Molly Goddard was facing disaster on the morning she reported to give her final pitch to the panel to compete for the £200,000 BFC/Vogue Fashion Fund Award. Only one designer could win, from a strong field of contenders which also included Marques’Almeida, David Koma, Huishan Zhang, Sam McCoach of Le Kilt, and Regina Pyo, but Molly’s clothes hadn’t arrived for the crucial show-and-tell.
“The lock on my studio suddenly wasn’t working. I was getting calls that nobody could get in to bring my dresses. Time was ticking by, and the others were presenting. Eventually we got someone to smash off the lock, and run over with the clothes, just in time,” she laughed, rolling her eyes. “But maybe it was good, because it made me stop everything”—she mimed putting on blinders—“and just go for it.”
Staying calm in a crisis is, perhaps, one of the qualities which will take a designer to the top, but even if the panel, chaired by British Vogue’s Editor in Chief Edward Enninful and Caroline Rush, CEO of the British Fashion Council, were oblivious of the mayhem at Molly’s, it was she who proved victorious. As she received the award on stage from Enninful at the Mandrake Hotel tonight, all she managed was a massive sob, and a dashing away of tears, before thanking her team and family, and falling into a bear-hug with the Vogue editor.
In the audience, looking on, was Erdem Moralioglu, a member of this year’s panel, who himself won the first of the British series of the Vogue Fund Award in 2010. As a fully independent designer, with four years in business and stockists around the world—Goddard was first picked up and nurtured by Dover Street Market at retail—she seems a promising successor to follow in the footsteps of Moralioglu. Enninful, in his preliminary speech, outlined the point of the fund, “to show that it all comes from England and the UK,” and made a pledge that he will be supporting all of the designers editorially through the pages of his magazine.
At the after-party, the Goddard family whooped it up, including her mother Sarah Edwards, who builds her sets, and her boyfriend Tom Shickle, pinching themselves that Molly has got this far in just four years, after dropping out of Central Saint Martin’s MA course. “The thing is, she’s fully independent, and has no debt,“ said her mother. “Well, except for the little my husband and I are able to do, maybe,” she chuckled. “I can remind her of that sometime now.”
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