Hayley Neil - Dress Designer & Maker

Hayley Neil is the founder and designer behind Rolling In Roses. Following an epiphany which struck whilst on a depressingly uninspiring shopping trip to help find wedding dresses for her sister, Hayley opened her first boutique in York in March 2012. Taking the name 'Glory Days' from the Pulp song she herself walked down the aisle to on her wedding day, the boutique offered vintage and antique bridal gowns alongside the bespoke service through which Hayley created one-off wedding dresses tailored for individual clients. Seeing the appetite of brides for contemporary, cooler, and more comfortable wedding gowns than those offered on the high street, Hayley founded the Rolling In Roses label in 2016 as a platform for her personal design vision and has never looked back. Rolling In Roses flourished and outgrew the confines of Glory Days so the two companies were recently merged and rebranded under the Rolling In Roses name, and the York boutique is now the RIR flagship store. Never happier than when designing or making, Hayley sources the fabrics, sketches the designs, drafts all the patterns, and makes the sample gowns herself in the Rolling in Roses atelier. Lying awake at night deciding how to finish the perfect cuff or solving a tricky pattern drafting problem is par for the course, but she wouldn’t have it any other way. Hayley can usually be found walking in the countryside with her husband and their little boys Luca Thor and Oren Jack, enjoying good food or having a pint in the pub with friends. Otherwise, you might come across her dancing in festival fields, strolling around art galleries or losing her mind watching bands at grimy little gig venues. A Yorkshire girl born and bred, Hayley is proud to base her design and construction right here in England, and always will do.“The name 'Rolling In Roses' is taken from an early Patti Smith poem. Known as 'the godmother of punk', she embodies our ethos of designing for the offbeat, sophisticated, fiercely independent bride. The dreamers, the poets, the music-makers, the lovers.” HAYLEY’S EPISODE “I’M A TOTAL GEEK REALLY” What a fascinating chat we had with Hayley, as well as discussing all things dressmaking we also somehow randomly discuss Bronze Age burial sites too (it’s all happening in Yorkshire apparently!) We hear about working as a freelance costume designer, maker, and assistant in the worlds of theatre and film, where she worked on an eclectic array of theatre productions and Bifa, Bafta, and Oscar winning films. Hayley tells us how she moved from this to opening a shop in York, Glory Days and her design label Rollin In Roses. We discuss chemical equations (something we never thought we’d say!), dresses made from recycled plastic bottles reclaimed from the sea, hand smocking and Radiohead, there’s also a fascinating story about an Indian silk farm. You will be enthralled! And finally, the ‘bump’ that appears in the video, is now a healthy, bouncing little boy Oren Jack - congratulations Hayley and welcome to the world Oren.