British designer ‘over the moon’ after long-lost coat found in charity shop

A British fashion designer has said she is over the moon that one of her long-lost designs has been found in an Oxfam charity shop, almost 40 years after it went missing from the designer’s warehouse.

When designer Jean Pallant found out her one-of-a-kind coat had ended up in a donation bag at the Oxfam store in Mill Hill, London, she was “very excited”, she told the PA news agency.

“I really was absolutely thrilled. It’s very nice that the person who discovered it believed it was something important,” she said.

“It’s like seeing a baby. It’s wonderful. I know every square inch of it and I’m absolutely amazed that it looks so fresh and feels so new. Everything about him looks exactly the same as when he went missing.

Oxfam store manager in Mill Hill, Marina Ikey-Botchway, said she knew the coat was a priceless item after receiving the donation.

She made the discovery among donations of fast fashion items from the high street.

“The first second I saw this coat I knew it was something special, so I checked the tag and after a quick Google search I found Jean’s email,” she said.

Mrs Pallant, who took part in the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and was one half of a married couple, sewed an orange coat with large buttons on her kitchen table in 1988, which appeared in an article in the Sunday Telegraph the same year.

When she went to pick up some items from her warehouse almost four decades ago, she felt “sick” to discover that the coat was missing along with five other items she designed with her husband, Martin, that have still not been found.

“When we got them all back, of course I remember those pieces because they are all my babies. These elements were missing and there is nothing I can do about it,” she said.

Now that the coat has been found, Ms Pallant said it was “remarkable” that the item looked “completely new”.

“It doesn’t look like it’s ever been worn, so I’m delighted too. This doesn’t look like a rag. It doesn’t even smell like must, which is strange. I don’t know where he was all these years, but he was obviously well cared for,” she said.

The coat was chosen by 1960s fashion model Penelope Tree to walk in the Oxfam Style for Change fashion show in partnership with Vinted as part of the September Second Hand campaign.

Reuniting with the long-lost coat has renewed hope for Mrs. Pallant that she will still be able to find other missing items.

She said: “I would love for them to appear. There are some really special pieces that I would like to return to our collection and place in our archive. Maybe they will appear, who knows?

“One of them was a very important song for us, which I think was written in 1972. I wore it to the televised fashion show celebrating Britain joining the single market and it was a beautiful white jumpsuit and a jacket with little mink spots.

“I would pay anything to get it back.”

Mrs Pallant, whose husband recently died, is restoring and curating the Pallant collection, which is to be donated to the V&A Museum in London.

Ms Pallant said: “I think it’s very important that this collection is at the V&A because we were part of a group of designers who were part of the cultural revolution in Britain, a generation that made a difference in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s .

“I want our collection to include other names that you will know from that era, names like Jean Muir, Ossie Clark, Bill Gibb and Zandra Rhodes, all these British designers who started in the same era as what we did. “