Christie Leigh is not your conventional florist. For one, she “can’t even look at” oasis flower arrangements — the kind that stick out of those styrofoam green blocks and are employed frequently by florists across the UK. “It’s just gross. You know that thing people have where they can’t stand the sound of nails on a chalkboard? I think I’ve got that specifically for oasis arrangements.”
Instead, she employs a kind of flower arranging technique called ikebana, a centuries-old Japanese method of positioning flowers in a style that more closely resembles a sculpture than a bouquet. “It’s much more naturalistic and allows each flower be elegant in its own space,” she says.
Leigh also had an unconventional career path: the 35-year-old Devon-born, east London local is not professionally trained in her craft, and prior to floristry she worked as a model — until one day she realised how much better her shoots would look with some fresh flowers on-set.
Drawing from her degree in illustration and her mother’s brief stint as a florist when she was young, Leigh started crafting floral arrangements for small fashion brands thanks to friends she met via the modelling world, but also reaching out to people on a whim who ran the brands she was a fan of. “I did a job for Joan The Store — which is an online shop that sells these small, gorgeous designers that I really like — and I reached out the to the owner who I’d never met and she was like ‘Sure’. I’m still really proud of what I made for them, that early on.”
Then came Burberry in 2018, the first big fashion house Leigh created arrangements for. She was tasked with creating 40 bespoke bouquets for gifting to high profile guests of the Burberry show, and she wasn’t quite ready for the gear change. “At the time my naivety meant I didn’t realise what I’d taken on, then I was there at four in the morning still making arrangements and taking them to this fancy Soho hotel to be placed in these [guests’] hotel rooms, and I still had more to do! But I loved every second, and that’s how I knew this is exactly what I need to be doing.”
The Burberry bouquets were slightly more traditional, positioned in a silver, polished, urn-like vase. But most of Leigh’s work for fashion brands since has been in the ikebana style, which employs a spiky palm-sized device, inexplicably called a frog, to hold the flowers in a specific shape. “It’s quite a weird thing to look at,” she laughs, “it looks like a weapon. But it really opens up the world of arranging. It can be placed in a glass, a bowl, a shoe, anything you want. As long as the water can cover it, the flowers respond really well because they just drink up that water. And it’s sustainable, so you can just wash [the frogs] and reuse them.”
Since then, Leigh has worked for the likes of Loewe, Louis Vuitton and Missoma. Most recently for Dior Homme’s Denim Tears campaign, Leigh drew from the colours of the campaign to craft asymmetrical, cloud-like bouquets in concrete grey vases. “They were just these really gorgeous peony arrangements in this fluffy environment and I put them with orange calla lilies, which is a flower I would never go to, but that colour tone was just calling. It looked really special.”
I felt so much like Rowan Atkinson [in Love Actually]. All of my friends were sending me memes of him...
Sometimes her work is more interactive, too, like when she was called upon by Prada to provide custom wrapping for gifts at their Harrods location last Christmas, adorning their trademark white packaging with sprigs of holly and pine brushes. “I felt so much like Rowan Atkinson [in Love Actually],” she laughs, “All of my friends were sending me memes of him. I channelled him fully.” She loved taking up this more one-to-one role, though: “It was such a nice thing to do because it was so festive and everyone was so happy to be buying gifts at Christmas time, so you chat about who the gift is for while you’re there embellishing it. It was lovely.”
And somehow Leigh still had the energy to put this level of effort into wrapping her own presents for her friends and family, which she says she goes “full out” for. “It doesn’t matter what’s inside,” she teases, “Like ‘I’m sorry it’s just a lump of coal but it’s beautifully decorated.’”
Leigh has certainly found her calling, and the fashion set have sat up and taken note. More than her success, though, she’s just happy that people are giving ikebana techniques a go, and that more shops are stocking the frogs and kenzan sets required to do so. For a touch of Burberry in your bedroom, then, hop down to Straw in Columbia Road (a Christie Leigh recommendation) and get yourself a frog along with some stems to go with it. You’ll be serving high fashion florals in no time.
