Diana does dressing up in vintage style

Published on Saturday 8 December 2007 12:23

ENTERING Diana Kiernander's compact terrace cottage in Portobello is like stepping into a giant bazaar. Her dimly-lit living room is a shrine to vintage fashion, piled high with dresses that are decades old, ridiculously high heeled shoes, antique fur stoles, sparkly bags and a hefty stack of style magazines.

And across the narrow hallway, the 30-year-old fashion stylist's bedroom is so packed with old clothes that she has had to remove her bed to fit them all in.

But sleeping on the floor is a small inconvenience for a woman used to suffering in the name of fashion. She giggles and her eyes fall on a pair of black platforms with a heel so high that just looking at them brings on a sensation of back ache.

"Those are my Vivienne Westwoods," smiles Diana, picking one up for closer inspection of the vertiginous heel. "I bought them in her shop in London, and oh, I hope my mum isn't reading this," she breaks off, looking slightly embarrassed. "They cost 290. But they are so ridiculous you can't wear them. I bought them ten years ago - one of those dumb things you do when you are young."

The shoes - a version of the Westwood platforms in which supermodel Naomi Campbell famously took a catwalk tumble - are part of an extensive collection Diana has built up for fashion shoots and personal use, with which she has reluctantly decided to part due to lack of space.

However, she was determined not to let the clothes, which include Biba 1970s dresses and Chanel and Dolce and Gabbana shoes, go without a big party in the style of her favourite fashion icons. Diana is holding a Forgotten Things Garage Sale at the GRV club, in Guthrie Street, on Wednesday evening.

It will be a night of film, dressing up and bargain buys, harking back to the iconic London Biba shop, which became known in the late 1960s for selling high fashion clothes in a boutique fitted with lots of comfy seats to encourage customers to make themselves at home while browsing.

The sale has captured the imagination of Channel 4 producers who have already filmed Diana preparing for the event at home. Diana reveals that they will also be recording the sale itself with the aim of showing a short film of it next year.

The mum-of-one, who writes regularly for The List and fashion web site modelfolios.com and has run recent fashion events in Dragonfly in the West Port, has booked top make-up artist David Farquhar to come along and help rummagers look their best as they try on choices from the dozens of rails. A ten-minute film, 4 Ribbons to Hokoten, made by Diana and starring Edinburgh-based burlesque star Missy Malone, follows the story of a dress from its beginnings in 1940s America to modern day Japan and will run on a screen in the main hall.

"I'm obsessed with the idea of shopping not just being about consumerism," Diana enthuses. "I want people to enjoy the social experience of shopping so I'm trying to recreate something like Biba. People would go to Biba on Carnaby Street early in the morning to excitedly await the new delivery. They would then spend all day trying on the amazing, fun designs. I wanted to create something like that - a giant dressing up box."

The young mum of two-year-old daughter Harper lived in London for ten years, moving there to do a Master's degree in fashion at the London College of Fashion. While there she pursued her dream of becoming a fashion stylist and writer by doing work experience and later paid jobs for magazines such as Pill, Wig, Marmalade and Red.

One of her earliest assignments involved taking ten models to a London school and personally dyeing their hair ginger. She recalls: "Myself and an assistant stayed up all night putting everything together, using shopping trolleys to push around the clothes.

"We had to arrange for a secondary school to lend us space and then we photographed the models playing football in the playground and using the Bunsen burners in the lab. They wore designer shirts to look as though they were in school, but breaking the rules - and they all had red hair," she laughs, "It was a school for ginger people."

She is now known as a stylist for always including vintage items in her work. But she also loves new designers and clothes and shoes by Marc Jacobs and Miu Miu, the nickname of Miuccia Prada, the woman behind top Italian fashion house Prada, will also feature among the 500 or so pieces in the sale.

And won't she be delighted to get her home decluttered and her bed reassembled after nights of sleeping on a mattress in the living room?

Diana laughs heartily. "I'm a very cluttered person anyway," she acknowledges, "but yes, I'm glad the show's on Wednesday and yes I'm definitely looking forward to getting the house back to normal."

• The Forgotten Things Garage Sale starts at 7.30pm at The GRV, Guthrie Street. Entry free.