Surrey Homes | SH41 | March 2018 | Fashion supplement inside

“Clothes are a big
thing for me. I buy
everything from
Topshop to Jean-Paul
Gaultier – the cleverness
is in the mixing...”
Left: Sarah painted a dark wood
Edwardian cabinet to fit in her white
and cream scheme. The coral is from
Dunelm and Sarah found the Jean-
Paul Gaultier display in an antiques
shop in Norman Road, sadly no
longer there
who has amassed her collection with wit and panache.
A pair of amazing red glitter ankle boots are genuine
Yves Saint Laurent, but sitting next to them is an equally
fab-looking silver pair – which are from Primark.
On Sarah, worked into an amazing look – which she
has the height and presence to pull off - you wouldn’t be
able to tell which pieces are the designer real deals and
which the chain-store cheap and cheerfuls. Equally, from a
distance, you wouldn’t know that her collection of amazing
bright-coloured fur pieces is all of the fake, fun variety.
“I buy everything from Topshop to Jean-Paul Gaultier,”
she says. “The cleverness is in the mixing. You could go
into Gucci and dress yourself from head to toe, but that’s
not using any imagination. And a lot of the fun is in the
chase of sourcing amazing pieces. It would be boring just to
go into a shop in Bond Street and buy it all off the rail.”
Along with the talent to spot the one knock-out
thing among the swathes of crud in shops like Primark,
Sarah’s shopping secret is her address book of designer
second-hand stores, which she visits regularly and has
built up relationships with the owners, so they let her
know when something special, in her style, comes in.
Then there are pre-loved designer clothing
websites, which she can browse from the comfort
of home, although these take a little more care.
“I’m very good at researching things if I buy online, I’ve
never bought a fake, but you do have to be careful.”
Her other secret, to keep it fun and to hold on to that sense
of the chase, is constantly updating and refreshing her trove.
“I do turn things over,” she says. ‘I sell things
back through Mel at The Wardrobe, but there
are some things I would never part with.
One of these is the ankle length chiffon Jean-
Paul Gaultier dress with a print pattern which looks
like dollar bills, but they actually say ‘SEX’.
“I like quirky things,” says Sarah, “the
weird and the wonderful…”
There is a great example of the latter in the window
treatment of the master bedroom, next door to the
dressing room. Sarah found the apricot and gold
91 surrey-homes.co.uk