Cotswolds based fashion designer given OBE in honours list

Clare Hornby, the founder of ME+EM, a luxury fashion brand, has been awarded an Officer of the Order of the British Empire.

Of the award, she said: ““I am incredibly humbled, and grateful to be honoured. I feel very fortunate to be able to represent British fashion to a global audience.”

After studying at the old Manchester Polytechnic (now MMU), she moved to London having secured a place on the Harrods Graduate Training Scheme.

In 2007 she co-founded Pyjama Room, a womenswear brand offering luxury loungewear essentials.

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Clare Hornby (Image: ME+EM)

In 2009 she and her co-found got the idea to evolve the product into a ready-to-wear collection, and has now gone on to build an incredible fashion empire which is known and loved by women across the world for its “affordable luxury” designerwear and praised for its “innate sense of what busy women want to wear”.

The brand has been worn by a host of A-list stars including Leighton Meester, Bella Hadid, Olivia Coleman, Princess Catherine and Daisy Edgar-Jones

ME+EM now has nine stores in London, four in America, one in Edinburgh, one in Manchester as well as stores within stores including at Selfridges and back at Harrods where she first started out.

In 2020, Hornby was made an ambassador for the King’s Trust Women Supporting Women initiative, a campaign to help young women who face disadvantage and adversity to transform their lives.

In the past financial year, ME+EM has registered a turnover of £120million, with sales across the world online, and with standalone stores in the US and the UK.