Sarah Angold is one of a recent crop of young multi-disciplinary creatives operating broadly underneath the umbrella of ‘designer’. To these all-rounders, no discipline is too far a stretch as ‘design’ is simply an all access pass to whatever field they find themselves in.
Whether in lighting, installations or jewellery, Angold’s striking designs appeal to the magpie within us all. Sculptural and tactile they have an unmistakeable brand signature – not an easy thing to achieve. She fuses her futuristic aesthetic with a unique design process, involving industrial elements underpinned by a strong belief in craftsmanship. It is in many ways a collision of ideas but in this contrast lies the beauty of her practice.
Meeting her during London Fashion Week, it was clear that Sarah Angold is the kind of person for whom perceived boundaries are challenges not problems. As she talked to us – at a mile a minute – it was impossible not to be as enthused as she is about the pieces she creates.
Her background maps her multi-disciplinary approach. After gaining a degree in Fine Art, she attended the Royal College of Art for an MA in Textiles. She then put in some time in Japan working as a vehicle designer and returned to London to pound down the door of Hussein Chalayan – who went on to commission bespoke pieces from her.
More recently she has designed a collection for Topshop and will soon be launching in ASOS. In addition, Angold promises us something even bigger is on the horizon for the brand next season.
We caught up with this dynamic design talent to better understand her practice and perspective.
HOW BIG IS YOU TEAM?
It’s me and one other full time person who’s my second in command and who looks after every aspect of the business and then we have a number of other people who come in, on a freelance basis; I’m lucky to have a really strong team who are behind every aspect of the business. Both my accountant and lawyer are heavily involved in the creative industries.
I’ve been really lucky to get a wave of fantastic interns, even this month we’ve turned people down because we just haven’t got the capacity for them. Interns become an integral part of the team, that’s how I want it to be – you wont be making tea for us, there’s not time for making tea at Sarah Angold! You will be designing, you will be making, you’ll be speaking to people in the industry – the pressure is on.
SO YOU’RE STILL QUITE LEAN IN TERMS OF THE BUSINESS ITSELF.
Don’t get me wrong we could really use another three to twelve people but we’re a small company and very specialist in the way we work; we make everything by hand, in our studio and all our pieces are limited edition. Firstly to get an extra person on board they have to be exactly the right person. We’re a really close-knit team and that’s important for our sanity but also skill-wise, it’s important that they share the vision that we have. We cross disciplines on all different kinds of projects, and that’s where we get the inspiration for our jewellery.
We’re growing really rapidly and it looks like next season we’re going to be launching in a big way, in our first UK department store which is going to involve interiors, jewellery and window installations. It’s a really exciting season coming up. But although we are growing very quickly, our costs are high. We’re a small company and as any business in this climate knows it, that it’s tough and we’ve got to get to a point where we’re working all day and all night until we can hire someone else. I work hard, we all do, but I’m so glad to be doing something that I find amazingly exciting, interesting and constantly diverse. You can be excited for long hours if you’re doing something fantastic and I’m so lucky that that’s my job.
YOU TALK ABOUT THE PIECES BEING VERY LABOUR INTENSIVE; CAN YOU GIVE US AN EXAMPLE OF HOW LONG IT MIGHT TAKE TO MAKE ONE?
Some of our pieces take a whole day to make and that’s not even including the cut. Obviously things are being laser cut. We’ve crafted the files on illustrator or a similar program on the computer which then go to the machine. Then we get the pieces back from the laser cutter and we just get back a bag of pieces. They all come with a protective layer on them and the reason they often take so long to make is a little know fact that for it to qualify as three millimeters of acrylic (the standard width of most of the acrylic we use) it can come to us as anything from 2.3 to 3.7 millimeters. We have to cut and file by hand because if the acrylics are changing then so is the width of the piece. So every single acrylic element has to be sat down, measured, lined up, cut and filed by hand and all the edges of the pieces are polished by hand.
It’s really time-consuming but that’s important to me. It’s important that it retains utter craftsmanship and I think that’s what’s interesting about our brand is that we use really modern techniques, in terms of materials and all the industrial processes and yet it’s balanced by this innate sense of craftsmanship. You know, when these pieces arrive to us they arrive as a giant four metre sheet of acrylic, on a lorry and all the metal work we have done begins life as these big blocks of metal. We’re throwing buckets of acid to etch out designs and it’s all really industrial. But actually what interests me is the idea of taking those processes and making something really beautiful, something much similar to a watchmakers craft. The bolts we use to hold things together are all watchmaker bolts. So it’s that real fusion of being modern and contemporary, pushing boundaries. We’re also really keen to make our work akin to art pieces. That’s why each piece has its individual product number engraved on it and are limited edition – it’s because we want it to be a wearable art piece, it has to be special. Each piece arrives in its own box, with a little card signed by me that talks about what I was thinking when I made the piece. That kind of personal connection is something that I think our customers really value and that’s why they come back again.
WERE YOU ALWAYS CREATIVE AND DID YOU ALWAYS HAVE THIS MULTIDISCIPLINARY INTEREST – WHEN DID THAT COME IN?
I was definitely always creative, there’s no doubt about that. My path through school went from art to art to art. The only other thing I considered doing was law – there’s a real part of me that’s great at arguing. At various points along the way I considered doing a law conversion course. It wasn’t until I started the business that I felt satisfied on an academic as well as a creative level. That’s what I had been striving for the whole time, because I was doing creative things but actually I wanted to be challenged in other ways too, so now that’s what the business does for me.
I did a foundation in Fine Art then I did an undergraduate in constructive textiles and at that point I was making fabrics with inlaid acrylics, so the acrylics were in there right from an very early point. After graduating I did some work for Calvin Klein but the one person I was determined to work for was Hussein Chalayan. I think his assistant must have heard from me more often than she heard from her husband because I was on the phone to her constantly! Finally I rocked up at their buildings and just said, “I’m going to hang around here all day and if anyone can see me brilliant, I understand you’re busy and you probably can’t, but don’t worry I’ve brought a book.”
So that day he gave me my first commission. It was for seven pieces for his catwalk and I had six days, including that day. So I got thrown in at the deep end but it was an amazing experience. It was that point that I really felt, I love the fashion and the fabrics but I don’t necessarily want to be the silent person behind the design – I’m rarely known for being silent! Also I felt the acrylics and structure were becoming more and more important and I didn’t quite know how this sat with fabrics, so I went and did a masters at the RCA and it turned out that I didn’t make any fabrics. Instead I collaborated with industrial designers, product designers, vehicle designers and the day after I graduated I moved to Japan to be a concept designer for Toyota.
YES I WAS GOING TO ASK YOU ABOUT THAT DECISION…
Well I had been collaborating a bit with the vehicle designers at the RCA and Toyota visited their department looking for people to potentially take on and I was like, ‘I know I’m not a vehicle designer as such…“ Anyway long story short, I found myself in an apartment in Japan, not knowing any English speakers at all. It was very naïve of me; I just thought everyone would speak English it being such a multinational company. I spent my first two weeks there designing with earphones in one ear learning Japanese. It was an amazing experience.
I came back to the UK to do a residency at The Design Museum. They got in touch with me and said, “we’ve followed your progress, we’d love you to do a residency, the only thing is we’re being sponsored by a lighting company and so it’s a lighting residency.” So I was like, “that’s alright, I’ll just go into lighting design for a year.” The jewellery came about because, after that residency I took the lighting collection I had designed to Selfridges and said, “wouldn’t you love to see these lights in your windows?” and they said, “if those lights were giant oversized accessories, we’d absolutely love to see them in the window”. So we came up with a deal where they gave me some money and I cut up all the pieces and turned them into giant oversized accessories and I would have my name at the bottom of the window. Then people kept emailing me asking where they could buy the collection – at which point I had to design a collection! That was six years ago. It’s been a winding path. We still do the other work – we’re actually working on a giant installation for a private home in Chelsea at the moment. We work on all kinds of projects and I think that’s how we can keep our style, because we are interested in so many different things.
WHICH AREA DO YOU IDENTIFY WITH MORE – FASHION OR DESIGN?
I identify with design and art and I find it quite odd, this concept that there’s a definite line between art and design and within design there’s fashion, product. I’m passionate about fashion and I don’t think that’s ever an area which I’m going to pull away from but would I be satisfied with just that? No. And if you take out any element of my design and process of collaboration then I’m a worse designer for it. I couldn’t say that one was better that the other, it would be like choosing between children. For me design skill can be translated to everything and actually the weirder the translation, the better the outcome.
IN TERMS OF OTHER INSPIRATIONS, LOOKING AT YOUR WORK PEOPLE MIGHT ASSUME THERE’S QUITE A FUTURISTIC THEME, DO YOU LIKE THAT KIND OF AESTHETIC?
Absolutely! I’m the weirdo that sits in the corner of a Transformers movie in the cinema and I’m there with my sketchpad and everyone wonders who that odd person is in the corner. I love that look, it’s a weird kind of sci-fi, deco chic. It’s actually not been my intention to look at deco but somehow it happens. It’s my natural instinct to create those kinds of geometric patterns. All our patterns graduate and flow.
Architecture is a big influence as well, you can see that in the structure of the pieces, but this season we’ve been looking at 80s pop because we really wanted to bring in some colour. It’s important to us that we’re sophisticated with a slice of fun as well. The person we design for is a woman who wants jewellery to accentuate her personality, so we want to create pieces that are dynamic. I think that’s why our customers come to us, for those kinds of really unusual pieces that they feel can somehow fit them – we love that we have that niche. What’s interesting is you don’t see much continuity in the age of our buyer – they range from their twenties right through to fifty and sixty year olds – who are actually one of our bestselling markets. The pieces are timeless?
IT IS VERY FUTURISTIC BUT THERE’S SOMETHING QUITE PRIMAL THAT MAKES YOU WANT TO TOUCH THEM – THEY’RE QUITE TACTILE…
It’s interesting that you say that because my fascination is within materials and combining materials in different ways. It’s about structure and sculpture and if I had to give you one word, where my heart lies, it’s material. So tactility is really important and that’s why I think I can design in any industry because it’s about the material and not just a product. So for me the fact that you want to touch them and feel them is the best compliment anyone can give me, because if you want to touch it, I’ve done my job.
DO YOU THINK YOU’LL EVER EXPLORE SOMETHING A LITTLE BIT MORE SOFT?
Yeah I do – I think one of the things about the fact that we work in this very unique way means that we will constantly evolve. I would like to think that we won’t become outmoded because we will lead the trend. We don’t look at trends at all and I would be cross if saw one of my staff doing that because we lead the trends, we’re not following them. That’s quite important to me that we keep developing, we have to keep challenging ourselves to do that and take risks, so that means each season maybe bringing in a new material or a new way of working. Perhaps one season we’ll do something and no one will like it but I think that risk has to be taken each season. I also feel that with the team I have, we ought to be able to create great things every season and they’ve got to be something new. If we can’t keep developing and challenging ourselves with something soft or curved or something that works in a different way, then we’re not very good stylists!
WHAT ELSE IS COMING UP FOR THE STUDIO?
In the run up to next season we are talking to the Design Museum and the V&A about doing some interactive lates with them. We’ve got a collaboration next season – we’re going to be working with someone who’s very involved with technology. What we’re planning for next season is massive and quite different; it will be unveiled gradually throughout the season. We’re hoping to give you some tasters at the V&A and Design Museum of what’s to come. We’re also planning our diffusion launch for ASOS which will either happen at the end of this year or the beginning of next. In the meantime we’re launching SS14… So no sleep – who needs sleep!
www.sarahangold.com
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