Moya Bowler
| Moya Bowler | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1940 Reading, Berkshire, England |
| Occupation | Shoe designer |
Moya Bowler (born 1940) is an English shoe designer who rose to prominence in the 1960s. She had considerable success in both the UK and US fashion markets, designing both high-end and high-street shoes.
A graduate of the Royal College of Art, she was among a crop of designers subsequently described by fashion writer and editor Brenda Polan as the "annus mirabilis", since so many of them went on to carve highly successful careers in fashion. Although she was among the stars of the 1960s avant-garde boutique scene, Bowler was also highly commercial – producing designs for high-street chains such as Lilley & Skinner while she was still a student. But the lion's share of her commercial success came from her work in the United States, where she designed shoes for brands such as Moderne and Shoe Biz.
Moya Bowler was born in Reading, Berkshire. She studied fashion at the Royal College of Art (RCA) under Janey Ironside and was part of a wave of new design talent that transformed British fashion in the 1960s, with a peer group that included Bill Gibb, Janice Wainwright, Marion Foale and Sally Tuffin.
She began freelance design for high street shoe companies while still a student at the RCA, after which she gained further experience by studying pattern cutting at the shoe manufacturing school Ars Sutoria in Milan and by working in a shoe factory. She attended a trade school in order to understand the mechanics of shoemaking.
Bowler's rise to prominence on the British fashion scene was swift. A 1966 article in The Times about the progress of RCA graduates mentioned her – alongside Foale and Tuffin – as an "overnight success". In the same year, The Guardian noted: "Miss Bowler is a shoe doyenne at just past 20, a full-time designer with a teenage-boutique stranglehold, a very famous person in the pop-footwear world".
That year Bowler, then aged 25, travelled to the United States, first visiting the Lowell, Boston factory that would be making her first line of shoes for US retailer Moderne and then visiting New York, where she was interviewed for the New York Observer.
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