It’s a sunny Saturday morning and we’re sat in a Turkish cafe in Dalston with fashion designer, Natalie Anne Moran, who is donning pastel pink hair and a jacket to match. She chats eccentricity, Kreayshawn and her soon-to-be-unveiled autumn/winter collection…

So you’re from Liverpool, how did you end up living in London?

I came down here to study. I’d always wanted to be in London. I went to Middlesex university to study fashion.

You claim to come from an eccentric family. Tell me about them.

My grandma on my dad’s side is very eccentric. She’s the queen of the eccentrics, always has these really crazy stories.

Do you think that this has inspired you?

Yeah. My parents are quite weird as well in their own ways. I’ve had quite an unusual upbringing and I think that’s affected me. My older sister’s an artist, my other one’s a writer and my little sister is a micro-biologist so she went completely the opposite way.

Your collections are very textile-focused. Your clothes contain lots of embroidery and your accessories are made of wood vinyl. Why is textile so important to you?

I’ve always been really interested in textiles. At college, at one point when I was deciding what to study at uni, I considered doing textiles. I’ve also always really enjoyed drawing and I feel that embroidery is just another way of drawing really.

The collections that you’ve released so far are all quite casual, would you ever do one which is more formal?

I’m actually working on a collection for winter which has a few more formal pieces as I want to put a bit more of a show on but I wanted the collections to be really wearable and affordable and there are a lot of designers that just design nice frocks so I wanted to do something a bit different to that.

You’ve worked with quite a few designers too. Tell me about working with them.

I feel really lucky to have worked with them – people like Christopher Kane. I did work experience there when I was still at uni and that was really inspiring. Then I did some work at Antipodium where I did quite a bit of admin stuff and then I worked with Louise Gray which was really, really fun as it was very hands on. It actually made me enjoy the making part of fashion. She had quite a loose way of working which I really enjoyed.

Is there a specific famous person that you’d like to see in your clothes?

I absolutely love Kreayshawn, you know the one who did that ‘Gucci Gucci’ song? She wore a massive bow in her hair in the video.

Which is similar to your hair accessories collection…

I actually made those before seeing that video so that was just a coincidence but I like her because she has a little bit of a ghetto edge to her. Maybe that’s just the Liverpool side of me coming out….

So, are you just designing the autumn/winter collection at the moment? What’s it like?

It’s sort of mixture of casual wear and evening wear. I still want to keep it affordable with the casual wear and then I wanted to do something a bit more expensive so I’ve designed a few evening pieces.

What are your main plans for the year?

I want to carry on designing in my studio space just down the road as I really love it. It’s a big space and it’s so close to wear I live. I share it with lots of others, so I think it has quite a creative energy about it.

Words: Katie Wilkinson