Fashion designer Richard Nicoll has died aged 39

London Fashion Week designer, Richard Nicoll, died in Sydney Australia on themorning of Friday October 21.According to reports, the 39-year-olddesigner was taken by ambulance to St Vincents Hospital in the early hours and is reported tohave died of a suspected heart attack.Police are not treating the death as suspicious.

The London-born designer graduated from Central Saint Martins in 2002, where he caught the eye of industry leaders -Dolce & Gabbana bought his entire MA graduate collection.After an apprenticeship at Louis Vuitton, he launched his own label in 2005, which became a favourite on the London Fashion Week schedule for a decade.

He was awarded the British Fashion Council"s Fashion Forward Award in 2006, was theBest Young Designer at the Elle Style Awards in 2009 andhis designs were worn by the likes of Anne Hathaway, Julianne Moore, Sienna Miller and Kylie Minogue.

In 2015 Nicoll closed his label, citing the increasedpressure to produce six collections a year with a small team and limited budget."I needed a break," the designer said to The Telegraph at the time."My sales weren"t going very well and the last couple of years have been super-stressful.It"s so different from how it was when I started and I"m just not sure if I"m signed up to what it has become."

From 2014 to 2015 Nicoll was the creative director of university clothing brand Jack Wills.Hewas the creative director of French fashion house Cerrutis womenswear line from 2009 to 2011 and designed a bridal collection for Topshop in 2012.He was preparing to start as a creative director at adidas in Germany in January 2017.

Nicoll said to WWD earlier this year about how the industry has changed since launching his label:“I was able to ride this wave of Central Saint Martins graduates and there was a sort of celebration of pure creativity at the time.And I think whats different now is that the designers need to be very, very mindful of price point and margin, and theres not really the room to be sort of particularly free with creativity, if its not sort of backed with commercialism.To start now you have to have a pretty solid commercial foundation and thick skin, I guess.”