It’s early September in Dorset, and fashion designer Izabella Doyle’s hands are berry-stained. The hedgerows in the field outside the converted milking parlour she shares with her partner, Matt Wright, a landscape gardener, are bursting with hawthorn berries, blackberries, rosehips and sloes. Doyle has been gathering fruit to make blackberry and bay leaf jam with her two young sons. She’s simultaneously talking to the Portuguese factory that makes the garments for Wright + Doyle, the clothing label the couple founded in 2015, and organising an event taking place during London Fashion Week.
Izabella Doyle at home in Dorset with (from left) miscanthus grass and Muehlenbeckia axillaris behind her. She wears wool Stanhope jacket, £630, silk Joyce shirt (just seen), £330, and wool Kassel trousers, £465. Clothes throughout by Wright + Doyle © Jacob Lillis
Wright + Doyle initially launched with gardening-wear. Wright, 42, is a former artist who spent 15 years creating gardens for, among others, designer Simone Rocha, activist Samantha Roddick and creative director Christopher Simmonds. Doyle, 40, is a tailoring nerd and pattern cutter who studied fashion design at Dublin’s Grafton Academy, later moving to London to work for Gareth Pugh, Giles Deacon, Roksanda and Studio Nicholson. “The first season, I designed a working unisex uniform: a jacket and trousers, with pockets specifically designed to hold gardening tools. I tried to make everything casual,” says Doyle. “But after 18 years working in luxury fashion that began to feel like a waste of my skills.”
