Cath Kidston: ‘I never expected to have a big business’

As she launches her new brand in Ireland, Cath Kidston, the empress of chintz, talks life and career with Mary Cate Smith

Cath Kidston is launching a new brand of natural body care products.

Cath Kidston’s childhood is straight out of the storybooks of my youth. 

While I lived vicariously through the capers of teenage detectives in knitted sweater vests, Kidston was doing lessons with a private governess in the bucolic surrounds of the New Hampshire countryside, sneaking off to her grandmother’s antique shop at every chance she could get.