Material girl

Belinda Robertson, feisty Glasgow girl, has taken cashmere to a new plane of fashion

Cast your mind back – not very far – to when there were just four types of sweater: polo neck, turtle neck, round neck and V neck. Nothing else varied much, except that sometimes people bravely wore a matching cardigan over the top, and then the ensemble was called a twinset. It was probably knitted in the Scottish Borders, in lambswool or – just occasionally – in the wool of the cashmere goat. Rare and expensive, this, and traditionally difficult to manufacture and ‘finish'; but so luxuriantly soft and easy to wear, so tactile. Potentially, in fact, rather addictive.

Kerpow! Enter Belinda Robertson – feisty Glasgow girl and party animal, with a will of steel and an eye for a singularly main chance. She set out to turn cashmere into what every woman was crying out for, subconsciously or not: clean-lined, colourful, modern, funky and fashion-aware pieces of clothing to make you feel a million dollars. That was 1986, since when Robertson has stormed the international markets, designing for private labels in the US and Japan; she has also opened her own flagship store in London, a sleek and discreet showroom in Edinburgh and others in Milan and New York, and diversified into menswear, baby clothes and cushion covers; she sits on numerous industry boards, and earlier this year – at around the time when she gave us the witty cashmere G-string – was awarded an OBE for services to the textile industry.

I meet Belinda Robertson on a rainy evening in her Edinburgh ...

To read the rest of this article you can do any of the following.

• By : Kate Patrick
• In : Products
• Issue : 2
• Page : 40
• Words : 1,369