Knitting, Costume and Textile

The Pamela Clabburn Memorial Lecture 2025

6/9/2025

Patrick Grant and How Less is More

On Saturday 6th September nearly 200 people gathered in Norwich University of the Arts’ stunning new Duke Street Lecture Theatre to hear the wonderful Patrick Grant from the BBC’s Great British Sewing Bee deliver this year’s Pamela Clabburn Memorial Lecture.
Anyone who is a regular watcher of Sewing Bee will know that Patrick is charming, intelligent and funny, with an extraordinary practical knowledge of tailoring and fashion design based on a career running (amongst other ventures) a Savile Row tailoring business, and designing and making for top brands around the world. In 2010 he was named the British Fashion Awards Menswear Designer of the Year. His credentials as a judge for the programme are impeccable.
But there are those who may know less about his business experience. He has a degree in Materials Science and Engineering, and an MBA from Oxford. These, combined with his hands-on experience of running a range of successful clothing manufacturing businesses, put him in a unique position to comment on the state of the fashion industry in Britain, and in 2024 he published a book called ‘Less’, which does just that.
Although there were tantalising titbits of Sewing Bee gossip and some celebrity anecdotes to lighten the mood, his message in this talk was a very serious one.

He talked eloquently and knowledgeably about how quality has been eroded by changes in the ways clothes are retailed in Britain, separating the maker from the customer as sourcing and production have been moved abroad in a continuous drive to cut costs. He described how the advent of internet shopping has intensified the problem, reducing seasonal fashion trends to daily ‘drops’ of thousands of new garments made as cheaply as possible from environmentally damaging materials. His main message was that in fact, it is a con of capitalism that has made us always hungry to have more, and that in fact, happiness is not dependent on having a lot of poor quality belongings, but on having a few well-made, high quality items that give us pleasure in their functionality and beauty, as well as bringing dignity to the people who make them. His experience comes from the textile industry, but his message is a much broader and deeply philosophical one: as the subtitle of his book says, it is how having fewer, better things can make us happier.

This is serious stuff, and his message is an important one, from a man who clearly feels a strong moral imperative to use his own success and influence for good. It was so fitting that this was the focus of the Pamela Clabburn lecture; Pamela, the founder of the C&TA and a pioneer in the restoration of historic textiles, certainly understood quality, and she would have approved wholeheartedly of a lecture which encouraged her members to value beautifully made fabric and homegrown craftsmanship. Many of us left determined to pay even closer attention to the quality and economic and environmental impact of everything we buy, not just our clothes.
The C&TA would once again like to express our heartfelt thanks to Kenneth and Lisa Clabburn and their family, who have been kind enough to fund the annual Pamela Clabburn lecture in memory of Kenneth’s remarkable aunt. The Clabburn family’s continuing support and patronage of the Association are very much appreciated.