Music, Style & Culture

Spotlight On: Art Disco

Lucy Catherwood and Marie France have gone from playing the likes of Leeds festival to creating stylish t-shirts destined for cult status.

Best of mates since school, Lucy Catherwood and Marie France, have gone from playing the likes of Leeds festival and performing on Lamacq Live, to creating stylish t-shirts destined for cult status.

The basics: For Lucy Catherwood and Marie France, both 27, it was the constant sales of their self-designed band merchandise that made them brave the world of fashion design. Judging by their website, Art Disco, and the fact they’ve already featured in magazines such as ElleGirl and MixMag, it looks like they made a good decision.

What inspired you to get into fashion design?
We’ve always been into customising and making our own clothes and accessories. When we started touring with our band we decided to design and print our own t-shirts and merch. We got a lot of attention for our artwork and our t-shirts would sell out nightly which sparked the idea to create our own label.

What’s been your greatest success/thing you’re most proud of to date?
We can’t believe we’ve gone from selling our band's t-shirts after a gig to having full-blown collections stocked internationally. We still have to pinch ourselves that something so fun can be our full-time job!

What helps motivate you? Any particular music you like to listen to while you work?
We have an almost unhealthy obsession with Fleetwood Mac and no studio playlist would be complete without a rightful homage to Stevie Nicks. For our last collection we were also inspired by the film Easy Rider so we played the soundtrack on repeat… we were definitely born in the wrong era.

What’s the most difficult thing about doing what you do?
We have so many ideas when creating new collections that the hardest part is to sieve them down to a cohesive selection. It’s like choosing between babies… we watched Sophie’s Choice recently and felt Meryl Streep’s pain.

Who’s on your radar when it comes to new design talent?
We recently started selling on ASOS Marketplace and we love the range of talent that it has… from freshly graduated fashion students to fully established brands both vintage and contemporary.

Where can people buy Art Disco clothes?
We currently sell online at our Art Disco website and also in our ASOS Marketplace boutique. If you want to check out our items in the flesh we’re stocked in ‘Ace’ Leeds, ‘Gone Retro’ Milton Keynes and also ‘M53’ (Spain) with more stockists currently on the horizon.

As well as conjuring up a host of cool clobber, Lucy and Marie also find time to indulge their musical side with their current band, Video Villain.