A day in the life of a designer..

Carol is an experienced designer and has been working at Long Tall Sally for over two years. Although Carol secretly dreamt of joining MI5 before she was hit by the fashion bug. Her passion for fashion started early on when she made her first skirt at just five years old.

Growing up she was influenced by Biba, Chanel, Norma Kamali and Perry Ellis. She is particularly interested in the fabric and cutting side of design. A tall woman herself at 5’10, Carol enjoys designing for taller women as she believes that height is an advantage and even admits she would like to be a few inches taller...

Carol's Blog

Not being a natural writer, I was a bit sceptical, at first, about doing this blog. I mean, why on earth would anyone be interested in what I have to say? Well, after a bit of careful research I found that reading about other people’s lives can be pretty interesting. And, I figured if Lily Allen can do it, so can I!

I’m a mere 5ft 10 and a half, which doesn’t make me huge but I do have an inside leg which swings between 34” at a squeeze and 36” in high heels (Although I do walk like Dick Emery in heels so I don’t tend to wear them that often!)

A lot of my friends are 6 foot and over and several around 5ft. Despite the obvious height differences we would spend hours talking about the difficulties of buying clothes. Personally, I think the five footers have it slightly easier, I mean taking things up isn’t a problem but if you are tall you can’t make clothing longer! I used to buy from LTS years ago, myself and several of my friends who were hard core label queens when it came to jeans have now been converted to Long Tall Sally for all our denims.

I’ve been designing at LTS for a couple of years, I haven’t always wanted to be a designer I wanted to be a spy really but I thought I might be handicapped by my tendency to gossip!

MI5 aside I love fashion, at the moment I am busy working on high summer 2009. The first thing we do each season is look at all the prediction and trend information, then we work on a colour palette and buy in print designs. The next stage is designing shapes and working alongside the factories to get samples based on our designs. It’s quite a long process but rewarding when you see your designs come to life.

Now for my favourite part, choosing what I want to wear this season- the Oxford shift dress, Rebecca jumper, Kingston skinny jeans, Audrey beret- I want them all!

This could take hours..

Bye for now

Carol