Out of all of the cover stars we’ve had since DarkDaze’s imagination started to go wild, we’ve never arrived at the shoot to find any of them helping to build the set. But a few hours before Ophelia Fancy’s Emma and Stevie were in front of the lens they were very much hands on in making the image.
Hugely talented girls, they also made the props, the costumes and styled the shoot. In a way it’s an extension of their work with long time collaborator DarkDaze on the brilliant fashion magazine Gang Up, of which they’re co-founders, when they’re not making bespoke costumes and hosting parties in the wildest fancy dress outfits you’ve seen. Oh, we almost forgot – they run one of the most highly regarded lingerie companies in the country too.
Let’s get this out of the way from the off – Ophelia Fancy’s knickers aren’t cheap, sometimes costing more that a hundred quid. But they are wonderful. The new collection is called Clowning Around, and the imaginary muse that gives the company its name has joined the circus. The result is midnight blue gingham and dusty pink silk loveliness with frills, ruffles and bows to die for. It’s beautiful rather than slutty.
“Emma and I do not make sexy underwear at all,” stresses Stevie, dressed in white.
“We make underwear directed at girls rather than boys,” adds Emma, in red.
“It’s to make girls feel great,” continues Stevie. “It covers up a little bit too much, probably. It’s not about sexy, red lace, it’s about frilly stuff that covers up a little bit but gives girls massive amounts of confidence.”
“Boys would probably put the girls in less but actually the girls in more feel sexier,” reckons Emma. “In this day and age where the standard size for a woman is 12-14 we want to wear more.”
The pair met whilst studying fashion at the University of Brighton but refused to follow their classmates to the jobs in London (“We’re Essex girls so Brighton’s quite good for us, it’s a big city as far as we’re concerned,” smiles Emma). Instead, after a bottle of vodka between them at a party, they were the only two from a bunch that promised to do a stall on Portobello Market to actually follow it up. They didn’t have a lot of material but they had scraps left from their university collection, enough to make knickers and bras and nipple covers.
Stevie was working at She Said, Brighton’s amazing ‘erotic boutique’ at the time and had seen what was selling. She’d clearly picked something up because they sold out of their wares on the stall that first day.
“We never sat down and thought, ‘We should be a lingerie company,'” says Stevie, “it was like, ‘What have we got here? This will do.'”
They’d been working on the market for maybe four or five months when they entered Alternative Fashion Week. They beat about 80 other designers and won enough money for the deposit on a studio in New England House.
“That’s where it went proper,” says Emma. “We stopped going to Portobello Market and started stocking in shops like Coco De Mer and Bordello.”
Ophelia Fancy is a label full of ideas, there’s always a story, a theme, like the underwear is just a part of a bigger picture. So where do the ideas come from?
“It’s weird,” says Emma. “We panic that we haven’t sorted out the next collection and we sit down and even if we haven’t spent very much time together the same ideas come through. We generally design it all in a day.”
The pair are great friends and as well as working together, spend a lot of time with each other. They see the same films, read the same books, make the same friends.
“We don’t even have to talk about it but we’re absorbing the same influences,” says Stevie. “So we sit down thinking we haven’t got any ideas and then it all comes quite easily. We don’t know how it happens.”
There’s such a strong ethos behind the label that you’d imagine it took months or years to form a picture of what Ophelia Fancy was all about. Not so, it seems.
“It probably only took a day,” claims Stevie. “I know that’s really bizarre.”
It spreads out to the hours of darkness too – the pair can often be found livening up a club night or event with their amazing costumes. There might be a lot of zombies around at the moment, but none to touch these girls. And their dusty clowns are untouchable.
“If me and Stevie could sing or dance we’d be performers but unfortunately we can’t,” smiles Emma, “so we do the fancy dress and go on a rampage.”
“We get away with so much more dressed like this,” admits Stevie pointing to her soldier outfit. “But day to day we are tomboys. We dress like 15 year old boys.”
“I asked someone the other day, ‘What would you say my style is?’ They said, ‘It’s a bit like shit grunge, isn’t it.’ Erm, cheers.”
The girls stress that the idea that people have of them as the perfect embodiment of 1942 glamour isn’t true. They love fashion of all eras, as shown by their extraordinary fashion-forward styling on Gang Up magazine, the second edition of which is due in January.
“We might go past a shop and see amazing shoes that are neon,” Emma says, “but we can’t use those in an Ophelia Fancy shoot. That’s fine, but it’s not what we’re all about. Gang Up is a further expression that Emma and I are fashion designers.”
Beyond more Gang Up and working on their next collection, Emma and Stevie want to do more bespoke costuming for performers, and if their outfits for the SOURCE cover are anything to go by they’ll have another huge success on their hands.
“Emma and I are trained in tailoring and business and people look at us sometimes like, ‘Funny girls dressed up funny, they haven’t got a brain,'” reckons Stevie.
Really? You’d be crazy to underestimate these two. Get tangled up with them and they’re going to come out on top.
