Alison Lloyd has created a bag brand that’s celebrating 40 years in the fickle fashion industry, and has a fan base of style savvy devotees from cyclists to architects. Not bad for someone who ‘never had a plan’…Forty years. Less than a lifetime perhaps, but add the qualifier ‘...in fashion’, and, like dog years, it grows in magnitude. Such longevity in an ephemeral, cut-throat industry, dominated by global brands and luxury conglomerates, is no mean feat. Which is why Hackney-based brand Ally Capellino, creator of beautifully crafted leather and waxed cotton bags, is one of British style’s success stories, as it celebrates its 40th anniversary this year.

So what’s the secret, I ask founder Alison Lloyd, aka Ally, over a Zoom call while she holidays in Crete. ‘Well, I’m quite modest I suppose in my ambition. I never had a plan, which is possibly a bit dumb,’ she says honestly, her face shadowed by a floppy sun hat, speaking hesitantly as she formulates her response. ‘I’m quite pragmatic about design and also about what can be done with what’s available. So I haven’t blown up or over-extended. I do know what I like. I feel, you know, people have to want to buy the stuff.’

And buy it they do, ‘hanging onto the bags for donkey’s years and wearing them into the ground’, says Lloyd. Bestsellers include the Fin in black and smaller Frances waxed cotton rucksack-cum-totes, with details in supple Italian bridle leather. Evolved from Frank (a two-pocket backpack) and from a ‘mummy bag’ (matching changing mats are available), they are eminently practical with their waterproof interiors and multiple pockets for stowing laptops, wires and water bottles – the accoutrements of the professional creative nomads that make up her loyal customer base. Architects, hipsters, stylists, cyclists, designers – intelligent Bauhaus-savvy, satchel-loving people who favour function and craft, who admire the understated utilitarian chic of the brand and prefer design with purpose, to flashy designer statements.

When Lloyd, now 64, opened her first store on Calvert Avenue in 2006, she became immersed in this creative community. It was her Italian agent who suggested she open a store, ‘that should be as homely as my kitchen at home’. When the shop next door to the studio became available, despite only having one assistant at the time, Lloyd took it on. ‘We ran a wire out of the studio window and in through the shop window, so we could have a computer in there and continue to work,’ she recalls. In the intervening years Shoreditch has gentrified, from artists’ studios and clubs to Foxtons, hip hotels and carefully curated retail. ‘It’s become quite a different place. It’s still home,’ says Lloyd, ‘but people have moved out, the prices are crazy. But we get people coming because they know we are there.’
Of course, the subtlety of Capellino’s discreet below-the-radar branding and ethos enhances the sense of joy when recognising fellow insiders. Take the most popular accessory, a simple leather key lanyard called Kamal. ‘A couple of people have told me they see it as a kind of badge,’ says Lloyd, remarking how useful it is. ‘When they see people in other countries and continents it’s like, ‘Ooh, they’ve got one’, like an AA badge,’ she adds.

There are disadvantages to appealing to a more considered consumer though, as Lloyd has discovered over the years. ‘It’s good and bad, because they’re sensible people. They don’t chuck their money around.’ And yet she has survived four recessions and now we’re on the brink of the biggest economic disaster yet, triggered by the pandemic. With the global fashion industry in crisis and concerns over the climate compounding the situation, there is much talk about a reset with a new consumer mindset emerging, defined by the ‘buying less, but buying better’ mantra. If this is the case, it’s likely Ally Capellino will continue to thrive.

Recalling the 2008 recession she says, ‘It wasn’t so tough for us, because people see the value in what we do. They don’t think it’s throw-away stuff. So tough times for us have possibly been when it hasn’t been tough times for other people.’ No doubt she is alluding to the biggest dip in Ally Capellino’s fortunes in 1999, when the split with her partner and brand cofounder Jonathan Platt, coincided with the company’s bankruptcy. This was at the tail end of the most hedonistic decade in recent history, when conspicuous fashion and designer label It-bags reigned. The UK was booming and dazzling with ‘soft power’. A Vanity Fair cover declared ‘London swings again’ in 1997 and that same year Cherie Blair wore Ally Capellino on the night of Labour’s landslide election victory.
‘I had some leather lying around and I thought, I’ll make a bag… I used clothing methods, it gave the bags a softness. We had a point of difference and it took off’Two years later, the brand – which by then had a Sloane Avenue store – went bust. In previous articles, Lloyd has put this down to ‘bad management’, but Platt and Lloyd’s relationship was also breaking down. The pair had been together for 24 years since meeting at Middlesex University, while studying fashion and textiles and had two children together. ‘We started Ally Capellino together and then we ripped it apart when we split up,’ she says. For her it was a new beginning. A self-confessed ‘stickler’, who admits she could never sit around doing nothing – at 13 she was buying fabric at Leeds market and designing trousers for the boys in her class – she brushed herself down and started again, solo.

A trio of consultancies, one of which was redesigning the Girl Guides uniforms, left her enough money to buy back her name from the receiver, move to Shoreditch and reboot. Returning to accessories – ‘Capellino’ is a misspelling of the Italian for ‘little hat’, named after a line of paper hats Lloyd and Platt made in 1980 for a Betty Jackson catwalk show, which segued into a range for Fiorucci-owned stores, pre-Egg days – was as much happenstance as planning. ‘I just had some leather lying around and I thought, I’ll make a bag,’ says Lloyd. ‘A lot of bags then were quite structured, rigid and always top stitched together, but I used clothing methods; turning the seams in, stitching them and turning them out. It gave the bags a softness, what you call a slouchy look now. We had quite a point of difference and it took off really quickly.’

Over the past two decades Ally Capellino has collaborated with a roster of suitably cool design brands and cultural institutions: Apple Europe, Frieze, the Christiania Museum in Copenhagen, Tokyo Bikes and since 2006, a bag range with the Tate Galleries. It was this capsule collection of buff-coloured canvas bags ‘for Artists’ – her first collaboration – that gave the brand stability in its early days, while also demonstrating the broad appeal of Lloyd’s simple designs.
‘A satchel became a bestseller and could be seen on a great variety of people,’ she says, ‘from teenagers who customised them with paint and badges, to pensioners who customised them with extra zips, or even Joanna Lumley going round ancient Greece.’

Under Maria Balshaw’s directorship, sustainability is now high on the Tate’s agenda, with new eco-friendly briefs issued to product collaborators. Lloyd has risen to the challenge, creating the bags with recycled fabrics, a polyester made from PET bottles, but she’s too honest and tuned into the issue not to express some reservations. ‘It’s great that those bottles are being recycled, but what’s the process? It’s still a petrochemical isn’t it?’

Greenwashing is par for the course in the fashion industry and the current kneejerk ‘cancel culture’ isn’t helping transparency over sustainability, as brands become fearful of being boycotted for saying the wrong thing. Lloyd is more conscious than most of the complexities involved and reluctant to make any grand claims for her brand; it’s an ongoing process of research and experimentation. ‘We do the best we can and the stuff lasts a long time and we are certainly using more recycled fabrics,’ she says. Personally, she confesses to never throwing clothing away, says she has ‘a wardrobe of old tat’ and the bikini she is wearing is inherited from her daughter, but these claims are delivered with her characteristically dry wit: ‘I’m just perfect,’ she adds laughing.

The paradox of trying to create sustainably is not lost on her – ‘It’s quite hard,’ she says. ‘I mean nobody really needs a bag’. The shelf-life of the bags clearly puts Ally Capellino leagues ahead in the sustainability stakes, with a typically discreet repair service extending the bags’ longevity. What’s more, 70 per cent of the collection is continuous, for example one of Lloyd’s earliest creations, a big bucket shoulder bag made from a roll of leather, inspired by an old sail-cloth chandlery bag, remains a core design.
As for materials and manufacturing; the British waxed cotton is shipped to China, where the nylon and canvas bags are made by artisans (the leather buckle straps go through five different processes to achieve smooth bevelled edges, all individually by hand) and the goods are shipped back, rather than flown. The leather bags are
made in Spain and veg tanned. Lloyd has experimented with vegan alternatives to leather, such as Piñatex made from pineapple leaves, but she’s yet to be convinced of their practicality for wider use. ‘It’s fantastic it’s happening. I guess more people need to invest in those things to make them nicer, it would be amazing.’

Lloyd designs around 22 new bags for each of the two fashion seasons, but only six make it to market. When it comes to designing a new bag, her approach is very hands on, piecing things together to make a prototype from the numerous boxes of swatches and leather samples in the studio, ‘available for rummaging to find the perfect colour, finish, weight, shine, weave, softness, crispness and any other quality that we’re aiming for’, she says.

Coronavirus may have been a curve, or wrecking ball for many brands, but Ally Capellino, with its wide range of backpacks, has benefited from the cycling boom. Lloyd is a cycling enthusiast and she has particularly loved pedalling around traffic-free London on her Cooper Bike. This quieter period has also enabled a makeover of her store interior, by local east London craftsman Seng Watson. The refresh has brightened and opened up the space with Watson’s signature materials of glossy garage paint, cast concrete blocks and papercrete lamps cast from Schweppes bottles creating a neutral, textured backdrop allowing the bags in warm leather tones and bright pops of canvas to shine.

Does she feel the pandemic might change priorities long term? ‘Not really. Honestly, so much is lip service. The same people will continue to try to be sustainable and other people just won’t,’ she concedes. For Lloyd, with only one bricks-and-mortar store now, the focus is on digital and working with e-commerce marketplaces such as Far Fetch. In October 2019 Ally Capellino merged with Authentic Bespoke, a British boutique investment group that currently controls heritage men’s style brands: Tusting leather goods, Budd Shirtmakers and the Washington DC-based retailer Sterling & Burke.
At the same time Lloyd was named creative director of the group. She sees it as a golden opportunity to flex her creativity with two quite traditional brands. Tusting is currently under the spotlight and Budd Shirt-makers is a promising prospect for Lloyd to design clothing again; ‘hopefully they might like a little collection of shirts that push the boundaries a bit,’ she says. As gender inclusivity goes mainstream in fashion, Authentic Bespoke may just be onto something, employing Lloyd to bring a softer sense of unisex cool to these traditionally male brands.

Talking inspiration, like her comparable British forerunners, Paul Smith and Margaret Howell, she finds it anywhere and everywhere. A glimpse at her Instagram accounts @allycapellino_plasticchairs and @allysbag opens up her world view of homegrown gooseberries, spiky plants as ‘hair inspo’ and chairs around the globe that catch her magpie eye. The campaign for the AW20 range is inspired by urban bird-watching – initially inspired by the ‘brilliant’ photos on the Marylebone Birdwatching Society blog and a canny way of capturing backpacks.
‘I like that masculine, industrial look, but then that would be nice with something pink and fluffy, bits of surprise, something fun’‘I like architecture and sculpture, and contrasting materials, they always get me going,’ she says. ‘I like that masculine, more industrial look, but then that would be nice to put with something pink and fluffy, bits of surprise, something fun. Things that look heavy or weighty or strong. I love old army clothes that are so strongly sewn.’
She’s keen to visit photographer Lee Miller’s house in Chiddingly, East Sussex, being the proud possessor of one of her photographs, a portrait of Picasso, taken at the Hôtel Vaste Horizon at Mougins in 1937. ‘I think that was the year that her Egyptian husband sent her off to Paris as he could see she needed more company. It’s also where she met Roland Penrose, her next husband. I love owning a photo that gives me a link to that bit of history.’

The conversation meanders into a discussion of creative women in US history finally being recognised for their talents, ‘I think women are taking over the world a bit, aren’t they?’ she muses. I recommend the Mrs America miniseries about the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, not least for its spot-on costumes, but also to mourn the absence of such feisty women in politics today. ‘That’s my autumn telly’, she says, adding, ‘have you ever watched any Germaine Greer films at that time? She was so hot, she was amazing, and so fierce, she didn’t give a shit about anything...’ It takes one to know one, I think, as she adds a typical Lloyd quip, ‘Then we got Mrs Thatcher,’ with a chuckle. allycapellino.co.uk
WORDS BETHAN RYDER