Julie Collins
Julie Collins has taught Lingerie and Garment Construction courses at Silai for Skills since 1995. She was born in Leicester and moved to Bristol in 1975 and ran her own clothing businesses for several years.
"I worked a lot of the time from home, I started up a little lingerie business and I was making lingerie, designing and making it and selling it through Party Plan. When that sort of tailed off I moved over to sports wear, it was in the 80s keep fit boom when everybody was wearing all this fantastic bright Lycra. So I did well with that for quite a while and then the fashions changed. The sports wear was getting a bit more subdued and people were looking for labels and wearing something that was quite plain, just with a label on it, rather than the way out designs, so that sort of tailed off. Most of the factories at that time had gone, so I ended up just doing alterations for a company in Bath for a few years. Some of it was quite interesting actually, because we dealt one of the designer shops so I was altering Armani garments, Collette Dinnigen, Marc Jacobs, some of the big designers. They'd got garments in this particular shop and when customers came along and needed alterations I was the one that did them.
It actually served it's purpose it got me together again after my divorce. Then I started looking for something else, started sending my CV off to various colleges, Silai being one of them. I had a reply to my CV and Aroona said that Rose was doing a Pattern Cutting course and she needed an assistant."
