The fashion designer earned more money as a judge on The Great British Sewing Bee than from any other job in her 50 year career

Esme Young, 73, has had a fashion career spanning 50 years but rose to national fame in 2016 when she took over as a judge alongside Patrick Grant on the BBC show The Great British Sewing Bee. She lives in London.

My father worked for the RAF and we had a comfortable middle-class upbringing. I’m the second of five children and nearly all of us were privately educated. We lived in nice houses and I never had the feeling we didn’t have enough.

My father encouraged me to follow my dreams rather than think about money. There was no pressure to aim for a respected profession. This was because he felt lucky to be alive, which affected his attitude to both money and work.

He was born in South Africa and had been expected to go into law. Instead he became an RAF pilot officer, joining 32 Squadron at Biggin Hill. He was on duty when a request came in asking his squadron to send a pilot to join 615 “Churchill’s Own” squadron, supporting the British Expeditionary Force in France. He put his own name forward and flew straight into the Battle of France in a Hurricane fighter plane.

He was shot down over Belgium in May 1940 in a hail of bullets from a Messerschmitt 109. His fuel tank caught fire and he was badly burned. He managed to parachute out and came down behind the British front lines, only to be shot in the arm and leg by his own side. When he landed, the British also threw a grenade at him, injuring his side. Miraculously, he survived.

Yes, when I co-founded the clothing brand Swanky Modes in Camden, north London, with three fellow fashion designers. None of us could find the sort of clothes we wanted to wear on the high street, so we decided to fill the gap.

We each put £50 into a pot (about £580 in today’s money) and to save pennies we picked up end-of-line fabric, remnant stock and vintage material. We even used car upholstery.

We never questioned what we were doing, even though we had little money or business experience. It was a struggle at the beginning, but we felt what we were doing was more important than making money.

I couldn’t afford to pay rent, so I lived in a squat in a beautiful old house in west London. We had to feed the gas meter, but otherwise we lived rent free.

Nova magazine ran a four-page spread about our transparent rainwear collection, which we’d made using vintage shower-curtains. It was photographed by Helmut Newton and modelled by naked women. The nudity caused a rumpus, but when the issue came out in spring 1973 people started queuing up outside our shop.

Soon we were not only fulfilling orders for Selfridges and Liberty but exporting to Europe, the US and Australia.

We built on our success by becoming one of the first labels to use Lycra outside swimwear. We designed a range of Lycra disco dresses for our spring/summer 1978 “graffiti” collection and they were a triumph, popular on dance floors globally. Grace Jones wore our “padlock” dress to promote her 1977 album Portfolio and it generated huge publicity. It’s now in the Museum of London.

No, we never made loads of money, even at the height of our success in the early 1980s when we were designing costumes for commercials and pop videos. A Greek businessman offered to invest in us, but he pushed for 51pc of our business. We were advised not to accept as he would probably have taken us over.

We decided to disband the company and I set up in business as a freelance costume designer. Initially work was thin on the ground and I ran into debt, but I knew I had to hold my nerve.

I made a cheesecloth shirt for Leonardo DiCaprio in the film The Beach, a “fur” coat for Scarlett Johansson in Under the Skin, and for Bridget Jones’s Diary I made the infamous bunny outfit Renée Zellweger wears in the party scene. Renée kept telling me to make it tighter – she wanted a cleavage because her character wasn’t skinny – and by the end she couldn’t sit down in it.

Even when you’re making clothes for Hollywood films, you don’t get paid silly money. It’s hard work and takes time.

I’ve earned more money as a judge on The Great British Sewing Bee than from any other job. It has also opened up ­avenues in TV and radio, and brought in invitations to do talks.

I’ve never been able to afford my own home. I’ve lived in social housing since 1983 – in a one-bedroom flat in Islington, north London, rented from the charitable housing trust Peabody. It is rent controlled and I have tenure for the rest of my life. I also own a beach hut on the north Kent coast which I bought for £500 many years ago.

In the late 1970s I had the opportunity to buy the three-storey building that housed my workshop in Camden. It went up for sale at auction at £20,000. It must be worth millions now.

I’ll have to keep working until I drop because I don’t have a private pension. I think my family would help out if I got into real financial difficulties.

‘Behind the Seams’ by Esme Young is out now (Blink Publishing, £18.99)

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