Hello Lulu! So can we start with the origin story of Fashion East?

Lulu Kennedy: It began back in 1996. I’d just arrived in London, with no plan, but I’d got a job working in these artists’ studios that put on shows just behind this building, the Truman Brewery. It had shut down as a brewery in the 1980s and was bought in around 1995 by this local family, the Zeloofs. And one day a member of the family popped into the gallery space where I was, and he ended up offering me a job. And I said “brilliant—I’ve got nothing else to do with the rest of my life.” At the time they were still taking out all the old brewery machinery and thinking about what they could do with the site, which back then many people thought was a white elephant—but just look at it now! At the beginning my role was helping to run the estate, which meant renting out space. Then I got into putting on events.

But how did it develop into Fashion East?

Hussein Chalayan booked this huge warehouse space in the Atlantis building for a show that was the first show I ever went to—the one that went from fully clothed to fully naked, which is pretty good for a first show. And I remember Matthew Williamson booked a show too. And at that time there were a lot of off-schedule shows, and a long list of smaller less established designers who were looking to break through. And a lot of them were local, because the area was cheap to live in, so I’d know them

anyway from drinking in the local pubs like the Bricklayer’s. And they would come to me and ask if they could borrow a space for their shows. And I got more and more involved. So the guy who’d hired me got a bit fed up with me, I think. He said, ‘You know what? Let’s just do this as a proper project. Let’s allocate space, and budget, and it can become your job’. I know, I’m very blessed.

So this was the drumroll that announced the creation of Fashion East.

I actually hated Fashion East as a name! I wanted to call it Untold—so this is kind of the untold story! The first shows we ever had created a lot of excitement. Thousands of people came, or wanted to come, and there wasn’t really anything else like it at the time… I remember Sophie Ellis-Bextor was our very first model at our very first show… For me that excitement was to a large part because of House of Jazz. I was always hanging out with them in the Bricklayers, and they were the catalyst—it was almost because of them that the show got pushed over the line. I remember a PR agency was brought in, and they got Channel 4 interested, and Channel 4 wanted to do a whole project on the show. And it was the PR Agency that chose the name Fashion East. I mean, I guess it works—it describes the key ingredients of what we do—but I still like Untold…