Edwin Hardy Amies

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Sir Edwin Hardy Amies KCVO (born July 17, 1909 in London , † March 5, 2003 ibid) was a British tailor, fashion designer and entrepreneur.

Life

Amies was born Edwin Amies in 1909 in Maida Vale, a bourgeois neighborhood in west London. His father was an architect who worked for London County Council , his mother, whose maiden name Hardy he later adopted, was a fashion seller until they married, most recently at the court tailor Madame Durrant in Dover Street. After attending the Brentwood School in Essex , he was supposed to further develop his language skills and was sent to Germany and France for this purpose, but returned to England in 1930, where he completed an apprenticeship in a fashion company in Birmingham . From 1934 he worked as a fashion designer at Lachasse in London, where he succeeded Digby Morton and became managing director in 1935.

Hardy Amies costume, designed for the Incorporated Society of London Fashion Designers (1945)

Because of his language skills, he was drafted into the British intelligence service after the outbreak of World War II . He was sent to Belgium, where he became the head of espionage and attracted attention by using the names of fashion accessories as code words . In the meantime, however, he was also able to work as a fashion designer, as there was a need for resource-saving, practical and at the same time as elegant clothing as possible under the conditions of war and rationing. Among other things, he designed a collection for South America together with a group of leading London designers, which led to the establishment of the Incorporated Society of London Fashion Designers . This was commissioned in March 1942 with the design of a collection of functional clothing, the resulting 32 models were mass-produced and presented on the website of Vogue .

After his military service, he founded his own fashion house Hardy Amies Ltd in a bombed-out building at 14 Savile Row in 1946 and soon had great success with his simple but elegant designs. His post-war designs with soft shoulders and a wide skirt are considered the British answer to the New Look launched by Dior in 1947 . From 1955 he was the court tailor of Queen Elizabeth II , whose ball gowns he designed until 1990. In 1989 he was ennobled. In 1968 he made the costume designs for Stanley Kubrick's science fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey .

The company founded by Amies still exists today. In 1973 he had temporarily sold the company to the department store chain Debenhams , which turned out to be a failure because on the one hand it was very difficult for Amies to no longer exercise full control, and on the other hand Debenhams did not understand how to operate in the world of haute couture . In 1980 Amies bought the company back. It was not until 2001, at the age of 92, that he stepped down from its management when he sold the company to the Luxury Brands Group .

The Guardian's obituary says of him:

"He appreciated the good things in life and was a connoisseur of good food, fine wines and firm male flesh - all of which he enjoyed to the full in his long and distinguished life."

"He valued the good things in life and was a connoisseur of good food, fine wines and firm male meat - all of which he enjoyed to the full in the course of his long and remarkable life."

He treats his homosexuality very discreetly until the last few years of his life. He dated his partner Ken Fleetwood, Design Director of Hardy Amies Ltd , for 43 years until his death in 1996.

Honors

Fonts

  • Just so far. Autobiography. Collins, London 1954
  • Still here. Autobiography. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London 1984
  • The Englishman's suit. A personal view of its history, its place in the world today, its future and the accessories which support it. 1993. German edition: Suit and gentleman - the fine English way of dressing. A personal look at the past, present and future of the suit and its necessary “accessories”. Lit, Münster 1997, ISBN 3-8258-3456-5 .
  • ABC of men's fashion. V&A, London 2007

literature

  • Ingrid Loschek: Reclam's fashion and costume lexicon. 5th edition Reclam, Stuttgart 2005, ISBN 3-15-010577-3 , p. 514.
  • NJ Stevenson: The History of Fashion. Styles, trends and stars. Haupt, Bern et al. 2011, ISBN 978-3-258-60032-1 , pp. 132f.

Web links

Commons : Edwin Hardy Amies  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Obituary of Hardy Amies
personal data
SURNAME Amies, Edwin Hardy
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Amies, Edwin (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British fashion designer
DATE OF BIRTH July 17, 1909
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH March 5, 2003
Place of death London