Known for her glamorous dresses, tailored suits and skirt-and-top ensembles made using high-quality materials and incorporating embroidery
Janice Wainwright, who has died aged 82, was a fashion designer known for her long, “bias-cut” dresses and use of intricate embroidery whose label found favour with London’s young and stylish set.
A student of Janey Ironside, the fashion professor who made it her mission to promote an “internationally accepted new English look”, Janice Wainwright started working for a mass-manufacture firm, Simon Massey, while still attending the Royal College of Art. In 1972 she began operating independently.
Under her own label, Janice Wainwright at Forty-Seven Poland Street, she began to shape what would become her signature style: glamorous dresses, tailored suits and skirt-and-top ensembles made using high-quality raw materials. She bought velvet from the designer Bernard Nevill and printed textiles from Celia Birtwell, and had fabric made up from vintage samples that she brought back from California. Her embroidery drew on Art Deco motifs and often took the form of birds or flowers.
Before long she was exporting the majority of her output to boutiques in France, America and Japan, while in London her clothes sold in Harrods, Harvey Nicholas and Selfridges. In 1974 she created a second “Janice Wainwright” label, using plainer designs and fabrics than the ones that had been popular during the 1960s. By the end of the decade her business had an annual turnover approaching £1 million. An article in The Sunday Telegraph in 1981 hailed her as “one of London’s most successful designers.”