History
One Saturday morning in 1982, Wayne and Gerardine Hemingway opened a stall on Camden Market, London to sell items from their wardrobes. Within a year they had expanded to sixteen stalls of second hand clothes, purchased from all over the world. The company's name (Red or Dead) refers both to an inversion of the Cold War slogan "Better dead than red", and to Wayne's Red Indian ancestors.
The Hemingways began making and retailing their own designs. Wayne later explained their goal "to be the first designer company that sold to everyday people." London Fashion Week snubbed them at first on the grounds that designer fashion was meant to be elitist, but later relented, and Red or Dead won the British Fashion Council's Streetstyle Designer of the Year Award from 1995 to 1997.
In 1995 they sold the brand to Stephen Hinchliffe's Facia Group. Facia collapsed the next year, and receivers sold Red or Dead back to the Hemingways. At that time it was counted as "one of the UK's leading fashion chains", employing more than 100 people.
Read more about this topic: Red Or Dead
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“... in a history of spiritual rupture, a social compact built on fantasy and collective secrets, poetry becomes more necessary than ever: it keeps the underground aquifers flowing; it is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“I feel as tall as you.”
—Ellis Meredith, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 14, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)