Molly Goddard was born on 16 December 1988 and grew up in Ladbroke Grove, West London, in a creative household: her mother, Sarah Edwards, is a photographer and set designer, and her father, Mark Goddard, a graphic designer and sculptor. Her sister, Alice, is a stylist and has styled her shows.
She studied knitwear at Central Saint Martins, completing a BA and leaving the MA a year early. She expected to work for an established house; her label instead began, she has said, "accidentally". In September 2014 she and her partner, Tom Shickle, threw a party during London Fashion Week with friends wearing her clothes, and Dover Street Market and the Hong Kong retailer I.T placed orders.
That first presentation, she later recalled, was held in a church hall in Mayfair that cost her £300, with rum, bagels from Brick Lane and a wedding singer. "I did the party presentation because I thought I'd get a job," she said. "But then we got orders."
A decade on, she changed course. The collapse of MatchesFashion in 2024 exposed, she said, the fragility of a wholesale system in which designers make now and are paid later, if at all. "This structure and this system is mad. And it's so risky." She stepped off the London Fashion Week schedule that September, and in November 2024 presented a pared-back resort collection of ten tulle dresses in her Bethnal Green studio, picked up, like her debut, by Dover Street Market. The decision, she insisted, was creative rather than financial: she wanted to make pieces she was proud of, alongside made-to-order and bridal commissions and collaborations. "This is totally a choice I have made."
Goddard is best known for voluminous, hand-smocked tulle dresses. Her method is fabric manipulation: pleating, gathering and smocking applied to inexpensive cloths such as tulle and taffeta. Costly fabric "bores" her, she has said; she prefers "something that's £6 a metre so you can pleat it and gather it". Vogue has noted that while her clothes may look frou-frou at first glance, she likes them to have a subversive streak.
Recognition came quickly: the Emerging Talent award at the Fashion Awards in 2016, a place on the 2017 LVMH Prize shortlist, the BFC/Vogue Designer Fashion Fund in 2018 and the BFC Fashion Trust grant in 2019. In 2016 her installation What I Like at the NOW Gallery in Greenwich hung oversized tulle dresses from the ceiling for visitors to embroider, and in 2017 she staged a Fashion in Motion show at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Her American following grew after Rihanna began wearing her designs from 2016. Jodie Comer's Villanelle wore her pink tulle "Jack" dress in Killing Eve, and Harry Styles wore a Molly Goddard blouse on the cover of Harry's House (2022). She designed merchandise for the Met's Camp exhibition in 2019, released a footwear collaboration with Ugg in 2021 and launched bridal in 2022. Recent collections have been pared back, shown in her East London studio, or combined her taffeta dresses with Western-inspired pieces drawn from vintage childrenswear.