Following up our recent feature on a student who wears Fifties fashions every day, Hilarie Stelfox meets a Huddersfield woman who designs outfits inspired by original patterns from both the 1940s and 1950s

THIS has been the year of the tea dress – an iconic 1940s style enjoying popularity once more.

It has also been absolutely the right time for Huddersfield entrepreneur Clare Quartermaine to design and launch her own collection of 1940s and 1950s fashion.

By adapting original patterns for the fuller figures of modern women, the Scapegoat Hill mother-of-three says she has captured the essence of vintage styling and made it more accessible.

Her small collection, So Foxy, is manufactured both locally in Calderdale and in Fife, Scotland, and sells on her website www.20thcenturyfoxy.com

What is most remarkable about the reproduction garments is that Clare is a marketing executive by day and started her vintage and burlesque clothing business without any prior experience in the fashion industry.

She began by simply retailing ranges that she bought in for customers who wanted to dress up for rock and roll nights, burlesque evenings and 1940s re-enactment events. However, she always planned to create her own outfits.

Clare said: “I have no formal training in fashion design at all but I contacted the Textile Centre of Excellence in Huddersfield and found a mentor called Sue Taylor.

“Then I had two days of intensive pattern cutting training.”

Using contacts gleaned from her marketing agency, which is based in Huddersfield’s Media Centre, she got her designs off the drawing board and into production.

Her first garment was a jersey shrug or bolero.