January 16, 2021 – Daily Mail – Passionate about puffed sleeves and Peter Pan collars, when Angela Lynne began collecting vintage children’s clothes 50 years ago, she never dreamed her hobby would be a game-changer for one of the world’s top fashion houses.  

The royal children have sparked a trend for more traditional childrenswear, much to the delight of Angela Lynne, an avid collector of vintage children’s clothing. But it was a huge shock when Gucci Kids came knocking at her door. ‘We live in a big, old, rambling house in Norfolk, and my husband and I are also rambling and rather elderly,’ jokes Angela.

She is speaking to me via Zoom; the wifi is patchy, but behind her I can see an ornate ceiling, a beautiful fireplace and lots of domestic clutter. ‘We live pretty traditionally,’ she explains. ‘My husband boils a kettle and staggers upstairs to shave, because if we put the cistern on, it takes an hour and a half to get a basin of water.’

While there’s definitely a charm to the old-fashioned world I’m peeking into, it doesn’t bring to mind the high-fashion scene I’ve witnessed in Milan: I see no designer candles or plush white carpets, and Angela doesn’t seem the type to don jumbo sunglasses and jet off to a detox retreat. So how did she end up collaborating on a capsule collection with Gucci? She was as surprised as anyone. ‘I hardly knew what Gucci was,’ she admits. However, she had something the fashion house was deeply interested in – an enormous archive of vintage children’s clothing, which she’s been collecting since 1970.

‘I started becoming interested in children’s clothes when I was a child myself,’ Angela says. ‘I loved babies, prams and nursery life, and from around the age of eight, I started drawing them.’ She shows me delicate illustrations of boys and girls that look straight out of an Enid Blyton book.

‘When I was about to have my first child, two maiden aunts took me to Harrods and said, “Choose a dress, darling.” So I found a dress that I thought was lovely. On the train home I kept peeping into the bag to look at it. That was the first dress, and I’ve now got a million.’ Fifty years later, she also has six children and 14 grandchildren.

Read more at Daily Mail.