How it began
‘Once upon a time, there was a beautiful girl who loved football more than anything else in the world. Arsenal was her favourite team and of all the players, handsome Tony Adams was her absolute favourite. Every Saturday when her team was playing at home, she would go to Highbury to watch her heroes playing. She loved the atmosphere and the passion and the excitement.
One day, to prove her devotion, she got herself a football shirt that was a replica of the one Tony wore on the pitch. She loved it. It made her feel part of the team she loved. But when she got home that night, her boyfriend went a bit crackers. He hated the shirt with all his heart. It was the unsexiest thing in the world and made her look that way too.
They rowed for weeks. She thought that he didn’t like it because he supported another club called Leicester City. He shouted and shouted that this wasn’t true. He wanted her to look as lovely as she could and the shirt was the end. She wanted to show how much she loved her club and anyway everyone else wore shirts like it at the match so why shouldn’t she. She insisted on wearing it. How on earth could they sort this out?
After a month of frosty looks and miserable Saturday afternoons, the beautiful girl had a brainwave. She rang her sister who was a genius at running up frocks and told her about the problem. Couldn’t she make her something that would show how much she loved the Arsenal team and which made her look like the hottest thing on the terraces at the same time?
They marched to Liberty’s. With a couple of yards of beautiful white Irish linen and some wonderful red silk thread, the clever sister was able to make the perfect Arsenal skirt. The beautiful girl looked gorgeous in it and still felt she was giving it all for the Gunners. The boyfriend swooned, thought she looked amazing and a few months later asked her to marry him and now they’re living happily ever after.
As for the clever sister, she realised that there was an amazing opportunity to make lovely clothes for girls that love football, but disliked all the unsexy things they had to wear at the matches. So she decided to do it all the time and invented a fashion label called ‘Vedette’ and made beautiful things so that girls all over the country could support their favourite teams and look drop dead gorgeous at the same time.’
Katie Walker – The Clever Sister
Following an intellectual start with a degree in Classics from Cambridge University, and an MA in the History of Art and Archaeology at New York University, Katie’s first job was at the Vatican.
Still lured to her true love of fashion, however, Katie then pursued her dream with a further BA in Fashion Design at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts at Antwerp.
Throughout this time she also interned for Marc Jacobs in New York and worked as a researcher for Vogue Magazine, as well taking positions as a stylist for New York Magazine and reporting on London Fashion for New York Magazine.
She then developed (with the inspiration from her football mad sister) her own new concept, Vedette. Katie has achieved enormous success in securing licensing deals with major football clubs and producing several collections which have been sold successfully in some of the World’s most prestigious stores and shown at London Fashion Week.
In 2006 Katie decided she wanted to introduce the rest of the world to Vedette too and she was joined by Amanda Johnson who was used to getting involved with businesses when they are little and making them bigger. Amanda also loves fashion and sport and gets to look after the less exciting but 'very important' parts of Vedette, like paying for things, getting the clothes made, and making sure they all get delivered to our customers wherever they are, and generally organising Vedette. If she is very lucky then Katie sometimes lets her get involved with bits of ideas for new collections but that's just to provide amusement over lunch! But they do both love Vedette very much and hope you will too.