About
Anne designs handsewn ladies wear specialising in natural fibres, especially silk dresses such as wedding dresses, evening gowns & luxury daywear. She also designs unique hand embroidery & beadwork for her creations. Her work as a visual artist includes ranges of designs for blank inside cards, Christmas and Easter cards as well as original artwork on paper, & giclee prints.
Anne began drawing & sewing as a young child. Anne's mother passed on hand sewing & embroidery skills from her mother's grandmother, Anne's great grandmother, a tutor & embroideress with the Sisters of Bethany Embroidery School, Clerkenwell, London. At school Anne's studies included hand embroidery, hand sewing, simple garment making, as well as art, history of art & technical drawing.
After leaving St Michaels Convent Grammar School, North Finchley, she trained in London art & couture studios in the 1970s when most of the work was done by hand. She was asked to bring examples of her artwork, technical drawing & embroidery to job interviews. Anne's training was broad: she trained with Sterling Studios as a paste up artist working on mostly IPC comics & teenage magazines: as a make up artist, painting make-up onto display mannequins with oil paints for a mannequin renovation company, Modreno. Then she made couture belts & covered buttons using couture hand techniques, no machines, for E G Stevens Ltd, a small company who made these for the London couture houses. Each order was often for a handful of buttons and/or a belt for one dress. After that Anne worked as a draftswoman for NCR, drawing up & pasting in text for complex computer forms as well as making pen and ink drawings of computers & computer equipment for their manuals.
As a young teenager Anne began making patterns for clothes, from imagination, as she could not find patterns for clothes she wanted, developing her own techniques for unique designs. She has a few hand sewing, embroidery & pattern making books for inspiration:
Dilmont Th. de, Encyclopaedia of Needlework, DMC, Mulhouse (France) (ref. incomplete)
Howlett et al. Odhams Encyclopaedia of Needlecraft, London: Odhams Press Ltd
Shaeffer, C B, 2011. Couture Sewing Techniques. Newtown: The Taunton Press Inc.
She moved with her parents from Finchley Central to Ealing then to London N5 where set up her practice in 1981 because people asked her to make her handsewn dress designs for them, backed up with part time office work until her creative work became full time in 1987. She then moved to London N1, Croydon & is now in Tunbridge Wells.
In the 1990s Anne helped couture designer Caroline Holmes with her dresses & in her London Bloomsbury salon. Anne was a member of the Register of Apparel and Textile Designers around the same time for several years.
She has sketch and photographic portfolios for customers to view when they visit her as well as a collection of her hand sewn dress designs to look at including some samples for sale. Most of her designs are for wedding dresses, evening gowns, luxury ladies daywear as well as bespoke dresses. She specialises in working with silk & natural fibres, designing unique embroidery & beadwork & painting on silk especially for hand painted silk scarves. Anne works with her own or uniquely commissioned embroidery, beadwork & hand painted designs, unless using pre-embroidered fabric.
Anne does not:
Design or make trousers. She does not work from ready made paper dress patterns because she makes her own patterns from dressmaking tissue paper for her clothes designs. She does not use a sewing machine because she creates hand sewn clothes. She does not use heavy corsetry, just light boning, soft cups, and/or elasticated stays. Quite a few gowns and dresses are specifically designed to be worn over a bra, corset, corselet, or bodysuit. Corsets were worn as a separate garment under dresses in bygone eras, not as part of the dress; more comfortable than a corset built into the dress, & the dress hangs better if a bra or corset is worn underneath as a separate garment.
Studies include an Open Degree from Open University in French, Classical Latin and Greek, Accounts, Ethics and Heritage; courses in Excel, an A level in IT, a CPD course in QuarkXPress, PhotoShop, CorelDraw, Hand & Lock Tambour Beading.
Her signature art style is artwork from hand cut stencils which she started in the mid 1980s for stencil pictures and many card designs. Anne used to individually airbrush each card she sold, but the inks are obsolete so she scanned the originals and now prints cards herself using archival inks and digital fine art paper. Some cards in her Christmas range are hand drawn from hand cut stencils. Some original stencil pictures are available.
Anne also works with pencils & oil pastels on fine art papers, often drawing flowers but also some abstract, experimental & conceptual art. She also has a Digital Art Collection.
Current shows and a selection of past events are listed in the Events menu - see top of page
Blogs include:
Exhibitions and Events for Art, Craft and Dress Design by Anne Fontenoy, a long list of shows etc.
Terms and conditions for dresses designed and made to order
Sustainability
This shop uses Etsy payments for online purchases including PayPal, no accounts are needed for either option.
Anne Fontenoy is registered with HMRC as a self-employed Sole Trader
After leaving St Michaels Convent Grammar School, North Finchley, she trained in London art & couture studios in the 1970s when most of the work was done by hand. She was asked to bring examples of her artwork, technical drawing & embroidery to job interviews. Anne's training was broad: she trained with Sterling Studios as a paste up artist working on mostly IPC comics & teenage magazines: as a make up artist, painting make-up onto display mannequins with oil paints for a mannequin renovation company, Modreno. Then she made couture belts & covered buttons using couture hand techniques, no machines, for E G Stevens Ltd, a small company who made these for the London couture houses. Each order was often for a handful of buttons and/or a belt for one dress. After that Anne worked as a draftswoman for NCR, drawing up & pasting in text for complex computer forms as well as making pen and ink drawings of computers & computer equipment for their manuals.
As a young teenager Anne began making patterns for clothes, from imagination, as she could not find patterns for clothes she wanted, developing her own techniques for unique designs. She has a few hand sewing, embroidery & pattern making books for inspiration:
Dilmont Th. de, Encyclopaedia of Needlework, DMC, Mulhouse (France) (ref. incomplete)
Howlett et al. Odhams Encyclopaedia of Needlecraft, London: Odhams Press Ltd
Shaeffer, C B, 2011. Couture Sewing Techniques. Newtown: The Taunton Press Inc.
She moved with her parents from Finchley Central to Ealing then to London N5 where set up her practice in 1981 because people asked her to make her handsewn dress designs for them, backed up with part time office work until her creative work became full time in 1987. She then moved to London N1, Croydon & is now in Tunbridge Wells.
In the 1990s Anne helped couture designer Caroline Holmes with her dresses & in her London Bloomsbury salon. Anne was a member of the Register of Apparel and Textile Designers around the same time for several years.
She has sketch and photographic portfolios for customers to view when they visit her as well as a collection of her hand sewn dress designs to look at including some samples for sale. Most of her designs are for wedding dresses, evening gowns, luxury ladies daywear as well as bespoke dresses. She specialises in working with silk & natural fibres, designing unique embroidery & beadwork & painting on silk especially for hand painted silk scarves. Anne works with her own or uniquely commissioned embroidery, beadwork & hand painted designs, unless using pre-embroidered fabric.
Anne does not:
Design or make trousers. She does not work from ready made paper dress patterns because she makes her own patterns from dressmaking tissue paper for her clothes designs. She does not use a sewing machine because she creates hand sewn clothes. She does not use heavy corsetry, just light boning, soft cups, and/or elasticated stays. Quite a few gowns and dresses are specifically designed to be worn over a bra, corset, corselet, or bodysuit. Corsets were worn as a separate garment under dresses in bygone eras, not as part of the dress; more comfortable than a corset built into the dress, & the dress hangs better if a bra or corset is worn underneath as a separate garment.
Studies include an Open Degree from Open University in French, Classical Latin and Greek, Accounts, Ethics and Heritage; courses in Excel, an A level in IT, a CPD course in QuarkXPress, PhotoShop, CorelDraw, Hand & Lock Tambour Beading.
Her signature art style is artwork from hand cut stencils which she started in the mid 1980s for stencil pictures and many card designs. Anne used to individually airbrush each card she sold, but the inks are obsolete so she scanned the originals and now prints cards herself using archival inks and digital fine art paper. Some cards in her Christmas range are hand drawn from hand cut stencils. Some original stencil pictures are available.
Anne also works with pencils & oil pastels on fine art papers, often drawing flowers but also some abstract, experimental & conceptual art. She also has a Digital Art Collection.
Current shows and a selection of past events are listed in the Events menu - see top of page
Blogs include:
Exhibitions and Events for Art, Craft and Dress Design by Anne Fontenoy, a long list of shows etc.
Terms and conditions for dresses designed and made to order
Sustainability
This shop uses Etsy payments for online purchases including PayPal, no accounts are needed for either option.
Anne Fontenoy is registered with HMRC as a self-employed Sole Trader