Episode 74: Louisa Maycock, Founder & CEO of Girls on Tops

My guest this week is Louisa Maycock - the creator, owner and mastermind of the hugely brilliant brand Girls on Tops.

If you don’t know them, I’m sure you’ll have seen one of their t-shirts out and about, particularly if you used to frequent film festivals. Louisa prints and sells white t-shirts that feature the names of celebrated and trailblazing women in the film industry including Tilda Swinton, Claire Denis, Lulu Wang, Greta Gerwig and Ava DuVernay. This year they released editions with Miranda July and Sofia Coppola and I myself own t-shirts emblazoned with Agnes Varda and Celine Sciamma. And I feel très chic when I wear them.

And not content to make us all just look very cool, Louisa has also set up an editorial platform called READ ME, which commissions female-led writing and along with Ella Kemp she edits and features really thoughtful and interrogative pieces on both contemporary and historical cinematic culture through an intersectionally feminist lens, and I think it’s very much unlike the kinds of the things you’ll read elsewhere. And I consider myself very lucky to have been published by them a few times. 

Louisa and I talk about the origin story for Girls on Tops, how the brand has grown over the past couple of years and how Louisa stays on top of it all - as a one-woman CEO and t-shirt folding machine. I’m so thrilled that we got this time to chat and I really was coming at it from the perspective of a fan, because I think it’s just immensely impressive that in the space of a few years Louisa has created something that - certainly in film-going circles - feels incredibly pervasive. I can’t imagine a time when they didn’t exist.