Nicole Farhi
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 10 July 2016
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Kirsty Young's castaway is the designer and sculptor Nicole Farhi.
Born into a Turkish family in France, Nicole's interest in fashion was present from an early age. As a child, she used to design clothes for her paper dolls; as a teenager, she was taken to couture shows in Paris by her stylish aunts.
Aged eighteen, she enrolled in fashion school in Paris and began selling her design sketches to earn a little pocket money, thus setting out on a career as a freelance designer. In the early 1970s, she met the British entrepreneur Stephen Marks who was just starting the retail chain French Connection where she became chief designer, and it was he who encouraged her to set up her eponymous label in 1982. Her fashion empire would eventually extend to New York, London and Tokyo before being sold in 2010, and Nicole herself left the business in 2012.
Since retiring from fashion, Nicole Farhi has dedicated herself to her other passion - sculpture. She sculpts predominantly in clay and then casts her works in different materials including glass, bronze and concrete.
She has been married to the playwright Sir David Hare since 1992.
Producer: Christine Pawlowsky.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4. |
| 0:06.0 | For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast. |
| 0:10.0 | For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk. |
| 0:17.0 | Radio 4. My custody My castaway this week is Nicole Fari. |
| 0:37.0 | For the first 40 years of her working life, she was of course a fashion designer, |
| 0:41.0 | preoccupied with how to make us look good from the neck down in |
| 0:45.3 | timelessly fluid styles underpinned by a classically continental sensibility. |
| 0:50.7 | In a notoriously fickle industry, she stayed the course, ending up with eponymous stores in New York, London and Tokyo. |
| 0:57.5 | But that was then. Now, her creativity is more concerned with matters from the neck up. At the stage when many of us |
| 1:05.2 | decide to take it easy, she has reinvented herself, becoming a critically acclaimed sculptor, |
| 1:10.7 | producing works in bronze, glass and concrete. Born and raised by her Turkish |
| 1:15.7 | family and niece, as a child, she made clothes for her dolls. Each August, as a teenager, |
| 1:21.1 | her style conscious aunt would whisker along to |
| 1:23.2 | couture shows by the lights of Balenciaga and Eve Saint-Lorant. |
| 1:27.5 | Her first tentative foray into fashion was as a hard-up student in Paris selling her |
| 1:31.9 | little sketches to magazines. She says I don't look down |
| 1:35.9 | on what I've done for 40 years. I was a fashion designer and every day I enjoyed what I was doing. |
| 1:41.2 | But I don't want to spend time thinking about fashion now |
| 1:44.9 | I don't find it that important I haven't shopped since I left I haven't bought one |
| 1:49.5 | t-shirt this is another life a new life starting. |
| 1:53.0 | So welcome, Nicole Fry. |
| 1:55.0 | Thank you. |
... |
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