Outside, it’s a perfectly-preserved, big 1920s Tudorbethan house in the north London suburbs – made slightly quirky by the fact that the half-timbering has been painted deep blue rather than black. And hang on, there’s not only a standard-issue Renault Espace parked in front of the garage, there’s also a Nissan Figaro. Which is an ironic, retro sort of motor, not one you associate with this kind of suburbia. We are, not to beat about the bush, in Wembley. However, Wembley is where Wayne and Gerardine Hemingway, self-taught designers and wealthy founders of the Red or Dead fashion company, have their London base. No problem: two stops on the Metropolitan Line from Baker Street and I’m there, ringing the bell.
Wayne opens the door, and an image of Harry Hill springs unbidden into my mind. Which is grossly unfair – Wayne bears only the most fleeting resemblance to the surreal comic, but on this day it’s something about the shirt (stripy, large of collar) and specs (wide, chromed side-pieces). And they both share a love of 1970s kitsch, there’s no denying that. Although, as Wayne observes, the 1980s is the decade designers – particularly fashion designers – are plundering right now. My excuse for this visit is Wayne’s new book Just Above the Mantlepiece, which deals with kitsch art of, yes, the 1970s and 1980s. Not, he insists, in an ironic way. His parents bought this stuff, he says, and he’s genuinely fascinated by it. More on that later.
In we go and – well, most likely you already know what the inside of the Hemingways’ house looks like. You’ll have seen it in the glossies. This was the family home for over a decade until they quit three years ago for a new house Gerardine designed near Chichester in West Sussex, where their four children are now based and to which they return almost every day after stopping work mid-afternoon. This lifestyle – with lots of space for family, and as much work as they want to handle without taking on staff – is very different from how things used to be. But now the Hemingways have released themselves from the treadmill of the fashion business and the 120 staff that came with it. Gerardine sold out her stake in Red or Dead, while Wayne, who did not, stays on in the far less intensive role of chairman. They can pick and choose what they do; they have structured their lives with care.
The Wembley house is part of this. No longer principally a home, it has been redesigned not just as a studio but also as a design experiment where projects can be prototyped and tested. This mostly involves Gerardine’s interior design work, which extends from complete buildings and major refurbishments to household products. A contemporary addition to the Institute of Directors in London’s Pall Mall is in hand, for instance, which will blow apart the old gent’s club feel of the place. Then there’s her work for the Milliken carpet tile company (the “concrete” and “denim” ranges are already famous), and the Miele kitchen appliances. I say “her” – but this is a design studio of just two people. The Hemingways bounce ideas off each other. They are not bothered about who takes credit for what.
Gerardine’s outfit today, should you be interested, is an understated but beautifully detailed skirt and top combination. The top is a white, ever so subtly ruffled affair that could be regarded as a distant echo of the New Romantic look that was in vogue when the two met at a Lancashire disco at the start of the 1980s. She had left school at 15 and gone to work in an office. He went to University College, London, as a scientist – specialising in geography and meteorology, as it happens. Both are from relatively humble backgrounds. Gerardine describes them as “first generation working-class entrepreneurs”. Neither ever did any kind of design course, but the fashion business isn’t interested in that. It’s interested in ideas, and the Hemingways had plenty of those. Their take on street style – they’ve always been big on the notion of creative democracy – put Red or Dead in the vanguard of the British fashion renaissance. It was as much high street as haute couture – they claim that Red or Dead was the first fashion outfit to launch a diffusion range straight into the shops.
They’re still at it, still aiming at the mass market: a current project is to design homeware for Debenhams, and it won’t even have the Hemingway name on it. They’ve thought of another name for the range – at which, apparently, Debenhams is baulking. But it will happen, and you’ll see it in the shops from Easter 2001.
You might think, to read some of the reports, that the Hemingways live in an ocean of kitsch. This is absolutely not the case. The interiors are light and modern, the walls are mostly white and the colours – of built-in couches or whatever – are pretty neutral. Wayne’s collection of mass-market kitsch art – the Green Lady, the Balinese beauties, the wide-eyed urchins and so forth – is confined to one upstairs room, covering all the walls and ceiling. Downstairs, Wayne is experimenting with another project, “30 second art”. In conjunction with Eyestorm (www.eyestorm.com), he’s developing DVDs of art which people will buy for use on projector TVs. Instead of a picture, you’ll have an ever-changing gallery of images. Of course, it’ll work on a normal TV as well (just as Wayne also uses his projector TV to watch football games in full surround-sound). He’s making demonstration disks, claims widespread support from artists, and has it running in a downstairs room.
In their studio, the Hemingways sit facing each other across a curvilinear table with a centrepiece of inlaid mirror fragments. Next to that is the kitchen, fully kitted out with Miele prototypes. They’re proud of the cooking-plate table. Done in orange Corian, the organic form of the table includes two big metal hotplates, the kind more usually found in worktops. The plates are cool at the edge, hot in the middle, and you can cook while you sit and eat. The table looks and feels convincing. At one side of the kitchen is a complete kitchen unit, housing fridge, freezer, cookers and cupboards, all contained in one purple upright disc of a cabinet. Miele is apparently not so sure about this one yet.
This is the new laid-back approach of Hemingway Design – the duo act as consultants and see how it goes. Wayne does the media stuff, appearing as a design pundit on The Big Breakfast, featuring in a forthcoming series on the 1980s, and producing that book, Just Above the Mantlepiece. He brings out a copy, and we sit around and flick through it.
“It traces mass-market art all the way through from when it started. Basically, Vladimir Tretchikoff was the first to say right: I’m going to produce art by the millions,” says Wayne.
Tretchikoff is the one who gave us the immortal Green Lady (officially called Chinese Girl), which sold in huge quantities in the 1970s from Boots the Chemists and Woolworths. According to Wayne, she was never meant to be green, but the colour printing was bad and that’s how she turned out. The book has plenty of Green Lady copies, and the other images popular at the time – particularly charging white horses. But these were outstripped by one work that, so to speak, went triple platinum: The Wings of Love. That’s the oh-so-tasteful one of the naked man and woman in the fiery surreal landscape, enfolded by swan’s wings. “It’s the biggest-selling art print ever,” says Wayne. “It was painted by David Pearson in 1972. It sold three million copies.” It also played a key role as silent witness in Mike Leigh’s celebrated fable of suburban angst, Abigail’s Party – the camera seems fascinated by it.
Wayne genuinely admires some of this stuff – such as the beauteous dusky maidens by JH Lynch. The book has removable reproductions of some of the pictures (technically known as “tip-ins”), such as the Crying Boy, which was supposed to carry the curse of fire, following a spate of fires in houses where it was hung. “Now you can get your own house burned down,” says Wayne. The Crying Boy phenomenon was worldwide: scores of painters produced them, nobody knows who started the cult.
It goes on – there’s the American female artist who made top-selling wide-eyed art of a kind that perversely came to define the Vietnam War – but who was held virtual prisoner by her husband, who signed the paintings and eventually got his comeuppance. And so through to the Athena poster art of the 1980s (“very cool at the moment”), though – since Wayne is doing painting here, not photographic reproductions – the famous bare-buttocked Tennis Girl, surely the Green Lady equivalent of that decade, is nowhere to be found.
In all this, Gerardine maintains a discreet silence, though she does allow herself the slightest wince of distaste when we get to talking about the pictures – usually of vintage cars – made of watch parts that you buy from the railings along London’s Bayswater Road. Wayne’s got one, of course. He haunts the Bayswater Road. This artistic twilight zone is his territory. It’s a nostalgia thing, as he makes clear when it turns out that one of his collection was originally a present from his grandmother: the book features old snaps of the Hemingway family on holiday, with youngster Wayne in evidence. “I’m not laughing at it. This documents the art that not my class, not my generation, but the public – people like my family – have bought and loved and had on their walls, but which has never before been documented in a book.”
However they divide their activities, both are absolutely clear that it was right to quit Red or Dead while they were ahead, with young children to attend to (ages from 14 down to three). Though the rewards are great when things are going well, the fashion business is an unrelenting cycle of collection after collection. The big Wembley house, with its huge garden, was fine for the children for a while – Gerardine recalls first seeing it as an unimproved shell, before her successive alterations – and the company warehouse was just round the corner, but eventually something had to give. Hence the move. The London home has become an urban retreat – because the real home is in the country. It sounds great, but that means an awful lot of commuting, even at the benign hours that the Hemingways choose.
“We were going to take central London offices, start up Hemingway Design, probably employ five or six staff to start with, set up some sort of hybrid fashion consultancy, interior design – all under one roof,” says Wayne. “Then we started working together here, just us two, from a table, and we really liked being back here, with the garden. We loved not having any staff. It was just like the early days of Red or Dead. We realised we liked the early days better than the later days.”
Gerardine says: “It had got so there was no time to take a step back, and think about what we really wanted to do. It was constant, no respite. As soon as we finished one collection, we had to get on with the next one. When I left Red or Dead, I felt I had to work really hard and sign as many design and consultancy deals as I could. Then we realised we had the luxury of being able to sit and think about what we wanted to do, without rushing into the next project. We had time to cherry-pick.”
So they rejected lucrative offers for a Hemingway catwalk fashion label – an older-generation version of Red or Dead – and decided to investigate other areas where the design is longer lasting than the few months’ shelf life of a fashion collection. This new world is where you find them now. Gerardine’s Institute of Directors project completes around the same time that a hush-hush technology project Wayne is working on is unveiled: emphatically not a dotcom company, he promises.
This is a very savvy and disciplined couple. They’ve hit their forties and, as Wayne points out, by 50 you’re pretty much dead in fashion these days – everybody wants new names. But in architecture or product design, say, you’re just approaching your peak at the same age. Wayne and Gerardine like that. The prospect has energised them. Carpet tiles? Wallpaper? Kitchen appliances? They love it. Says Wayne: “We haven’t been so creative in years.” And you believe them. Because they were always good. And now the Hemingways have the time and the space to think.
Just Above the Mantlepiece by Wayne Hemingway is published by Booth-Clibborn Editions on 20 November, priced £35.00
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