Lily Allen to quit music for a fashion break

Singer Lily Allen has confirmed she plans to take a break from music next year. During her sabbatical, she intends to try her hand at another popular option in the celebrity career portfolio: fashion design.

Allen told BBC Radio 1 today that she plans to take "one or two years off from recording and performing music". Her final gig will be with Dizzee Rascal in March at the O2 centre in London.

In September Allen, whose second album It's Not Me, It's You sold two million copies internationally, wrote on her blog that she would not be renewing her record contract, although at the time her spokesperson denied that she would be quitting music.

Allen, who designed a range 'Lily Loves' for the high-street chain New Look in 2007, plans to launch a fashion rental store in London with her sister, Sarah.

Called Lucy In Disguise, the shop will be about "making fashion democratic," Allen told Radio 1 DJ Sara Cox. "It's about getting really nice clothes, but letting people rent them for affordable prices so they can go out and feel like a million dollars and it won't cost them a million dollars."

Allen will have to juggle the fashion with her other new interest - acting. Last month it was announced that Allen is to make her West End debut in 2010 in the lead role of Neil LaBute's play Reasons To Be Pretty. Allen has dabbled in acting before, including cameos in The Comic Strip Presents... as a three-year-old in 1988 and as a lady-in-waiting in the 1998 film Elizabeth, co-produced by her mother Alison Owen.

Allen also confirmed that she has "given up" computers entirely after she became embroiled in a row over illegal downloading with her anti-piracy blog. Allen, who was once a prolific Tweeter, said she had "stopped everything, I haven't got a computer and I haven't got a Blackberry. I'm a neo-Luddite, that's how I describe myself." ·