Debbie Moore founded Pineapple Dance Studios in 1979 in Covent Garden. Today Pineapple is a leading global global lifestyle brand and Pineapple leisure wear for adults and kids is available to buy direct online from Pineapple, Covent Garden and major online retailers and catalogues. Official Pineapple merchandise includes apparel, dance bags and fitness accessories.
Debbie Moore OBE, founder of Pineapple Dance Studios, began her journey by winning the Honey Magazine modelling competition at the age of 15, becoming an international model and being the first woman to list her company on the London Stock Exchange.
Debbie founded the Dance Studios in 1979 in a disused Pineapple warehouse in Covent Garden. Her aim was to make dance accessible to everyone, where absolute beginners could mix with professional dancers and celebrities.
Inspired by the dancers’ style Debbie developed Cotton/Lycra with DuPont and was the first fashion designer to use the versatile fabric for dance wear, followed by bodies, leggings, dresses and skirts. These items revolutionised fashion and helped to create the global Pineapple brand that continues to be a staple of every woman’s wardrobe today. With her Hepburn range she became the first to produce outerwear using Cotton/Lycra.
Originally as a fit model herself, Debbie’s first hand experience meant she was able to structure each piece she designed to be functional and flattering, whilst emphasising the female form.
Pineapple dance wear was the first fashion and lifestyle dance brand to cut leotards in a way which emphasised waists and necklines and designing tracksuit bottoms to flatter hips and legs.
The Southbank Centre is the UK’s largest arts centre and the heart of London’s cultural life.
We exist to present great cultural experiences that bring people together and we achieve this by providing the space for artists to create and present their best work and by creating a place where as many people as possible can come together to experience bold, unusual and eye-opening work. We want to take people out of the everyday, every day.
Occupying a prominent riverside location that sits in the midst of London’s most vibrant cultural quarter on the South Bank of the Thames, our site has an extraordinary creative and architectural history stretching back to the 1951 Festival of Britain.
The Southbank Centre is made up of the Royal Festival Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Purcell Room and Hayward Gallery as well as being home to the National Poetry Library and the Arts Council Collection. It is also home to six Resident Orchestras (Aurora Orchestra, Chineke! Orchestra, London Philharmonic Orchestra, London Sinfonietta, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and Philharmonia Orchestra).
We have three theatres in London – Sadler’s Wells Theatre, Lilian Baylis Studio and Peacock Theatre – and present dance online on Sadler’s Wells Digital Stage. We also tour productions nationally and internationally. In 2023 we’re opening a fourth venue in London’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. This new space will house a 550-seat mid-scale theatre, as well as facilities for a choreographic centre and a hip hop theatre academy.