time. And, of course, the super successful Topshop collaboration is ongoing, with a new collection due
to hit the shops in June. How does she cope?
Well, for one thing she’s not running her Westbourne Park Road shop any more. She handed that over to her son George and his wife Bella last year, leaving her to focus on fashion and designing free from the worries of shopkeeping. “I’m two different people,” she says. “There’s fashion, and there’s home. They’re very different areas. There’s so much more to agonise over with interiors and you’ve got to get it right because things last so much longer. Fashion’s easy because it’s over in three months. But I don’t think you want fashion at your windows, though sometimes fashion and home do overlap. Like with my new scarves.”
Birtwell prints are instantly recognisable for their mix of fantasy, elegance and little girl prettiness. Little Animals, her earliest print, is still a best-seller, featuring elegantly crafted elephants, goats and mythical creatures with birds and plants. “I did Little Animals in 1984 and it still sells – that would never happen in fashion,” says Celia. Her two new prints are very different from each other: there’s Jacobean, a classic leafy sprawl with a distinct 17th-century feel, and Birds and Bees, which Celia says would suit “a wonderful tumbledown Scottish lair or something.” It features fragments of verse as part of the birds and bees print, written by Celia’s “lovely boyfriend Andrew” after she persuaded him that she needed some words to fill space in the fabric. “I’m not so sure about that print,” says Celia. But, as her daughter-in-law Bella says, “it’s not often that you get a chance to read your curtains”.
Celia Birtwell opened her Westbourne Park Road shop in 1985, when she wanted to move away from fashion and into interiors. Did she go off fashion? “Yes, I did. I worked so well with Ossie and I think you’ll only have a relationship like that once. He was extremely clever and made brilliant tweaks to things – he’d cut a hem on the bias, or spend ages working on new ways of doing a sleeve – and got such pleasure out of it. Unfortunately he couldn’t keep it going but I think I was very lucky to meet him and when it folded I didn’t know what to do.” Celia’s collaboration with Ossie Clark produced some of fashion’s most iconic pieces: her floaty prints and his inspired shapes were widely loved throughout the 1970s and remain hot collectors’ pieces. Does Celia still have a lot of their things? Sadly not. “I’ve got some little black jackets, though,” she says. “I’ve always been a bit round so Ossie used to make me lots of black fitted jackets to sharpen up my shape. But I’ve hardly got any dresses left.”
Despite going off fashion, Celia began to feel that her designs were all becoming a bit serious when she did an awful lot of striped fabrics at the beginning of the millennium. So she did Isabella and Mademoiselle, prints that feature women characters, for a bit of fun, which brought her to thinking about clothes again. So she teamed up with Clements Ribeiro at Cacharel and started working with chiffon for the first time since Ossie, which she found “quite good fun”, and soon afterwards Topshop came knocking.
“I think Topshop is great, the girls there look so good and there are so many different looks.” Her newest Topshop line will arrive in June and is set to sell out just like the first two collections. “It’s very reminiscent of the past, with dresses in eight or nine prints and lots of accessories like umbrellas and scarves. I love doing scarves because you can have fun with borders and don’t need to worry about repeats,” she says. “I did lots in the 1970s but they all fell to bits.”
George and Bella abandoned careers in film production to focus on the shop and their three children; George does much of the printing and Bella does all the organisational stuff. “I worked in the shop a bit 15 years ago,” says George, “and I remember getting mugged for the takings around the corner.” Westbourne Park Road was less fabulous then – when Celia first moved here there was a betting shop and a place that imported wicker baskets, and The Cow and The Westbourne were “awful pubs”. Now there’s a fancy bikini shop and a stylish restaurant. And George and Bella are hoping for some of the pub crowd to come curtain shopping between pints. Let’s hope they’re not too drunk to read them.

Pendle Harte

Celia Birtwell, 71 Westbourne Park Road W2
020 7721 0877
www.celiabirtwell.com