Afternoon:
9°c
Lily Allen wears vintage disguise to launch ‘mud-free’ style festival
Louise Jury, Evening StandardUpdated 13:02pm on 25 Feb 2010
Lily Allen will swap the stage for a catwalk when she makes her fashion debut at the new Vintage At Goodwood festival this summer.
The singer, 24, who wore a red vintage dress to celebrate British fashion from the Forties to Eighties at the launch of the event today, insisted that she still intends to give up music and will play her last show on 7 March.
The festival in August, which mixes music and fashion, will feature the launch of Allen's new vintage clothing label, Lucy In Disguise.
The singer said: “I'm starting a shop with my sister and a couple of other people. I'm really busy in the office every day at the moment, sourcing clothes, and I'm really excited about my new venture.”
Allen added that her shop aimed to be “an antidote to the mass consumerism culture of high street shopping”.
Vintage At Goodwood is being billed as the festival for people who want glamour and no mud. Fashion designers Gerardine and Wayne Hemingway have joined forces with stately home owner Lord March to launch the event in the Sussex countryside.
The three-day festival will boast the first performance by Sixties pop singer Sandie Shaw in 25 years and the world's biggest market of vintage clothing. It will also feature events from punk group The Damned to tea-dancing.
Hemingway said: “It's a cultural event very much like the Festival of Britain but a contemporary version.”
It began after the Hemingways saw a picture of Kate Moss in the Glastonbury mud and realised that festivals had lost their sense of glamour.
Hemingway said: “It was an epiphany moment. I realised they had stripped away the fashion and the glamour and it was just about getting mucky, but when me and Gerardine were growing up, the whole thing about music was music and glamour going together — glam rock and David Bowie, punk with Vivienne Westwood. It's a celebration of the creative industries which are the second biggest driver of the economy after the service sector.”
The idea took concrete form when the Hemingways met Lord March who could offer Goodwood as a setting. This will also lessen the chance of mud with careful grass preparation and chalky soil.
At the event there will be venues dedicated to music through the decades from a Forties club with the orchestra of John Miller, to a Seventies ballroom and an Eighties roller disco.
Attendance will be capped at 20,000 for the first year, but will have to expand to balance the books. Tickets go on sale today with adult day passes for £55 and weekend camping tickets at £150. Go to www.vintageatgoodwood.com
Reader views (3)
Lily is an absolute dream (I wonder, is that the reason for certain sections of the fair (no pun) gender disliking her to distraction?).
She looks great; sings well; entertains well; is spikey to phonies, and, most important of all, is a cricket-loving lass.
Keep it up, girl, because London and Britain needs your sort.
- Ted, London, 26/02/2010 08:48
Report abuse
iz dat becos she got no talent?
- Oggy Oggy Oop, uk, 25/02/2010 22:44
Report abuse
I just want to congratulate Lily on giving up music and making a change in career.
Let's be frank, her music is absolutely woeful but she has the taste to recognise it and the frankness to move on. We don't live in a great era for pop music and I'm certain she'll be happier elsewhere because she is clearly quite a smart woman.
All I hope is that she goes easay on my ears and is never tempted back into the studio at any price. It would not make me smi-i-ile.
PS Sara Stockbridge looks foxy, who is she?
- Ganesh, London, UK, 25/02/2010 17:47
Report abuse
