A British fashion designer has been reunited with a piece that went missing almost 40 years ago after the garment was found in a charity shop.
Jean Pallant said she was “over the moon” when she was told the one-of-a-kind orange coat had turned up in a donation bag at the Oxfam store in Mill Hill, northwest London.
Shop manager Marina Ikey-Botchway made the discovery among high street fashion clothes and said she could immediately tell the garment was a priceless item.
Ms Pallant, who was part of the 1960s cultural revolution and designed clothes with her husband Martin, who died recently, said she was “very excited” by the find.
The garment was missing for almost 40 years. Pic: Gabi Torres/Oxfam/PA
“I was absolutely over the moon, really. It was very sweet of the person who discovered it to believe that it was something important,” she said.
“It’s like seeing a child. It’s lovely. I know every single square inch of it, and I’m absolutely amazed that it looks so new, and it feels new. Everything about it looks exactly as it did when it went missing.”
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She made the coat, which has large, round dark buttons, on her kitchen table in 1988 and it featured in a Sunday Telegraph article that year.
But she felt “sick” to discover the garment had gone missing, along with five other pieces which have still not been found, when she went to retrieve some clothes from her warehouse nearly four decades ago.
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“When we retrieved them all, there were these pieces which I remember, of course, because they’re all my babies. These pieces were missing, and there’s nothing I can do about it,” she said.
“I’d love those to turn up. There are some really special pieces that I’d like back in our collection for our archive. Maybe they’ll turn up, who knows?
“One of them was a piece which is so important to us, which was made in 1972 I think. It was worn by me in a TV fashion show to celebrate Britain joining the common market and it was a beautiful white jumpsuit and jacket with little mink spots on it.
“I’d pay anything to get it back.”
The coat was chosen by sixties fashion model Penelope Tree to walk in Oxfam’s Style for Change fashion show, in partnership with Vinted, as part of its Second Hand September campaign.
Ms Pallant is restoring and curating a Pallant collection to give to the V&A Museum in London.