How I became a fashion brand . . . an unlikely true story
It seems, if you live long enough, all your dreams can come true. I am now in my eighth decade, but many years ago, when I was just ten, I lived in Marylebone in London and used to walk along the local side streets which were then the home of the wholesale showrooms for the fashion trade. I always stopped outside the window of one shop in particular. It advertised clothes made by ‘Dior of Paris’. I thought, little boy that I was, ‘one day I am going to have a fashion label of my own.’
Well, believe it not, more than sixty years on, that day has come. In fact, that day is today, when a new design label is being launched on an unsuspecting world: ‘Gyles & George, London & New York’.
The new brand isn’t ladies’ gowns or men’s suits (the stuff I admired when wandering the streets of Marylebone), it’s high-end knitwear: jumpers and sweaters – colourful, quirky, unique. Gyles is me – the man known for wearing fun knitwear on TV – and George is George Hostler (1939-2018), my late friend, sculptor, head of design at Leicester polytechnic, artist and designer. Between us, a generation ago, we created several hundred original pieces of knitwear and it’s these retro sweaters that are at the heart of the new Gyles & George label. And today - 18 November 2021 - a selection of our fun jumpers goes on sale at the Rowing Blazers pop-up boutique at 18 Earlham Street, in London’s Covent Garden, off Seven Dials, not far from St Giles’s Circus and Leicester Square tube station
My boyhood dream began in the late 1950s, but my knitwear journey started later, just half a century ago, in 1971, when I founded the National Scrabble Championships. Thousands of word-game enthusiasts from across the UK took part in the competition and one of them brought me a present to the Grand Final in London: it was a bright yellow hand-knitted sweater with a Scrabble board emblazoned on the front with the message ‘Gyles Brandreth Loves Scrabble’ written out in knitted Scrabble tiles. The sweater proved a huge hit with everyone who saw it and inspired me to design and create original sweaters of my own. One of the great advertising men of the era (Peter Marsh) told me, ‘Wear the jumpers on TV and you’ll get noticed. There’s research that shows viewers remember 83 per cent of what they see, but only 17 per cent of what they hear.’
I did as Mr Marsh advised and soon, appearing on Countdown and TV-am, I was known as TV’s ‘colourful jumper man’. One day, in the early 1980s, I was walking down Kensington Church Street and passed a small boutique where in the window I saw a sweater featuring a pair of cockatoos. I loved the look of it, went in to the shop and bought it. I also asked the shop who had made it. They gave me George Hostler’s address in Leicester. We met up, we became friends and working partners and that was the beginning of the Gyles and George adventure. It’s now lasted forty years!
George and I created so many sweaters together – mostly they were one-offs for me to wear on TV (and on stage: he created a whole knitted wardrobe for me to wear as Baron Hardup in Cinderella with Barbara Windsor and Bonnie Langford); a few were designs that George sold through the boutique in Kensington; quite a number ended up in the four books of sweater designs we created together. George was the knitwear designer and craftsman. I was the one who came up with the fun ideas – drawing them for George and sending them to him, either by Fax or, literally, drawn on the back of an envelope.
The sweaters had a number of celebrity admirers, including Elton John and Joanna Lumley, some of whom appeared as models in our books, one of whom was Diana, Princess of Wales who was a regular customer at the boutique in Kensington Church Street. Diana’s favourite jumper was the one that says ‘I’m a Luxury’ on the front, and ‘… Few Can Afford’ on the back. Joanna Lumley looks as gorgeous in our spotted bow-tie sweater today as she did in it forty years ago.
When I went into politics in the 1990s, I abandoned the colourful sweaters for a Tory MP’s regulation grey suit – but the sweaters weren’t forgotten. I was speaking in the House of Commons one day when John Prescott from the Opposition front bench began barracking me. ‘Woolly jumper,’ he snarled derisively, ‘woolly jumper.’ He kept it up for a while until I paused to point out that ‘the joy of a woolly jumper is you can take it off at will, whereas the blight of a woolly mind is that you’re lumbered with it for life.’ Of course, Mr Prescott got the last laugh because he went on to become deputy prime minister and I lost my seat at the next election. (Later he gave me a colourful knitted dressing gown he had been given on an official visit to South Africa. ‘More your style than mine, Gyles,’ he said.)
Out of parliament, I went back into entertainment and broadcasting, but I didn’t return to the woolly jumpers – until last year. In 2020, at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, at the suggestion of one of my Twitter followers, and on the basis that desperate times call for desperate measures, I brought some of my favourite jumpers out of the closet and posted a jumper-a-day on Twitter and on Instagram. I then started wearing them again on TV – on shows like This Morning and Celebrity Gogglebox – and was amazed (and delighted) to find they were more popular than ever – and liked by people who weren’t even alive when I first wore them.
One of these millennial admirers was a young American, Jack Carlson, 35, an Anglophile archaeologist who spent much of his twenties sitting in rowing boats as cox to the US national rowing team. He got into fashion retail creating the Rowing Blazers brand making blazers for rowing clubs around the world. He came across the Gyles and George knitwear in one our books from the 1980s and decided this is what the world needs now.
Early signs are, he might be right. We are dipping our toe into the market with just eight designs, handmade in 100 per cent lambswool – and I have simply chosen my favourites, starting with a huge red heart on a deep navy background. Two feature messages: one is ‘I’m a luxury’, of course. The other is one inspired by my time in government. On the front, it reads: ‘What the ****’s going on?’ On the back, it says: ‘Don’t ask me.’ This is a fashion brand with a sense of humour, as well as style. One sweater features a wrap-around snake with knitted forked tongue, another aims to hit the right note with a piano keyboard and matching scarf. What’s incredible to me is that though the designs are thirty to forty years old, none of them looks remotely dated. Without realising it, it seems we were creating ‘classics’ – these really are iconic sweaters that have stood the test of time. Move over, Dior of Paris. Gyles & George of London & New York are here.