What’s a nice Manx girl doing in the thick of things at London Fashion Week? Julie Blackburn finds out.

Molly Wade from Peel, who is currently studying for a degree in fashion and textiles at Middlesex University, was chosen as one of the interns to work for high fashion label, Preen, for seven weeks leading up to their show at this month’s London Fashion Week.

Molly was back in the island recently and met me for a coffee, to tell me all about it and show me some of the designs the label were showing.

Like everyone else involved she has been working flat out and she said she was enjoying seeing the daylight: she didn’t see much of it in the week leading up to the show when they were finishing at eight or nine o’clock every night.

She added: ’Then, on Friday before the show, I got home at one in the morning and on the Saturday we started at 10 and finished at two in the morning: then I had to be up again at 6.30 to get to the show for 8am to set up and dress the models.’

The Preen show was held in Covent Garden in the Top Shop Show Space and Molly explained that the inspiration for their Fall 2018 ready to wear collection was Korean pearl divers: ’These are women who are essentially the breadwinners while the men stay at home. Preen is quite a pro-feminist brand.

’So there was a lot of neoprene, and scuba shoes, and it was all lined with Mongolian lamb fur.’

Of the looks she loved in the show, Molly said: ’Towards the end of the collection there were all the white and ivory gowns. They had gowns that had an entirely embellished panel and it was amazing the time it must have taken to embellish the whole thing.

’One gown had sequins, beads and feathers and it was so heavy to put on the models.’

There was a distinct Manx element to the team as the two designers who head up Preen, Justin Thornton and Thea Bregazzi, are also from the island. They were honoured with a lifetime achievement award at Isle of Man Newspapers’ Awards for Excellence last year. Their clothes have been worn by some of the best known women in the world, including Michelle Obama, the Duchess of Cambridge, Cate Blanchett and Gwyneth Paltrow.

Molly said: ’Another girl, Amy, had finished her internship with the label but came back to help with the shows and she was from the Isle of Man as well. I couldn’t believe it - she was in the year above me at school!’

Molly’s first impressions when she began working at Preen were how focussed it was: no one was allowed to have a mobile phone or any other distractions in the studio. She did a lot of the pattern cutting and says: ’I was cutting all the fabrics so I got the feel of them and it was all really high quality: georgette, organza and silk, and the leather was really soft.’

She went on: ’I was quite lucky really because in the weeks before the show there’s a lot of fittings and they asked me to assist them in the studio.

’I got to know all the 43 looks they were showing really well so in the days leading up to the show, when they needed someone who could dress the models, I was doing all the fittings so I got to work with the bigger names like the stylists and the hair and make-up artists while all the other interns were sewing on sequins.’

Surprisingly, Molly said, the models themselves are not booked months in advance, as you might imagine: ’The show was on the Sunday and we had castings on the Friday and Saturday: it’s really late, the run up, we were still picking models at 10 o’clock on Saturday. It is such a fast-paced environment, it’s so stressful!’

Around 60 to 80 models came for the castings, many of whom had just done New York Fashion Week and were planning to go on to Milan after London.

’They were really nice and really down to earth,’ says Molly.

She has now gone back to university to finish her second year and said working on the show had inspired her: ’I’m quite excited to go back and start my own stuff again.’

In the summer Molly has another internship, this time with Temperley Bridal, as this is an area that really interests her.

She said: ’I can’t wait for that. I want to take my collection into a more bridal route which I haven’t really touched on before. I love dresses - I rarely find myself designing anything else - so bridal’s just on another level really.’

She would love to have her own label one day but first she would like to travel and work abroad, learning from different countries and cultures. And she adds that there is one very valuable lesson she has learned from her time at London Fashion Week: ’It is a hard industry.’