The Gold Edition Meets… Deborah Brett

I was born in London but grew up between there and Switzerland until I was seven. Half of my family were quite business orientated but I had an uncle who was an artist. Overall, though, we were a family that appreciated music, culture and art, so I can’t really tell you how or where my creative spirit came from – it just happened. I was lucky in that I knew what drove me from a young age, which was just the idea of being creative in any way that I could, whether that was dressing up, painting or making things from papier mâché. I was always expressing myself through my hands – that was my thing.

It was fortunate that I had really supportive art teachers at school. I basically lived in the art room and I don’t think my family particularly understood it, they just tolerated it. I had to find my own way, especially if I wanted this to be some sort of career path. It was quite bold of me to go to art college (I ended up going to Central Saint Martins to study fashion design) but I just had this real conviction. My father wanted me to study law and German at Bristol, but I knew I didn’t want to – even if it meant he didn’t speak to me for six months. I just felt very strongly that I needed to do something for me. 

It was a really interesting time to be at Central Saint Martins. My contemporaries are all really well known now. But it still wasn't a very trodden path. There weren't any famous people that had come out of Saint Martins since John Galliano, so they were excited to find the next Galliano. People who were my contemporaries include Stella McCartney – she was in my year – Phoebe Philo who was the year below me and Katie Grand who was a couple of years above. (Alexander) McQueen was doing his MA and Matthew Williamson was a couple of years above me too. Suddenly it was Cool Britannia, where you had all these young designers coming out of college and launching their labels. It was a really exciting time.

However, I realised I was not going to be supported at Saint Martins as a designer. It was a time for avant garde, not true ready to wear. They wanted ground-breaking and I knew that wasn’t me, so I switched halfway through to journalism and that’s when I discovered magazines. Again, I grew up in a family that didn't buy magazines, so I didn't even know what a stylist was until I got to Saint Martins. Suddenly I realised I could still be creative but in a different way, not just with making the clothing, but actually in representing it. 

I graduated with a degree in fashion communication and promotion. It was journalism, photography, marketing, styling – all these visual arts, but based more on print. By this time, I also had a lot of work experience under my belt. I’d worked at Elle in New York, in Joseph’s press office in Paris and I'd done all my own fashion shoots. Luckily, I ended up walking into a job at The Times as a fashion assistant to a wonderful woman called Grace Bradbury. Within six months I'd been made deputy fashion editor because it was just me and her. I ended up styling all the shoots and contributing to the fashion pages from the get-go. 

The beauty industry has definitely become more age positive. You now have these brands that focus on combining skincare with colour, like ILIA, for example, which I'm a huge fan of. I don't want to be 20 or pretend I’m 20 – I want to look like the best version of myself now. 

Motherhood is such a shift in everyone's life, and it does make you re-evaluate what's important to you. I took a bit more of a backseat in my career at that time, but I was lucky enough to still be able to work in fashion and be a full-time mother. I could pick and choose the jobs I wanted to do – the challenge came in keeping myself excited and engaged in what I was doing. That started to wane. That, combined with the shift in magazines, suddenly made leaving my children for shoots not very worth it. I also felt I needed a new challenge. So, once I'd had my third child, I decided that was the time to discover something new. I gave myself a year of discovery – a year where I would set aside a day or two in my week to look at different fields and try out different things.

I enrolled in lots of different courses. I started doing some printmaking because I was always really obsessed with it at school. I got into baking and I did flower arranging – anything creative. One of the courses was pottery and I absolutely loved it. But I didn't understand how you could study it and then do it as a career. It was just a craft – it wasn't viewed in any high regard. But when I started doing it, I loved it so much. So, then I did another pottery course, and then another one. It filled me with that same joy I had when I was younger. 

Around the same time, ceramics started coming more to the fore. You'd go to Frieze Art Fair and suddenly there were ceramicists being shown among the contemporary artists. People were viewing it in a different way. Then, my pottery tutor at college asked if I wanted to do a degree. I remember quite viscerally being taken aback and my instinct made me say no. I had children and a job, and I didn’t think I could go back to school. But then she told me it was two days a week for a year – and before I knew it, she was signing me up for it. So, I completed this Level 3 BTEC at Chelsea Art College and I have to say it was the best year of my life. I hadn't realised how rewarding it was to throw yourself into something that was really new and scary. Trying all these things and potentially failing at them – I found that really exciting.

My best piece of advice for anyone looking for a new chapter is figure out what you don't want to do. So, you might say, I want to be impassioned but what is it you want to feel impassioned by? In whittling away at what doesn't resonate with you, you're able to find the thing that does. I had a wonderful tutor during my college year who gave me the space to figure out the things that made me passionate about ceramics. While I was doing that course, I think I had an innate sense that this was going to be stuff people would want to buy. So, I refused to do it. Purposefully, I said I could do that, but I'm not going to. Instead, I wanted to push myself further creatively. I knew I could do the commercial thing, but I didn't want to be pigeonholed straight away.