IN fashion terms Alex Morris has made her mark in the last decade; she’s raised the local game; introduced us to unique, often quirky European designers and brought her highly individual sense of taste and style to many town and country wardrobes throughout the region.
 She used to be Alex from Eden in Clayton Road, except that she’s now Alex from Selah in Brentwood Avenue. Selah is her new “invention”, just a hop skip and a jump away, “I’m still local,” she says, “It’s a downsize, a smaller cosier environment, more personal and a return to what I love the most, the shop floor.” Alex (Alessandra), 31, arrived in Manchester in 1994 from Livorno, nr Pisa in Italy, taking a year out after A-levels to study theology at the city’s University. She met husband Mark and simply stayed; but being a Saturday girl at upmarket boutique, Ebony and Ivory in Nantwich, was to be a bigger influence on her future when her natural fashion skills came to the fore. “I understood the product,” she comments, “Being Italian counts for a lot in fashion. “As a nation we live and breathe it and appreciate good quality fabric and the construction. My mother always bought very good quality tailored clothing for me, there were less clothes but I learned to play with them.” On arriving in the North-East due to Mark’s employment in 1997 Alex saw the same small market town fashion potential she’d experienced in Nantwich, here in Hexham, and opened her first Eden. “Successful yes, but limiting to what I could do,” she says so a move into Jesmond followed and the Clayton Road store began to boom with regular fashion shows and special events. “We grew by word of mouth,” adds Alex, “so much that when the offer of extending to next door became available, instead of taking part of it we saw the potential in the whole of it.” So the innovative Eden Concept store with home and lifestyle departments around a core offering of fashion, came into being. “Overnight, we doubled our turnover,” she explains, but management, overheads and staffing issues took her further away from her beloved shop floor. “It’s impossible to be in control in that kind of situation.” The decision to cease trading, handed on the proverbial plate by very good offer for the leasehold meant a shedding off of an old life for a very new one. “I still believe in the concept of the Concept store”, she ponders, “but now I imagine different scenarios for perhaps three or four little shops.” Now, newly single with two children under six, a new home and a new business means a whole new set of priorities and a fresh look at all that has gone before. “I am a walking stockbook; I never want to be pushy. I know everything in the shop so I know what it is going to look like. “My customers have learned to trust me, the likelihood of what I pick being the right thing for them is very high!” For the new A/W season Alex brings us Spanish designer Isabel de Pedro, Italian labels Patrizia Pepe and Ernestina Cerini and Amsterdam-based Tony Cohen to mix with Californian Joes Jeans and accessorise with LA jeweller Yvone Christa and Italian Tataborello, and already we can see her choice of the new influences which really work together. Ultimately Alex knows her ‘ladies’. A name change for the new store was essential. “There are so many Edens around now,” she says, laughing off the copyists. “I tried changing the letters of Eden around, played with some letters of my name, but then going back to my theology days I came across ‘Selah’. “It’s a Hebrew word, and is used in the psalms to denote when something deeply important has just been said; a sales agent found out for me the translation is ‘for ever’ its a very good omen.” | 
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