In Pursuit of Luxury

Kresse Wesling is one half of Elvis & Kresse a circular company set up in 2005 to solve the problem of material ending up in landfill. They started with London’s decommissioned fire hose. None go to landfill anymore. They also reclaim parachute silk, auction banners, and printing blankets to name a few of the other materials. They upcycle the materials and ethically handmake them into sustaina...

Lanificio Leo, founded in 1873, is the oldest textile factory in Calabria. The company represents a perfect mix between the enhancement of traditional know-how and a strong propensity for craftsmanship and innovation. The history is as important as the future and they still use machinery dating back to the 1890s. Now in the hands of Emilio Leo who as chairman and creative director of Lanificio Leo...

Luxury to me is always grounded in heritage and provenance. My guest on this episode evokes exactly both those qualities. Andile Dyalvane is one of South Africa’s foremost ceramic artists. Guided by a deep spiritual connection to his Xhosa ancestors, Andile’s complex, large-scale ceramic artworks are a metaphorical vessel through which he seeks to honour his cultural traditions and share his journ...

It is safe to say that my guest on this episode of the IPOL podcast is fanatical about globes. Peter Bellerby started Bellerby & Co Globemakers the artisan globemakers based in London in 2008. The company has its roots in his search for a globe for his father’s 80th birthday. Fortunate for us he was unhappy with everything he found on the market so he set out to make one himself. And more than...

If you have ever travelled in a premium cabin on an aircraft it is more than likely that Adam White’s company, Factory Design has been responsible for its design. Adam is a leading product designer specialising in aircraft cabin and product design. He has worked with amongst others, Etihad, Aer Lingus, Four Seasons and Virgin Atlantic and won numerous design awards for his work.

Bobby C. Martin Jr. sets the relentless standard of design and vision for Champion Design, the agency he founded, with Jennifer Kinon, in 2010. He has partnered with a wide range of clients such as Amazon, Apple, MTV and The Studio Museum in Harlem. He recently illustrated his first children’s book “ Have I Ever Told You Black Lives Matter ” (Tilbury House). In 2017, Fast Company named Bobby one o...

Casey Campbell is the Managing Director, North America at Gameloft one of the world's top mobile games publishers. He focuses on connecting brands with a highly-engaged audience through mobile games and compelling rich media. He manages all Sales and Business Development activities in the U.S. & Canada. By turns disruptor and disrupted, Casey has unique insight into this dynamic and growing se...

Kathryn Sargent started her career in the wonderful world of tailoring at Gieves & Hawkes in 1996, rising to the position of Head Cutter, the first woman to do so in the entire history of Savile Row. She founded her own tailoring house in 2012 and is the world’s only female Master Tailor. Breaking tradition, she offers tailoring for both men and women focusing on the needs of the client rather...

This week’s episode of the IPOL Podcast is the second of our Special Visionary Women discussion panels recorded live at the IPOL conference. The panel, made up of 4 of our 8 Visionary Women have shaped our future in a creative and imaginative way, championing new ides that are both bold and empowering. Joining us are Jessica Helfand / Design Observer, Effie Kanyua / Director of Communication and P...

Rosy Greenlees OBE, is Executive Director of the Crafts Council, a national charity in the UK promoting the value of craft and making to society through its research and advocacy, support to craft businesses, public projects and craft education in schools. The Crafts Council has supported thousands of makers through its talent development programmes and through her work, Rosy who is also passionat...

Roger Smith is a master craftsman. He is one of very few watchmakers who makes a watch from start to finish. He set up his studio in 2001 with an unswerving ethos to craft watches to a peerless standard of horological excellence. His journey has been one of continual discovery and he has spent the last decade exploring the future of mechanical watchmaking. This has taken him into previously unexpl...

Join Lydia Slater – Editor in Chief Harpers Bazaar, Catherine Scorey – Chief Operating Officer at All Saints and John Varvatos, Bijou Abiola – Director of Strategy and Consumer Insights at L’Oreal Luxe and the designer Maria Grachvogel for this, the first of two Special Issues of the Visionary Women Live podcasts recorded at the IPOL Conference. We discuss vision, women in business and communicati...

As a child Raffaella spent a lot of time watching her father preparing the embroidery, organizing all the materials for the embroiderers, making technical artworks and checking the finished work for some of the biggest fashion houses in the world. She was well prepared for the world of fashion despite this not being her initial career choice. She, however decided to join her father at the family c...

Stephen started his career during the late 1970s. He has become one of the most acclaimed milliners making millinery seem modern and compelling in materials that are often radical in design and range from refined to whimsical. He is always at the forefront of fashion where his hats routinely grace the most celebrated magazine covers, enliven window displays of the world's most stylish stores...

Theo started designing jewellery in the 1970s and opened his first studio on Fulham Road in 1980. For over 40 years he has been designing and making his own original, beautiful jewellery and silverware by hand in his workshop and studio in London’s Fulham Road. His attention to detail is what sets him apart from other jewellers. This and his acute understanding of craftsmanship and materials. We c...

In this, the final episode of season two we meet Kyre Chenven one half of the duo who set up Pretziada a creative practice on the southwest corner of Sardinia. Kyre and her partner, Ivano Atzori, work with artisans on resuscitating local craft.  Together they work symbiotically as cultural translators: writing and photographing the particularities of the island, reproposing new designs of cla...

Christopher Lutterodt-Quarcoo (CL-Q) is a creative entrepreneur, awarding-winning director of  'Hertz' (BFI Future Film Festival: Best Documentary currently on BFI Player)  and writer. Operating on the axis of design, politics & film he is the director of  THE ADV_™  an immersive forum, developing; empathy, insight and foresight through weaponised empathy. Christopher is also the founder of th...

Sonya Walger is an actor and author, she stared on Broadway in the original production of Frost/Nixon, and she has been in way too many films and TV series to name all of them. Here are a few, Lost, Sleeper Cell,  CSI: NY , and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. ,  FlashForward .  Parenthood  and most recently For all Mankind where she plays an astronaut, Molly Cobb, the first woman on the m...

Theodore Diehl, horologist at Richard Mille. Theo has had a varied and exciting career. He was originally conservatory trained as a harpsichordist and Early music specialist and worked many years as an A&R manager and producer. In the 1990’s, he made a change to watch journalism, and worked with all the major watch magazines and newspapers including the Financial Times (UK). It was during this...

Sacha is 3rd generation Rose leading Derek Rose, a leisurewear company specialized in Feel-good Living. Sacha joined in 2003 and has transformed the business into one of the UKs leading leisurewear companies. It is refreshing to speak with someone who is so open about business, his passion for technology and how his business is about more than just making money. 

Margaret is the Sales Director for Harris Tweed Hebrides and has over 20-years experience working in textile manufacturing, retail, rural economic development, and community sustainability. As a proud Hebridean and a native Gaelic speaker, she has spent her life surrounded by the Harris Tweed Hebrides® industry which forms the backbone of the fragile island economy in the Outer Hebrides of Scotlan...

Kevin Bethune – An accomplished designer and innovator, Kevin started his career as a mechanical engineer working in the world of nuclear power plants. He then turned to work in a different kind of engineering, that is design engineering. Although quite different fields the thinking is much the same. Be innovative and come up with solutions to complex problems. Since then Kevin has designed some o...

Father Andrew More O’Connor is a Roman Catholic Diocesan priest ordained by the Archdiocese of New York in 1996 and is currently the pastor at Saint Mary Grand on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. In addition to his service of the Archdiocese, he is a visual artist and feels that church and art must go together like subject and verb, more so now because the paradigms of the sacred shift along with...

Catherine Scorey Jobling. Catherine is the Chief Operating Officer at Allsaints where she has overall responsibility for all product, men and women. There are many entrepreneurial women in the world of fashion, but very few make it to the highest level of management. Fewer still have contributed so much to the success of a British brand in the competitive world of the international fashion industr...

Lydia Slater . Lydia is the Editor-in-Chief of Harper’s Bazaar UK, overseeing it’s print, digital and experiential offering. She has expanded the Bazaar at Work programme and launched the Bazaar Summit, an annual conference that champions the career woman, bringing together Bazaar’s high-net worth readership with women leaders from around the world; an initiative that has become a pillar of the br...