Licensed to beg - and noses pressed to London Fashion Week's windows

This is the preface to our story, the launch of a new fashion label called Earl of Bedlam. 

We hope you will follow as installments flow, ebb, dam up and stutter forth. Actually, we would prefer you at our side, not "following" - beginning now, as London hosts Fashion Week. From our windowless HQ with the finest post code in London - SW1A - we are, thanks to charitable benevolence, occupying the spare maid's quarters in a grand building behind the Ritz with security porters who politely wonder to what we're up (we think they like us, they remind Mark when Arsenal are playing and laugh when we bring our own rubbish down). This is not entirely unlike our position in the professional fashion cavalcade going on about us. And one paragraph in, I have mislead you already - there are windows in our cozy bunker, but they are opaque and only open a couple of inches. Our best view right now is the horizon of our hopes.

See, we aren't attending any do's or getting shoved at shows. Mark Antony Wesley and I have, between us, done plenty socializing in our time. Now we are getting down to business. Last week we had "robust" meetings with potential investors, today we sat down with a gentleman called Anton Dell. He came highly recommended by an agent I contacted who, it turned out, only represents womenswear. Mr Dell was an agent himself for twenty five years and now acts as broker, matching line to a propos agents in territories around the world: www.antondell.co.uk  

He nominated the penthouse bar of St. George's Hotel (two blocks up from Oxford Circus) as our meeting place. Downstairs in the lobby, we heard our names pronounced as a question and turned to see a man in a damson coloured velvet jacket, with an appealing, open manner.  I am almost reluctant to tell you about the setting for this most encouraging rendez-vous - it was a genuine discovery to Mark and me. After all, we like to boast between us we've danced on most bars in this town. But, starting as we promise to continue, with generous candour, here's the coup: the express lift carried us all to the fifteenth floor and the spectacle of the city spreading west made our eyes wide with delighted surprise. If Mr Dell did nothing else for us that day, already he had delivered one class revelation. It could, should and yet may be (if we propose our "Nostalgie de la Mud" club night to the management) where the global elite come to party, like the Boom Boom Room, penthouse club of Manhattan's Standard Hotel. But here, no models serve cocktails by the house mixologist in over-thought surroundings. Instead kindly staff, in waistcoats as worn as the carpet, greeted Mr Dell with friendly recognition and brought us tea. 

Then Mr Dell assessed the portfolio. He pondered Mark's sketches and photoshopped outfits, the line drawings and swatches. He praised the standard of the work. He then gave us, based on his many years' experience and the performance of similar projects, projections of wholesale orders in the UK. The majority of these, he said, would be outside of London. Retailing has been hit like other sectors of the economy,  but "when people see something great," pronounced Mr D, "money doesn't matter." "Strong work," he added, "will always sell." Buyers are exercising caution, he continued, but more in ordering from well-established, high end brands. The good news, for us, is that they continue to go for new lines as the very novelty is a draw to serious fashion hounds. As in the music industry (or rather, the one that existed when I worked in it), discovering new talent confers kudos on the buyers, same as discovering a new band would make an A&R man's reputation. Mr Dell treated us to tea, for which we were very grateful, and we parted much encouraged.

Here's the lowdown on the label's id -

Any horse or customer can smell a nervous chancer. Being authentic matters. Mark Wesley’s credentials as criminally irresistible are impeccable from where I'm sat, and his talent is self-evident. However, for reasons much debated, he preferred not to work under the banner of his name. A few likely candidates presented themselves and were almost mistaken for the title role, but when "Earl of Bedlam" rocked up, the fit was sure - a salute in four strong rolling beats to the great South London landmark, the Bethlehem Lunatic Asylum. In time that name elided into “Bedlam”, where, for the price of one penny, the gentlefolk of London would stand about the balcony to be entertained by the crazy folk below. 

Conditions were consistently dreadful, and the care amounted to little more than restraint.... the noise was "so hideous, so great; that they are more able to drive a man that hath his wits rather out of them."  Some of the less dangerous patients were allowed to leave, and issued with a 

license to beg. 

How we are feeling the lament of one-time resident, seventeenth century playwright Nathaniel Lee: "They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me."

In 1815, Bedlam was moved to St. George's Fields, Southwark, now the Imperial War Museum. We paid a visit there on Sunday as antique working men's clothes and uniforms are Mark's favourite inspiration. This IWM is free to visit, not even one penny to they take from you. The inmates must have had an uncomfortable time in their first winter at the new site - no glass was initially provided for the windows, because of "the disagreable effluvias peculiar to all madhouses." [information from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bethlem_Royal_Hospital].

So at least we have glass, even if we can't see through it. This is not insanity then, but a fine vision awaiting notice. We hope to arrest attention with dark romance of words and cloth, tales with not just edge but corners - mainly our true life story. Mark creates costumes inspired by them. I write them down.

And so goodnight for now, the cell door is shut and the candle snuffed,

Lady C