Alumni 2015.Tessa Allen

Having gained her degree Tessa went straight,as an intern,to Holly Fulton and started work on her SS16 collection.

Tessa says “the hours were super long but I was learning pattern cutting and working with toiles etc, which I’m glad I got a chance to do. And I was doing a lot of hand sewing and fixing embroidery, because I was the only textile intern! It was a good experience to work in a small team compared to Mary Katrantzou. Fashion week was stressful and tiring as ever but Hollys collection was beautiful“.

Straight after her internship at HF , Tessa went onto an internship at Hand & Lock (literally the day after!) Tessa says “I was really enjoying it. We got set a personal project which we could complete alongside helping with their work set for us, and this involved creating contemporary beading samples with a 3D feel, as you can probably guess I loved doing this! They have so many beads and sequins to choose from. And having all of the archive samples to look through whenever you want is amazing!
Also during the internship I helped to make an embellished piece for their collection, then began to learn monogramming and took part in silk shading, tambour beading and gold work classes. I also helped out the designers with artwork drawings, which was good practise. I began to get trained on the digital machine for embroidery as although they are mainly a hand embroidery company they get a lot of machine requests too. They ended up offering me a job halfway through my internship so I am now working as a design assistant and completing lots of pretty cool jobs!

Tessa concludes “I managed to book a place onto the Lesage workshop at the Chanel exhibition at the Saatchi gallery, which was really good and the brooch they teach you how to make is beautiful! I thought the exhibition was exquisite and getting to see all of the embroidery samples in detail was great“.

We are delighted for you Tessa and wish you every success in the future.Congratulations.