When you start something creative for the first time, you are completely free, no real influences other than your own vision.
Take a second look, you might have not seen it all.
I don't see myself as a pure fashion designer sending dress after dress down the runway but about wanting those watching my shows to aspire to a certain lifestyle.
Color is the thing I'm best known for. If people pigeonhole me, so what? Long live the pink dress!
For me style has something to do with your inner attitude towards clothes and the awareness what sits well on yourself.
Ultimately I think I learned a lot from my mother - the way she used fashion to make herself feel better; it was a tool she had and she used it very well. Fashion for her wasn't so far as an escape, but certainly a time where she would sit on her own and prepare what she wanted to wear the next day - it turned into bit of a ritual.
I remember sitting at the end of my mum's bed being fascinated by her ritual of getting dressed. It was a very methodical and considered process. I suppose you could say she was my first real muse.
I've dipped my toe into the beauty world and I'd like to keep it there!
I think the biggest shift is the way people look at and have access to fashion. It's already old the minute you've seen it, and we've already moved on. Fashion has become very in and out. Back in the days when I started, you would wait for Vogue to come out, and that is where you would see what people wore that month. Now we are looking at what someone is wearing this second.
I love what I do and feel really lucky to still love what I do - I want to get out of bed and go to work at least three out of five days a week! My fear is it ends up any less than three days. But design-wise, I've still got an appetite, a lot more I want to say with my work - the story is not nearly complete!
I wanted to start a menswear line of slim-fitting, luxury cashmere jumpers in a range of great colors. I know these jumpers will become season-less staples in my own wardrobe. Cashmere and silk printed scarves and hand-beaded T-shirts compliment the line and form a solid foundation for the collection to grow next season.
