For nearly two decades, from 1966, Thea Porter created clothes made from sumptuous fabrics that drew inspiration from a view of the exotic Middle East. Combining richly-patterned silks with antique fabrics, her clothes were a must for music and film stars such as Pink Floyd, Crystal Gayle, Elizabeth Taylor and Barbra Streisand. Fashion magazines all over the world featured her latest styles and Thea became a key member of the innovative group of British designers which included Ossie Clark, Zandra Rhodes and Jean Muir. During her lifetime she won huge acclaim, and her place in the history of British fashion was ensured when she won Designer of the Year in 1972. Thea Porter was included in several landmark exhibitions on twentieth-century fashion such as the V .A Museum's Cutting Edge: Fifty Years of Fashion (1997), Orientalism: Visions of the East in Western Dress at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1994) and Hippie Chic at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (2013). Most recently, an exhibition at the Fashion and Textile Museum in London (2015), described Thea's family history and upbringing in Syria, her years as a student in London after the Second World War, and her life in cosmopolitan city of Beirut during the 1950s and 60s. Thea Porter's Scrapbook reveals Thea Porter's talent as a keenly observant and descriptive writer as she records in her memoir, her early life and the business she set up, starting with the much-visited Greek Street shop in Soho and charting the dramatic surge of American interest in her clothes, and the opening of her shop in Paris as she pursued her ambition to create dresses `beyond trend and tat, that thirty years from today will still be beautiful'.
