House of Flora is an established Britishfashion label and design house founded by designer Flora McLean. House of Flora designs have been exhibited in the Victoria & Albert Museum in London as part of the 2009 Anthology of Hats exhibition curated by milliner Stephen Jones.
History
McLean is the daughter of performance artist and photographer Bruce McLean. Some of her first self-made designs were the hats and turbans made for her father's 1996 film, Urban Turban. House of Flora, McLean's own design house, was founded in 1996 when she started taking on private commissions and making millinery props for magazines, advertising and fashion shows. Her avant-garde design aesthetic is informed by her stated influences of surrealism, constructivism and the Bauhaus movement.
Collections
Hats
McLean specialises in avant-garde headwear for haute couture designers, catwalks, fashion campaigns and personal collectors. The designs are made often from a variety of different materials not normally associated with millinery, such as PVC, Perspex, felt, leather, wood veneer, fibreglass and nylon, and are influenced by strong geometry and historical figures as well as concepts in modern art. The geometric nature of the designs and the bespoke fabrication detail of the work often leads to it being described as part fashion/part art. House of Flora has created Millinery Couture for Matthew Williamson, Blumarine, Bruce Oldfield and for Riccardo Tisci at Givenchy Haute Couture.
Clothing
The design house also provides bespoke clothing designs, such as the pink fibreglass corset and black trench coat outfits designed and fabricated for Victoria's Secret in 2006 and 2008. McLean debuted her first dress design created under the House of Flora name - entitled Dress No.1 - at the SHOWstudio's 'Future Tense' project in 2008. Dress No.2 and Dress No.3 followed. It is McLean's stated intention to produce a single House of Flora dress design per season.
McLean and House of Flora's design project collaborations include those with hairstylist Neil Moodie, and with whom McLean has created 'Iconic Heads' - hats inspired by hairstyles and created from in felt and other fabrics, one hat in the form of Elvis's quiff. 'Iconic Heads' has toured to Colette in Paris, Bumble and bumble in New York, and Liberty in London.
House of Flora worked with award-winning printer Danny Flynn on a collection of accessories inspired by letterpress printing, and which debuted at the 2009 London Fashion Week; this saw the designer's work being rendered as laser-cut typography on rubber for garments and accessories - the piece, entitled Dress No.2, was reviewed at the 2009 London Fashion Week. The designs were also featured in Vogue. Film of the work, Letterhead, can be seen on the Vogue website. An interview with Flynn for Print Week blog described the design collaboration.
The showcase fashion films for the new House of Flora dress collections Dress No.1, Dress No.2 and Dress No.3. were all created by the director Justin Anderson for Ponyboy Films and displayed by Vogue.
McLean is a winner of the Jerwood Contemporary Makers prize, an award initiative set up by the Jerwood Charitable Foundation and the UK's only award for the applied arts. The chosen recipients share a prize fund of £30,000 and an exhibition at the Jerwood Space gallery. The Flora McLean/House of Flora design piece, entitled Marcel, which was chosen for the Jerwood Foundation's third and final year of awards and exhibitions, was part of the Iconic Heads wool felt hat project with stylist Neil Moodie in 2009. An exhibition of the work of all the award winners opened 17-June - 25 July at the Jerwood Space, London, 2010.
