Fashion student Mihai Popescu won the 2022 Fashion Research Competition run by the British Fashion Council and the British Library. He recently completed his degree in Fashion Textiles and Design at Middlesex University. 

I was always into art. When I was young, I made a little book in which I could draw clothes and shoes and headpieces. I was obsessed with Lady Gaga, and I drew a lot of inspiration from her outfits. But I never thought I was actually going to study fashion. 

After college, I decided to take a gap year, and moved from Romania to London. Being in a big city, with so much going on, I felt the need to pursue what I’d always loved, so I applied for a foundation course in fashion textiles and design. My great-grandmother was a weaver, and she’s the reason I decided to study textiles. She died when I was quite young, so I never had the chance to spend time with her and learn her craft. 

I hadn’t heard of the British Library x British Fashion Council Fashion Research Competition until one of my tutors told us about it. The brief was to go to the British Library and use its resources to look into my heritage, and to use that research to propose a collection. When I visited the Library, I found out so many things that I hadn’t known about my culture. I was actually a bit upset that I hadn’t thought about going there earlier on in my degree. 

 

It made me understand who I am as a designer

You could find books there that would tell you every single detail about traditional Romanian dress. One thing that I really liked was traditional pattern cutting. Traditionally, people would use embroidery to make rounded necklines and different types of ruffles. I’d never imagined that you could make so many intricate designs from a square piece of fabric. I’d seen the finished garments before, but I never knew how you got there. 

The process really made me understand who I am as a designer, and realise that I have something unique to offer. The project was inspired by everything that’s happening in Romania at the moment. A lot of political parties are trying to use traditional Romanian dress to say that gay people do not belong in Romania. As in, these outfits are traditional, but being gay is not traditional. They even had a referendum to try and change the constitution of Romania so that marriage is only legal between a man and a woman. They use the phrase, ‘the traditional family,’ which is also the title of my final collection.

One of Mihai's designs, taking influence from an image found in the Library's collections.

 

It’s okay to be gay and Romanian

I wanted to tell them that it's okay to be gay and Romanian, and that any family is a traditional family. I’ve been living in London for six years now, and it's very hard for me to go back home, and be myself, because of the situation. So this collection has a very special place in my heart. I was debating whether to make it, because of how people might react, but I don’t regret it: it really helped me find out who I am.

The British Library is absolutely incredible. It's so calming. I spent three, four hours at a time going through books, taking everything in. I think it's an amazing place, and I would recommend it to anyone who does design. I think it's very important that we have places like that in London. 

 

I cried when I got the prize

The fact that I won the competition gave me a lot of confidence in what I’m doing. In my opinion, telling a story with your designs is very important. It’s one of the reasons I decided to do fashion: it’s more than just clothes; it’s political. I cried when I got the prize. It was a very intense day: we had to go for interviews, and the judges were very nice, but they weren’t giving anything away, so I didn’t know how it had gone. When I heard my name, it was probably one of the best things that has ever happened to me. 

The competition had a prize of three thousand pounds. I invested the money in my final collection. I think it gave me the freedom to experiment. The financial aspect of this course can be challenging, so winning the competition gave me a head start. 

The final result is inspired by my time partying in London. When I did the styling for the show, I went for a cyberpunk, club kids feeling. I wasn’t one hundred percent sure I was happy until I saw everything on the runway. We had so many people coming to see the show, and when the models came out, everyone just started to scream! Now, I’ve started to apply for jobs, and I hope to have time to work on my own label as well. I’d like to develop my ideas further. I’m really inspired by the British conceptual designer Craig Green. His collections are like pieces of art. 

 

As told to Lucy Peters

When Amarachi Clarke started her chocolate-making business, Lucocoa, she found information and support at the British Library.

I used to be a keen runner, but when I got injured doing the San Francisco Women's Marathon, I went from being able to run 26 miles to not being able to run at all. I wanted to incorporate really good chocolate into my healing process. I started exploring, but the more I read, the more it didn't quite align with what I was seeing on the shelf. The books were saying that chocolate's like wine and coffee, where different regions create different flavours. I thought, why does all this dark chocolate taste so bitter? 

 

I taught myself how to make chocolate

I’ve got an international development background. I started looking at the chocolate supply chain; it's very murky. No one in the UK really makes chocolate, and the big companies are still using child and slave labour. In 2001, they all signed up to something called the Harkin Engel Protocol, which was supposed to eradicate it. I used to be the Vice President (Welfare) of the National Union of Students, so I know campaigning can do incredible things, but sometimes it can take so long. Those big companies have got enough marketing budget to fob you off.

I thought, let's go down a business route. That's when I taught myself how to make chocolate. In 2015, I converted the second bedroom in our two-bedroom flat into a chocolate factory. We launched at a chocolate show and sold out. Then I took a market stall in Brick Lane for two years, trying to refine our recipes. In February 2020, we moved to our own factory in Bermondsey. It probably wasn't the best time to move, but we're still there three years later. We are London's first bean-to-bar chocolate maker. When we started, there weren’t many in the country, and then we became the first in London, which is wild. 

 

The BIPC is almost too good to be true

The British Library’s Business & IP Centre is pretty special. They have all this research that we wouldn’t be able to buy by ourselves. Every time industry reports come out, I go down to the Library to go through what they’re saying the trends are, and see how that compares to what we’re doing. In the early days of Lucocoa, the Library was advertising their Innovating for Growth programme (which has now been succeeded by Get Ready for Business Growth) but you had to have a revenue of over £100,000 to take part. We qualified the year after we moved factories. I had one-to-one meetings with experts and it made me really think deeply about our purpose and strategy. 

If you’ve got a small business, or are thinking of starting one, the Library’s BIPC will help you understand what you’re trying to do. You can research your market at the click of a button. We never used it for intellectual property, but I know that if I was starting again, I would. I made mistakes on one or two of the trade marks I was filing, and I'm pretty sure that if I’d gone in and asked a couple of questions, somebody would have told me. The BIPC is one of those things that's almost too good to be true – but honestly, just believe it. 

 

People mistake us for Willy Wonka

It takes three days to make a bar of chocolate. We receive tasting notes for each sack of beans, like citrus or roasted nuts, and then I try to find those notes as we roast and grind. We say, okay, for me personally, what do I like tasting? You can't do what all the big companies do, which is shove them in the oven and just burn them – that’s how you get bitter chocolate. It's like eating burnt toast. It's not supposed to taste like that. 

We roast our beans at a lower temperature to extract the flavor. We crush them and remove the shells, then put the nibs – the insides of the cocoa beans – into big stone grinders. We add coconut sugar, lucuma and cocoa butter, if it's dark chocolate, and milk, if it's milk chocolate. On the third day, we cool some of the chocolate down and temper some to make it into bars. People mistake us for Willy Wonka's chocolate factory, when really it's a lot of heavy lifting and measuring things quite precisely. You need to concentrate. 

 

I even made brownies on This Morning

Our name is Lucocoa: 'lu' for lucuma, 'co' for coconut sugar and 'coa' for the cocoa beans and butter. I wanted to hold us to account, and make sure we would continue to work with these core ingredients. We’re passionate about three things: cleaning up the supply chain and paying people what they’re worth, making chocolate taste how it's supposed to taste, and not using white refined sugar. We use coconut sugar instead, and a fruit from Peru called lucuma, which is a superfood. Our customers love the taste of our chocolate and the fact that we're doing something good.

A lot has happened since we've grown – I even made brownies on This Morning. We do school visits now. In February, we hosted 80 Year Two students over three days, which was absolute carnage, but their little faces were so excited. We do quite a lot of bespoke work – a client recently asked us to make a bust of Sir Christopher Wren out of chocolate for the 300th anniversary of his death. We’ve worked with Google, and Puma, and Spotify. We’ve been asked to do quite a lot of stuff.   

 

As told to Lucy Peters

 

Alex Johnson has had six books published by British Library Publishing, the Library’s dedicated in-house publishing team. Trained as a journalist, he spent 15 years at The Independent, and is the online editor of Fine Books and Collections magazine. 

I grew up in quite a bookish family. My father was an English teacher and an archivist. My mum was a librarian, and ran a mobile bookshop. I've always liked reading and writing. Because of that, I went into journalism, initially – not a great reason to go into journalism. But it was always in the back of my mind that I wanted to write books. 

I think I’ve now written six books for the British Library. I'm interested in books as objects, the world of books, and the whole idea of reading, and that's in line with what they do. As a library, I think they're seen as a force for good. People are very respectful of an institution that's been going for so long. My mother is delighted that I've done so many things with the British Library, although I suspect she's still hoping that I'm going to become a lawyer.

 

Tintin’s stayed with me throughout my life

My first book for the Library was A Book of Book Lists: A Bibliophile’s Compendium. My own three favourite books are A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell (that's 12 books, but I'm counting it as one), Lake Wobegon Days by Garrison Keillor and The Adventures of Tintin. When I was younger, I was a big fan of Tintin; then when I did A Level French, I started reading it in French. My wife was born and brought up in Spain, so eventually I started reading it in Spanish, too. It’s stayed with me throughout my life.

The next two books of mine that the Library published were Shelf Life, Writers on Books and Reading, and Edward Lear and the Pussycat: Famous Writers and their Pets. I was surprised by how many writers wrote with their pets sitting on their laps. Edith Wharton used to write in bed, surrounded by her dogs. John Steinbeck's dog Toby ate the first manuscript of Of Mice and Men, which, it seems, Steinbeck took in his stride. 

 

Charles Dickens had a pet raven

Charles Dickens had a pet raven whom he wrote into Barnaby Rudge, and which arguably inspired Edgar Allen Poe's poem ‘The Raven’. He had two or three with the same name – various incarnations of this raven, Grip, who were either lovely or appalling. After he died, they had one of them stuffed, and now it's in the Free Library of Philadelphia. 

When writing about Elizabeth Barrett Browning and her dog Flush, I was intrigued to find out how widespread dognapping was in Victorian England, a subject I'd previously known nothing about at all.

In 2020, the Library published my book How to Give Your Child a Lifelong Love of Reading. I think the important thing is to be guided by the child, and not be prescriptive about what's good. Children are more likely to read and finish books that they've chosen themselves than those which their parents have forced on them. Whatever they're enthusiastic about, whether it's Charlotte Brontë, or football, or spiders, books can be useful paths to getting more out of an interest.

 

How many Dylan Thomases does it take to change a lightbulb?

When I was a child, we regularly went to the library. I'd go with my parents: we'd take out whatever the maximum allowance was, whizz through them and go back the week after. I think that was an early introduction to how marvellous libraries are. My wife and I have done the same with our children: they've done summer reading projects at the library. I grew up in Shropshire, and the local library was the one where the poet Philip Larkin got his first job as a librarian. He had very mixed feelings about the residents, and the ambivalence was mutual. 

The next book I wrote for the Library was The Book Lover’s Joke Book. How many Dylan Thomases does it take to change a lightbulb? None, they just rage, rage against the dying of the light. I'm here all week. Don't forget to tip your waitresses.

This autumn, I have another book coming out with the Library: The Book Lover's Almanac: A Year of Literary Events, Letters, Scandals and Plot Twists. It’s a day-by-day look at the world of books and literature. We're starting off each chapter with births and deaths, and when books were first published or plays first performed. Every day there’s a little story about things that happened on that date, and each month finishes with writers’ famous last words. 

As told to Lucy Peters.