Vanity Project: A Tale of Fashion and Celebrity Styled by Dave Thomas

In 1988 David Thomas was an unemployed plumber with a seemingly impossible dream: to enter the world of fashion. Dave worked weekends washing dishes in a cafe and evenings as a lavatory attendant in a West End nightclub, and in every spare moment he hammered on the doors of fashion editors, until one of them opened a tiny crack. Having seized the chance to be an unpaid dogsbody at Riva magazine, he found his niche in the contemporary music scene, working with legends of style Judy Blame and Isabella Blow, dressing artists like Lisa Stansfield, Boy George and Kylie Minogue. In the intervening decades the business of styling has ascended from the pavement to the penthouse. What began as kids playing dress-up with ribbons and safety-pins has evolved to become the backbone of a multi-billion-dollar style and clothing industry. And David Thomas is now one of Hollywood’s most successful stylists. Vanity Project takes a behind-the-curtain look at the glamour, the tantrums, the comradeship, the rivalries, and the surprisingly hard graft of celebrity styling.