Dress code

BRUCE OLDFIELD is charmingly apologetic. When I rang up to request an interview, his personal assistant hadn’t heard of The Northern Echo and, he feels, may have appeared a bit off-hand. She didn’t realise, he explains, what a good paper it is.

The internationally-renowned fashion designer, who is celebrating his 60th birthday on Wednesday, is sitting in his Knightsbridge boutique. “The problem is, you’re ahtside Landan, you see,” he laughs, his amusingly appalling attempt at a London accent highlighting the depth of his North-East roots.

Bruce, a former Barnardo’s baby who was brought up in a two-up, two-down terraced house in County Durham, used to read the Echo all the time. In fact, he remembers he and his foster siblings appearing in it.

The Echo published a photograph of them all in the early Fifties: “I was pictured in my school uniform, with my foster mother and brothers and sisters. We were names then, I don’t think many people had seen anybody who wasn’t white,” he says.

It’s fitting, then, that Bruce should appear in The Northern Echo again as he marks not just his 60th year, but the 35th anniversary of his successful design business. He is certainly a name now, but for very different reasons.

Long renowned for dressing some of the world’s most beautiful women, from royalty to Hollywood A-listers, today’s glamorous young starlets, including singer Rihanna, actress and musician Taylor Swift and model Kelly Brook, are queuing up to wear Bruce’s stunning creations.

And he is jetting off to the Middle East this month to woo some of his wealthier customers – women who think nothing, he says, of paying between £20,000 to £50,000 for a dress. “If the recession hits, they sink another well,” he says.

But much more exciting for the rest of us is the news that Bruce is about to launch “something High Streety”. That’s about all he can say at the moment. But he does confirm that, for the first time, he will be producing something for those of more modest means.

Bruce does make fabulous frocks – elegant, classy creations that last for years. “I have long lost the urge to be cutting-edge,” he says. “I make clothes that are sexy and make people look better than they already do.”

A master of understated elegance – today, Bruce is wearing elegant black linen trousers, a white Turnbull and Asser shirt and red Converse trainers – his love of fashion and design began in the unlikely setting of the small miner’s house in the village of Hett, where he lived with his foster mother, seamstress Violet Masters, and four stepbrothers and sisters.

The family lived close to poverty, with an ash closet in the yard and a tin bath that came out every Saturday night: “It was a bit like Angela’s Ashes, except ten years on in County Durham,” says Bruce.

Bruce loved watching Violet sew and, by the age of eight, he was makings dresses for his sisters’ dolls. “And I watched Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies – I loved the style.”

There won’t have been many lads living in that area at that time with similar interests, but Bruce always felt he was different. The result of a fling between a young married Irish woman and a Jamaican boxer, his colour, certainly, marked him out from the crowd. But not, he felt, in a bad way.

“We were welcomed into the community. We were considered to be cute, a novelty, ‘kissed by the sun’,” he says. Violet encouraged Bruce’s interest in sewing and fashion and instilled in him a belief that he could achieve anything.

By the time he was 13 he was, he confesses, “a bit crazed” and was sent to a Barnardo’s children’s home in Ripon, where he went to the grammar school after passing the 11-Plus. He raged against the rules of the home.

“I was a rebellious, arrogant little b*****d. I was smoking, drinking, sneaking off to nightclubs and defying rules.” When he turned 16, he moved into lodgings in Harrogate.

But still he thrived at school. “The school was a good fit,” he says. “It had very middleclass ideals, a good education, very liberal. I felt more at home with that – I grew up there. And it was respite from Barnardo’s.”

While at school, clothes took on a new significance.

Bruce loved wearing his uniform. “It made me stand out from the other Barnardo’s boys,” he says. And when he visited his foster mother, she would help him make outfits.

“There was a fantastic club in Ripon, called Underworld, which I would sneak out to. I’d wear purple pinstriped trousers and a flowered shirt. I was a dedicated follower of fashion.”

Although clearly bright, he didn’t do brilliantly in his A-levels and went to teacher training college before realising he wanted to work in fashion.

AT art school his student fashion shows were so impressive he was chosen to design a capsule collection for the New York department store, Henri Bendel, and he launched his own label in 1975.

Violet lived to see the beginnings of his success.

“She saw the first few issues of Vogue I appeared in. I am glad about that,” says Bruce.

His career started to soar when actress Charlotte Rampling, closely followed by other A-listers, started to wear his frocks. But Lady Diana choosing him as her favourite designer really made his name.

His designs would look perfect on Kate Middleton, he muses. “She is a lovely looking girl.

It would be good to get that wedding.”

Having recently launched a bridal wear shop opposite his boutique in Beauchamp Place, and now heading a staff of 20, Bruce, ever mindful of his humble beginnings, feels the constant pressure to sell dresses. “I employ people, they rely on me,” he says.

That he has managed to stay in business for 35 years without going bust is partly down to his North-East roots, he says. “I was always grounded, that’s what the North gives you.”

He misses the North. “I am always in awe of the Penshaw Monument. I love Fountains Abbey – where I used to do cross-country running and stop for a cig half-way round.”

But business comes first, and Bruce has no intentions of slowing down. “I would love to live in North Yorkshire or County Durham. I know Janet Street Porter manages it, but I have to be in London every Monday morning.”