Synopsis "Thea Porter's Scrapbook"
For nearly two decades, from 1966, Thea Porter created clothes made from sumptuous fabrics that drew inspiration from a view of the exotic Middle East. Combining richly patterned silks with antique fabrics, her clothes were a must for music and film stars such as Pink Floyd, Crystal Gayle, Elizabeth Taylor and Barbra Streisand. Fashion magazines all over the world featured her latest styles and Thea became a key member of the innovative group of British designers that included Ossie Clark, Zandra Rhodes and Jean Muir. During her lifetime she won huge acclaim, and her place in the history of British fashion was ensured when she won Designer of the Year in 1972. Thea Porter was included in several landmark exhibitions on twentieth-century fashion, such as Orientalism: Visions of the East in Western Dress at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1994); the V&A Museum's Cutting Edge: Fifty Years of Fashion (1997); Hippie Chic at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (2013) and Global Sixties at the Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam (2015). An exhibition at the Fashion and Textile Museum in London, Thea Porter: Bohemian Chic (2015), and an accompanying book published by the V&A and written by Laura McLaws Helms and Venetia Porter revived her importance and legacy. Her clothes are now sought after by a new generation of celebrities who include Kate Moss and Nicole Richie. Thea Porter's Scrapbook is her story in her own words, an unpublished autobiography she put together before her death in 2000. Edited by her daughter, Venetia, and with an essay by fashion historian Amy de la Haye, this book, illustrated with sketches, letters, press cuttings and photographs, describes Thea's family history and upbringing in Syria, and, through her own letters, her years as a student in London after the Second World War and her life in the cosmopolitan city of Beirut during the 1950s and 1960s. Thea Porter's Scrapbook reveals her talent as a keenly observant and descriptive writer as she records her life and the business she set up, starting with the much-visited Greek Street shop in London's Soho, and charting the dramatic surge of American interest in her clothes, and the opening of her shop in Paris, as she pursued her ambition to create dresses `beyond trend and tat, that thirty years from today will still be beautiful'.
