Tamsin Blanchard

Tamsin Blanchard is a journalist who writes about fashion and design. She has recently authored the book Green is the New Black, published by Hodder & Stoughton. She has always been interested in fashion and grew up making her own clothes, and shopping at Chelsea Girl, jumble sales and Liverpool's best vintage clothing shop, 69A. Her interest in fashion was fed by magazines like i-D and the Face and looking at the pictures in Italian Vogue. She was quite single-minded in her determination to get onto the Fashion Journalism course at St Martins (at the time, it was the only course in the country). There, she spent a lot of time in silly platform shoes. For her, fashion has always been – and still is – about ideas, visual excitement, colour, texture and pattern rather than the name on the label. After seven years at the Independent, where fashion coverage was encouraged in its broadest form, from eco fashion (in the days when it was still considered the stuff of cranks and 'crusties') to haute couture. Tamsin moved to the Observer where she spent five years writing fashion profiles as well as editing and writing the interiors pages, offering her a chance to explore other areas of design. She is now style director at the Telegraph Magazine, where she commissions, and occasionally writes, fashion features. In the summer of 06, she helped to organise a fashion day as part of the Hackney Spice Festival, an annual event put on by the Hackney Empire. The theme of the day - which included a farmers market of fashion (local designers and makers) and a catwalk show - became eco/ethical fashion and was sponsored by Hackney Council's Recycling department.