I didn’t really believe we were going until the visas and plane tickets arrived two days before we were due to leave. Although China appeared to be opening its borders, the projects that the Institute of Contemporary Art were taking to a shopping centre in Shanghai were full of issues on which the Chinese traditionally hold very strong and particular views. There was a real risk that the authorities would put a stop to it, even though the exhibition was timed to coincide with Tony Blair’s first ever visit to the country.

Our project, Primitive Streak, which chronicles the first 1,000 hours of human life, took fertility and artistic self-expression as its themes. The bookshop, stocked with copies of The Face, i-D and alternative art books, would expose the Chinese to imagery unimaginable until now. Sera Furneaux’s Kissing Booth would encourage open and public intimacy to be replayed on large screens, while US computer company Sun MicroSystems allowed unedited access to the internet.

My business partner Caroline Coates, my embryologist sister Kate and I were met at Shanghai airport by two well-mannered hotel bellboys in ill-fitting dark blue uniforms. Blinking in the morning sunshine that cut through the smog, we were bundled into a hotel bus for the half-hour drive to the hotel.

Shanghai creeps up on you slowly. None of the 12 million or so inhabitants was visible from its network of flyovers. To the accompaniment of The Nutcracker Suite on the bus radio, we watched as ranks of steel and glass towers rose on the skyline, looking like garish and over-designed scent bottles.

The scale and extent of new buildings, many part-finished or unoccupied, suggested Shanghai was on the move, levelling its past, keenly intent on the future., But then the road dipped into a sea of bikes and wooden shanties where wedding dresses were displayed for sale hanging from powerlines in the street and barbers sat cutting men’s hair with their stools placed precariously close to the traffic.

The Westgate Shopping Mall, where the show was to be held, was not unlike others I have visited in the Far East – filled with designer brands, real and ripped off, alongside home-produced items. It was the last place you might choose to display something that should not be touched, yet it was perfect for parachuting into everyday Chinese life.

That night we walked the Bund waterfront, an exotic version of the Brighton promenade, the financial heart of the city. Most of the inhabitants, it seemed, were out of doors, strolling the illuminated, fluorescent riverbank, photographing each other, eating noodles out of cartons. Uniformed sailors brushed against us in an effort to have a picture taken with a Western woman. For the first time, I began to wonder what they were going to make of it all. My biggest fear was that it would be seen merely as foreign art, whereas I wanted them to see it as science as much as art. Of course, with China’s one-child policy still in place in many parts of the country, this is contentious stuff.

The following morning we discovered that part of the collection was stuck in Zurich. Muddled explanations made it hard for us to figure out what had happened but finally it arrived. Now we had the task of getting it through customs, delivered, unpacked, ironed and mounted before the Prime Minister came to open the exhibition at 6pm the following day.

We worked through to the early hours; grey with fatigue, we returned to the hotel to sleep. In the morning, under doctor’s orders, I performed my daily back exercises; necessary but not very elegant when you’re not wearing any clothes. Later I was told that hidden cameras are still not unusual in hotels. What, I wondered, might they have seen on this occasion?

We trooped back to the shopping centre to finish dressing the mannequins and then host the international press conference. I should have written my speech on the plane, if not before leaving, when energy was on my side. On seeing my crumpled notes, Philip Dodd, director of the ICA, whispered ‘You’re not going to read that, are you?’ I did. It wasn’t my finest hour, but I made it. The European journalists asked questions, but the Chinese reporters were very, very quiet.

In the afternoon I gave a talk to the fashion students from La Salle School, a Canadian college with a Shanghai branch. All female and aged between 17 and 20, the students were dressed conservatively in neat skirts or trousers, with only details such as glasses and earrings providing variation. Speaking through an interpreter, I told them of my fashion college training and of my recent shift towards experimental work – a decision that was based, paradoxically, on a need to create a body of work that might last.

As I walked the students through the collection, starting with the garments that represented sperm and egg, I hoped to encourage a more open-minded relationship to scientific research and design. I hadn’t anticipated, however, that the collection would have a direct bearing on their lives.

As I explained the nature of DNA and the notion of ‘individuality’, I realised I was confronting their perceptions of themselves head-on. Whereas the instinct in Western culture is to look for the new and unexpected, theirs was to seek conformity and orthodoxy. And here I was, painting a picture for them of the potential each one of them possessed to be different from their mothers and fathers, from everyone around them.

As this dawned on the group, some wandered off, while the remainder closed in tighter around me. They stood glued by each dress, waiting to see what it might signify. I was no longer the messenger: the collection itself was doing the work. A sense of discovery had overtaken the group.

Not suspicious of the future, the young Chinese assume that, as boundaries drop away, everything coming at them will inevitably appear novel. Youth and the artistic community are in the best position to decide which aspects of their tradition might be challenged and might be retained. The head lecturer at La Salle, for instance, described a project that had been rejected by the students when they discovered that the cloth they were being asked to use was traditionally employed to cover the dead.

Other reactions to the work came from a diverse group of people: a gang of beauty-counter girls, chefs, biology students and embryologists, old men, pregnant women and schoolchildren. I only saw one woman who looked like someone who might have visited the exhibition in London: she wore a long black skirt, a backpack, and had dreadlocks. She visited the exhibition several times.

Tony Blair opened the exhibition, accompanied by Cherie, who asked for a closer look. ‘Where’s the Lewinsky dress then?’ asked one of the Blair party – a reference, we assume, to the 1,000 Sperm Coat. ‘I hear Monica’s got a frock in the show,’ he went on. ‘Ours, I’m afraid, is washed,’ I replied, at which, blushing, he disappeared into the crowd. Cherie, meanwhile, declared the coat beautiful.

I am now in the early stages of returning the Primitive Streak project to the Chinese by working through the Internet with La Salle. We hope to create a body of digital fashion work in partnership with the ICA, allowing anyone to study the design process – via a web page – from brief to realisation.

It would be easy to assume the hunger for contact with the West might encourage a quiet revolution amongst those in China who are involved in the arts. Having spoken to the students, however, I doubt it will happen soon. Yet we do have much to learn from each other. Art and design have often succeeded where language has failed, and as the collection moved off to Beijing I was reminded that, as ever, it will be the practitioners of art who speak most powerfully across this divide.

Originally published in British Vogue, January 1999, p.36-37

Twenty years ago the name Helen Storey was a fashionable one to drop. It was displayed outside the designer’s three shops and sewn into her garments, which hung in swish department stores alongside those of her contemporaries Westwood, Hamnett and Galliano. Worn by the likes of Madonna and Cher, it stood for a particularly angry kind of 1980s fashion – shock-frocks printed with the image of a foetus or sliced up the back to reveal a bare buttock. In both 1990 and 1991 Storey was nominated for British Designer Of The Year. But by 1995 she’d gone bust, her name a whispered byword for the sorry state of the British Fashion Industry. Twenty years on when I tell someone I’m off to meet Helen Storey they draw a blank. ‘Who’s she?’ they ask.

Stitched into this ex fashion designer’s tale are the threads of a rag-trade tragedy – not only the end of a business but also cancer, divorce, the dole – ‘most of the biggies,’ as Storey languidly puts it. In the bright London flat she shares with her 21-year-old son, Luke, Storey talks about her fashion past not with bitterness or regret but as thought it was a slightly foolish adolescent indulgence, like wearing loon pants (or bottomless dresses), a thing that happened a long time ago and that she can’t quite believe involved her. She may be wearing an original Helen Storey skirt and sitting beneath a set of her own fashion sketches, but today her professional concerns are a long way from what to do about next season, the length of hemlines or the cost of silk. Currently, for example, she’s pondering ‘the world’s biggest problems, pretending they’re not big and trying to find solutions for them.’ That’s the kind of thing Professor Helen Storey occupies her days with now.

In the past nine years Storey has clocked up not one but four professorships – the most recent from the University of Sheffield, which last year bestowed the grand title of Visiting Professor of Material Chemistry. She is the first to acknowledge that this does ‘seem absurd’. Not just because she used to be a furious young designer who showed collections with names like ‘Rage’ in places like Tube tunnels, but because she failed to get anything much at all out of Hampstead Comprehensive, not least science O-levels. Yet now she works alongside eminent scientists to find solutions to the global conundrums of water shortage, inefficient use of solar energy and our throwaway society. This autumn, in collaboration with the leading chemist Tony Ryan, she will demonstrate her response to plastic pollution with an exhibition of the world’s first dissolvable dress. And it won’t be shown on a catwalk.

At 48, Storey, ballerina-slim with a silver curtain of hair, still looks like someone who belongs in an atelier, but it is the ‘strange mid-world’ where art meets science in which she now feels at home. Unlike her former occupation this one may be tricky to pin a label to, but it has given her a sense of purpose that she never knew before. ‘I think if you get to experience yourself doing more than you ever thought you could, then it does resonate a kind of happiness in you – that money and frocks don’t,’ she says. She still loves fashion but no longer feels as though she needs it ‘to be at ease with myself’. Although she can afford to buy the clothes she wants, she’s started walking away from them. ‘I can be quite practised at that on some days. I can know that something exists and is absolutely beautiful, but I don’t have to own it.’ Besides, turning up to discuss the Polymer Centre in the latest prêt-a-porter might not do her any favours. ‘You want to neutralise all that out of the way, so you can get on and focus on the thing that’s really exciting rather than the person who’s saying it. It’s the opposite of fashion, which is all about, “I’ve arrived! I’m in the room! What d’you reckon?”’

It seems like a volte-face for the ‘little diva girl, infatuated with handbags and make-up and clothing’ who stepped straight out of Kingston Polytechnic in 1981 and into a coveted job at the house of Valentino, before going on to launch her own label. But actually Storey always has a ‘straight-down-the-middle, love-hate relationship’ with fashion. The daughter of the radical northern playwright and novelist David Storey, she was ever ready to challenge and be challenged. At Kingston she was thought of as ‘unemployable’ and surprised everyone by landing the Valentino gig. Once there, she reacted badly to the world of high fashion. ‘I found myself shocked at the female psyche when it came to clothes – just what women would be prepared to do in order to feel lovable or look good,’ she says. ‘You could tell that they felt nothing until they had that label in the back of their neck.’

The creation of the Helen Storey label in 1989 – with her long-term business partner, Caroline Coates – was her response. At the time she explained her need to design as ‘a way of expressing anger about witnessing what women are going through’. She was almost instantly a star. Her final collection – the one with bottoms – created such a stir that the zoologist Desmond Morris was drafted on to news programmes to come up with an explanation, and a political cartoon portrayed John Major airing his behind in like style.

The compulsion to change and do something ‘more than fashion’ arose through the worst possible circumstances. In 1993 Ron Brinkers, her husband and the company finance director, was diagnosed with cancer. Storey nursed him through it, while designing and trying to keep the business afloat. She failed, and within a year of the company going into receivership she split from Brinkers and found herself on the dole. Unsurprisingly, she also found herself in crisis. My attitude to life changed considerably,’ she says. ‘there was a sort of urgency to how I spent my time because I had seen what it was like when your time is threatened. I had to do things that had a purpose attached to them. I couldn’t do something that was beautiful just because it was beautiful. I had to look for meaning and I couldn’t find enough of it in fashion.’

She wrote an autobiography, Fighting Fashion, but was then at a loss until one day her sister, Kate Storey, a developmental biologist, sent her a leaflet about a Wellcome Trust science-and-art initiative, with a yellow Post-it note attached bearing a question mark. Storey’s answer was a collaboration with her sister – an installation called ‘Primitive Streak’, which translated the first 1,000 hours of human life into dresses. It toured Britain and six other countries and was seen by three million people. The fashion industry, however, were nonplussed. ‘You couldn’t buy it, you couldn’t sell it, so what was it for?’ Storey shrugs. ‘It was only six years later when it went to China as a backdrop for Tony Blair’s first visit there, that Vogue decided to do a piece on it.’

In 1999 she set up the Helen Storey Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation promoting creativity and innovation. She has since toured ‘Mental’, an exhibition exploring creativity, and has worked with schools on projects about emotions, energy and the creative process. She enjoys communicating with children in a way she feels she would have benefited from herself. She still feels cheated by her poor education but there is some comfort in her string of professorships. ‘I remember when I got the first one being absolutely chuffed. I thought “Where’s that teacher?”’ she says, laughing. ‘But they’re not accolades. Being called Professor of Material Chemistry isn’t because I’m hot at chemistry; it’s a title that allows me to knock on the door of physicists or chemists and have a conversation.’

Her current work with Ryan at Sheffield comes under the umbrella project ‘Wonderland’, through which new inventions such as dissolvable dresses are being developed. The dresses – knitted from the sort of polymer used in washing-powder sachets – are almost an advert for the science, a way of drawing in an audience to think about the problems of waste, rather than a genuine proposal for post-millenial dressing (although she will now work towards making an environmentally smart plastic bottle a commercial reality). During the forthcoming exhibition the garments will be lowered into tanks and left to liquefy. By the end of the show they will have entirely vanished. One could translate this into a spooky metaphor for Helen Storey’s previous career. This time, however, solid science will be left behind.

Originally published in The Sunday Telegraph, 20 May 2007, p.32-36

If any single thing informs Helen Storey’s work, it is conflict. That and an absolute refusal to compromise. ‘I’ve always been attracted to things that are elusive, that need a lot from me to master. Perhaps that’s why I’ve ended up doing fashion in a country where it’s very difficult to get something off the ground. There’s something in the struggle that I’m drawn to.’

It is that struggle and the apparent conflicts in her work that give it such vitality, electrifying the familiar with the voltage of the new. In Storey’s hands the fluffy, sensual feather boa takes on a tough lyricism when made up in recycled rags; the sentimental romanticism of a ball gown is given a modern, urban edge when its floating skirts are manufactured from industrial bin-liner plastic.

Although not simply an evening wear designer, Helen Storey’s primary instinct is undoubtedly focused on glamour. As a child and young woman she trained in ballet, but while she was addicted to the grace and discipline of the form she found it difficult to reconcile those feeling with her anger about the way that women were supposed to look. ‘It brought home to me the inappropriateness of how I felt among girls wearing pink. ‘That inappropriateness still informs her work for while she remains attracted to the grace and drama of evening wear, her anger at conventional ideas about femininity and prettiness has resulted in some of the most exciting and modern evening wear created anywhere, certainly in this country.

Evening wear is a curiously uncharted area of fashion; while day wear has been endlessly reinvented and re-drawn, there have been very few experiments in glamour. It I almost as if all the advances of feminism have not touched that final stereotype; that strength and prettiness cannot co-exist. In Storey’s work they can, and they do. This is beauty in sneakers, glamour in DM’s. ‘If I design a ball gown, my instinct is always to match it up with a T-shirt.’

A gritty realism, an acute sympathy with the soles that women are forced to play and a heightened sense of the theatrical gives her work its caustic edge. She has, in the past, been accused of forcing women into sexual stereotypes, but that is to wilfully misunderstand her guiding principles. ‘I’m angry at the way women get treated and I’m disappointed at the games they have to play. But I have faith that they can dress in the way they want and still take control of themselves.’ That is why the fans of her clothes can be counted among some of the most provocatively modern women in the world; Madonna, Cher, Sandra Bernhard, Rosanna Arquette, Mica Paris and, if not a woman then certainly a vision of subversive glamour, Prince. The child of liberal, intellectual parents and the daughter of the playwright and novelist David Storey, one of the original angry young men of the late fifties, Helen Storey has inherited much of her father’s drive and passion. As a child she had no particular ambition, certainly not one to be a fashion designer. ‘I didn’t know what I wanted. I had a lot of unfocused anger which, in retrospect, has helped me because what I couldn’t articulate, I expressed through pen and cloth.’

After a rough and often contradictory education, a gentle, liberal home and a tough, reactionary comprehensive where she played skinhead by day and dancer by night, she emerged with no clear idea of her future. Her fierce intelligence was obscured by unsatisfactory exam results, her innate creativity crippled by an early encounter with an inflexible art education system. She came to believe that she was good at nothing until her father, recognising something in his daughter that she could not herself see, scooped up the drawings she worked on endlessly, returned them to her neatly reorganised in a bound portfolio, and encouraged her to go to art school.

She went to Kingston Polytechnic, where she began to experiment with sculpture and texture. ‘I felt like I’d found my home. I was completely centred when I was drawing and designing.’ She came under the tutorship of Richard Nott, now of Workers for Freedom, who gave her the confidence to push her ideas forward. Ironically, or perhaps typically, she ended up working at Valentino in Italy, ‘a place that was completely opposite to me. It was couture and money and perfume, and I wasn’t.’ She worked in the design studio and in publicity and marketing and while she felt an emotional distance from the work being done at Valentino, it taught her the value of professionalism and the speed at which things could be achieved. It also encouraged, most importantly, her interest in evening wear. ‘I had always been a little afraid of glamour because I didn’t feel glamorous myself.’ It was not, however, a vision of women with which she felt comfortable so, after a year working with Lancetti, she returned to England where she found a job with Belville Sassoon.

It was the early Eighties and a time when experimental British design was exploding onto the world stage. Storey, finding herself more and more drawn to the type of work she had been exploring at college, soon hooked up with Caroline Coates at Amalgamated Talent. In 1984 she launched her own label and in 1990 established a formal partnership with Coates, which exists to this day.

During those ten years Helen Storey has consistently experimented, both with her own vision of glamour and with her need to reflect women’s roles in society through her work. Her work has changed, as her view of both women and herself have changed. The birth of her son, Luke, was an important catalyst in cementing her ideas about women’s image; the culmination of which was best expressed in her 1990 collection, ‘Rage’. It was provoked, she says, ‘by this awful vision of woman where you’re supposed to be a nappy mother by morning, a shoulder-pad woman by day and a lover and sex goddess by night.’ The collection was a landmark in her career, provoking both outrage and empathy. It won her the British fashion industry’s award of Most Innovative Designer, brought her to the attention of a global audience and earned her the reputation of being one of Britain’s most provocative talents.

Certainly, there is nothing anodyne in Storey’s work; through it are expressed the complexities of her own personality. Her inarticulate, instinctive need to create colludes constantly with a fierce intelligence that rationalises that there are already enough clothes in the world. ‘Designers should be looking at why they want to be designers in a world that doesn’t need them.’ Well, the world does need designers, just as people need to express the primeval need for decoration and the assertion of their own differences and identities. What they don’t need any more of are clothes without thought, or fashion as a fail-safe. As The Guardian said of Storey back in 1990, ‘As thirty something safeness spreads throughout the high street, her designs promise to delay the moment when the fawn raincoat takes over the world.’

Helen Storey’s clothes are not easy; they are not fawn raincoats nor even safe cloaks of anonymity. And if they provoke it is because there is the rasp in them, always, of instinct against reason. They are thoughtful and sometimes, even, incoherent although the result is never anything but passionately original. Not everything that Storey designs succeeds; but that is part of the dynamic of her work and what marks her out as a constant and moving force in contemporary fashion. She experiments, she takes risks, she makes mistakes. She sits, as she says, ‘on the knife edge between good and bad taste.’

To make mistakes is anyway the mark of the true innovator for it is often the failures of the present that provide the material of the future. As The Daily Telegraph said of her in 1991; ‘she has the personal vision and risk taking of the artist,’ and it is that experimentation, that honest struggle for expression, that gives Storey’s work its modernism. Her honesty is sometimes daunting, often too daunting for a world that likes its fashion designers to come out with pretty, pat expressions of femininity but as she herself says, ‘To me, a Laura Ashley smock, which spells the subservient woman locked prettily in her place, is far more frightening than black plastic boobs.’

The last ten years have been a time of experimentation, a period that Helen Storey calls, ‘her learning decade.’ As she has changed and grown, so has her work. Through it she has resolved some of the conflicts and compromises faced by a young woman who finds herself in complex and often difficult times. In that, she reflects the mood of a generation. The conflicts are not entirely resolved and nor, perhaps, will they ever be. But there is, in her work, a new sense of purpose, a melding of instinct and reason. As she reaches the beginning of her second decade in business, the angry young woman of British fashion is feeling, as the title of her collection for Spring ’95 so eloquently describes, ‘Good Inside’.

Catalogue Essay, October 1994, p.5-12

Helen Storey’s debut on the catwalk tomorrow is the most eagerly awaited show of London Fashion Week. A front-runner for the Designer of the Year award, Storey made her name with her stretchy, sexy fringed evening wear, worn by pop stars such as Madonna, Cher and Yazz. Her first catwalk show will be a sparkly, no-holds-barred affair, in the best tradition of young London fashion. It will also mark a bold change of tack.

Days before the show, she is doing what most designers are reluctant to allow – letting me see the collection. People are bustling through the first-floor studio above her shop in London’s Newburgh Street. Her design associate, Mark Tabard, is trying on a bright waistcoat. The clothes are arranged on rails. Storey – low-key, soft-voiced, wearing her trademark tracksuit – talks through each section.

The collection is called ‘Rage’ and is a sequence of images of a modern woman struggling to juggle lover, child and career. Storey says it is ‘autobiographical, my most emotional collection yet, a reflection of everything I feel about women.’

She is the daughter of David Storey, the playwright and, and left school with one O-level to study fashion at Kingston Polytechnic. Her first job took her to Valentino’s studio in Rome. She was back in Britain by 1985, married architect Ron Brinkers, had a baby and started her own business, all within a year.

The beads and fringes and Lycra stretch in those early collections made her a hit with the club set. The irony I that designers do not come less clubby than Storey, whose idea of a perfect Saturday night means time spent with her husband and son, Luke. ‘I come from a very theatrical background, and the clothes reflected that; they were very showy, very theatrical. They didn’t reflect my personality at all,’ she says.

‘I had this inner dilemma about the relevance of fashion. I found it hard to justify how I ended up a frock designer in a family of intelligent kids. The only way to keep interested has been to design clothes which say something about me.’

She hates the role-juggling image of the ‘New Woman’. ‘You know, the woman who’s supposed to go out jogging in the morning, outboss the men in the office during the daytime, become a loving mother in the early evening, and transform into sex goddess at night. I hate the pressure. My rage, I suppose, is against the need to compromise, the frustrations that creates.

‘Luke is five, and I couldn’t bear to send him off to boarding school or hire a nanny. So I’ve tried to make him part of my life, and he’ll be up here at night when I’m choosing shoes for the catwalk show. And I worry about whether this is the way for him to grow up. And all the time there’s the child in me to cope with too, because it’s the child in me who designs.’

The designer she admires most is Vivienne Westwood. ‘She’s constructed a convincing intellectual view of her own life, and made that work with her clothes.’

The shock-tactic section of her show, ‘Combat Woman’, includes classic riding jackets, fishnet dresses and jumpsuits, all in combat fabrics, plus bra tops and hot pants decorated with bullets. Another section of her collection marks an abrupt change of mood: simple shift dresses in yellow and white georgette, printed with ghostly images of a baby. Some of the dresses have cutaway details revealing glimpses of thigh and back.

In another sequence, double dresses in gentle water-colours are featured. Tomorrow’s catwalk show should confirm that, behind the rage and the glitz, there lies a very different Helen Storey.

Originally Published in The Independent, 13 October 1990, p.15-16

In the past, I might have flung on any number of things appropriate for the Downing Street Reception for London Fashion Week, but it will need more thought this time. I have been sitting in an armchair for months. Throughout the winter I have sat quite still and am too familiar with the red brickwork of the house opposite my window. I have given up chasing the cats that crap on my sleeping garden. The guests at Number 10 will wear Seventies-looking shoes and Gucci tabards and hairdos which hover and stay.

Now I’m in my mid-30s, and everything has changed. What does it feel like when the need to run has gone? The driven part of me – the part that plunged into creating the Helen Storey name, that couldn’t wait to leave my miserable childhood education behind, to be in control – has gone. And during the time designated for me to come back and relaunch, fate and my need for stillness have precluded both. I now deal in the small, in the detail of pennies rather than the rounding up of thousands. I am down to collecting premier points from that supermarket and Income Support of £25 per week.

It’s during the day that I miss the part of me that I thought I knew: 11am in my local superstore is the magical time. The employed are away in offices somewhere. Mothers have their young to go ahead of them. And then there is me – and all the other long-term unemployed. I can tell you that Andrex costs £1.22 more than Somerfield’s basic range toilet tissue, that when I am feeling self-destructive you will find me shopping in Food Giant, and that a local shop whose largest sign in the window says ‘convert your jukebox’ has a business that survived longer than mine did.

This period is about nothing definite. It is a passing-through, a leaving-behind – a bungee jump on the inside. You could say I am working towards my freedom. You catch me, however, tossing my head violently from side to side, an old bone locked tight in my jaws. I growl beyond my known nature. I am not wrestling with failure; I am confronting my former omnipotence, the all-powerful part of me that created a label now no longer in existence.

I can shed it, drop it, or hold onto it. It’s taken months, but with not a design in sight, I can see my next season. It is smaller, a bit here, a bit there, no frills – not for profit alone, but a backable venture. It could be a play: a divided stage, backstage revealed, the catwalk out into the audience. I know the dialogue, the way we do it, but I still question the reason as to why. I have designed the set, know the cast is of 20, can sense which theatre and recognise that in this play lies the stuff of my years as a dancer and my years in fashion.

In my cupboard I have an old tabard. It is acid yellow and embroidered with diamanté up the back. If you wear it back to front, it gives the best-shaped breasts. With some boots left over from my last collection and my long hair, I just might, with a push, hover and stay.

When I first met Caroline Coates she was sitting in a small upstairs room behind a metal desk in the West End of London. I remember blonde hair, the colour purple and a conversation taking place on the phone; the person on the other end no doubt squirming under her powers of persuasion. She put the phone down and looked me straight in the eyes.

Caroline was a young woman from Yorkshire. She had maintained her northern ticket more successfully than I – a straight-forwardness and honesty that is too often complicated in the name of sophistication by some southerners. From the outset, she set about creating opportunities to build fashion-design companies, and this in a country where the textile trade rarely took any notice of us designers. It required enormous luck, coupled with day-and-night persuasion, to get a collection manufactured; and there was a fundamental disbelief that design in the hands of the creative could make money.

Set up in 1982, Amalgamated Talent was created to harness and capitalise on the talent pouring out of art schools and colleges. The idea was to coach students who wanted to set up their own business, to help them with costings, cash flows, banks, exporting, insurance, editing, manufacturing and finance. In her day, Caroline held the hands of up to 80 designers, equipping them with the skills that have seen the best of them come through to leading positions in some of the world’s largest firms – Coats Viyella, Calvin Klein and Marks & Spencer.

Starting out on my own was a reaction to dressing women I had nothing in common with (at Valentino and later at Belville Sassoon). The vision for the label was still located in glamour, but somewhere between Bruce Oldfield’s early work in the Eighties and the high street. It was an unconscious mix of myself and Biba, with edge.

From the beginning, my belief in myself was fuelled by a need to find out what kind of a designer I really was. I had no idea what was in store. It was not so much naivety as an urge to follow the risk-taking, energetic side of my character. In Caroline I recognised the strengths both of my mother and my father, at once nurturing and persuasive. The trust which rapidly built-up between us, combined with a practical need for partnership, gently convinced me that I was in the right place.

At the time of designing my first collection, I was still working at Belville Sassoon, making mad dashes between his world of taffeta and my other life in denim. Despite my accuracy at fulfilling the brief for the county ladies, I had a rougher, more experimental side. Denim was miles away from chiffon and I was drawn to a cloth I could beat up, bleach or rip. After my first meeting with Caroline, she had got me together with Wrangler to do a range that considered the roundness of women, and my first collection for Spring/Summer 1986 was a continuation of this theme.

I was unable to gain access to the heavy-duty machinery which gives denim its authenticity, so I decided to take it in the opposite direction and produce denim which was feminine. I designed jeans that fitted into the waist and hung just right, low on the hips, using the material’s fraying qualities to the full. I created shift-dresses and jeans constructed inside-out. Macy’s of New York bought my Pompidou Centre collection – just five orders, but it was enough of a taste to hurl me forwards towards the next collection.

In those days you just did it – launched yourself into a catwalk show, a creative coming out. My first catwalk show, ‘Rage’, marked the beginning. It received as much praise as it did damnation: from ‘what Britain’s been waiting for’ to ‘an apocalyptic mess’. But liked or disliked – along with many of the big British names on the move: Hamnett, Galliano, Westwood and Ozbek – ‘Rage’ made a noise at a time when a certain stillness was in the air.

Putting the collection together was a nightmare. I soon realised that what sells would put the audience to sleep and that the newsworthy, edgy stuff would be impractical and unprofitable to manufacture. I learned fast the first time around, and my lesson paid off by the time the next season arrived. For ‘Rage’, in a room which could comfortably hold two, there were, at one point, ten people cutting patterns, sewing, divorcing, styling, casting models and having supposedly secret affairs. A tension I could bring nowhere near the surface almost had me over the edge. Invariably, there is always too much in a first catwalk show. The need to yell rather than simply announce is a seemingly unavoidable urge, especially in the young.

My second catwalk collection, ‘Present Times’ (1991), by contrast, was designed and worked on in a large rented space in Kingly Street, London W1. Up three flights of stairs, a tight team produced what I still consider to be my best work.

One collection will always be emerging as the previous one is being manufactured. The one that is being creatively finished still demands a great deal of attention after the event. ‘Rage’ was being manufactured in Cornwall as ‘Present Times’ was being developed in London.

I was new to this game of trying to please both buyers and press. ‘Rage’ was virtually impossible to manufacture. By the time we had satisfied every buyer’s individual wishes on an order, there were more than 160 styles and the company simply could not produce them. Our mistake was to even attempt it. We had created something somewhere between ready-to-wear and couture. As the chaos of ‘Rage’ continued, I used all the mistakes I had made in it to keep ‘Present Times’ clean and straightforward.

The energy of ‘Present Times’ relied on instinct. The previous collection was styled beyond recognition. In this one, the clothes alone told me what to do, when to leave them, when they needed some edge. I felt for couture, I missed its possibilities, the arts and crafts and support that must surround a designer for their life to be real. So I turned to what was to hand. Council rubbish bags became a ball skirt, floating with a static and flow only polythene and net can attain.

The animal heads which prompted so much coverage in the press were the result of a long evening’s discussion with my husband, Ron – my rambling partner in life’s more creative moments. He claims the idea was his, and I, indisputably, that it was mine. (In the past, there have been times during these brain-storming sessions when the only point on which we could agree was that the other’s recollection was wrong.)

The hair was by Vidal Sassoon, the 20 girls split between shaven heads and locks of coiffured abundance; the make-up, a moon-dust and blood-lipped creation, by Lesley Chilkes. I worked with Shelleys on the loafers, which floated on clear Perspex wedges. Throughout the collection, commercialism lent itself inventively – and, perhaps, rarely – to the experimental.

Backstage after ‘Present Times’, those people who make or break you queued to congratulate me. As each unexpected face fought its way towards me, I knew I had got it right. During that year, and as a result of that particular collection, I was voted Most Innovative Designer Of The Year, and was nominated for Designer Of The Year. It was 1991 and the only way was up.

Four years later, designed in three days and completed in seven weeks, ‘Edith’s Sisters’ (Autumn/Winter 1995) was a collection which would never be produced. Unknown to us, it was to be our last show, put on in an Underground tunnel in South Kensington – the same passage which used to ferry a bored four-year-old girl to the museums.

In an unspoken sense, Coates and Storey was on its last legs. This became apparent not by a gradual lack of interest (as one imagines would arise near an end), but rather by a total commitment from the whole team to do it as well as we could.

As befits the spirit in which Caroline and I had tackled everything, the venue was full of reasons why not to. The first of these was a requirement to keep the tunnel open to the public until two hours before the show. To gauge the impact of this, bear in mind that the alternative tent venues, 200 feet above us, took eight days to erect in order to accomplish the same purpose. I willed this one to happen, grovelling and scraping, pre-empting every reason under the sun why they wouldn’t want to do it. We had three weeks’ notice – an interesting exercise in the interpretation of proceeding with haste. There was not much in common between this tiny fashion company and London Transport.

Having worked out who the action men were at LT, Caroline and our show producers, Nick and Cameron, sat down to work out if it was all possible. The catwalk was three minutes walk long. The audience could be dozing by the time outfit number one had returned, and the abilities of even the best girls to shine would be stretched. In acknowledgment of this, we decided to have two changing rooms, one at either end: outfit one at the Science Museum, outfit two at the Natural History.

This seemed to work until the day of the show. The make-up and hair were toi be done at the Polish Club up the road and the girls would be ferried down to the tunnel to the appropriate changing-room before the audience came in. To complicate things, we had to do two shows back-to-back. The first, with separate clothes in it, was for our sponsors, Alfa Romeo, and the second was for the fashion pack in general.

Many friends and employees from the past seemed spontaneously to re-emerge to help: Chantal and Liz Friend, buyers we hadn’t seen for years; Gapu and Kevin from Untitled; the model Michelle Paradis from my first show. ‘Edith’s Sisters’ was summoning up the best of the past for a curtain call.

When you are not a major design house, things like the perfectly sized shoe for every girl in every colour for every outfit can be a problem. I had known Helen Bailey for many years, and on this day she was assisting. Once down the tunnel, and having sorted some of the clothes on the rails, she gave me one of those don’t-panic-but-I-think-we’ve-really-fucked-up looks.

‘What? Tell me what.’

‘I can’t,’ she said.

‘Tell me, for Chrissake.’

She looked at all the accessory bags, packed perfectly, labelled beautifully with model and outfit number, running order, and which end of the tunnel they should be in.

‘What? I still don’t get it,’ I said.

‘The shoes,’ she persisted. ‘The jewellery. How can it be in both changing rooms at the same time? She can’t just say “excuse me” and leg it down the other end to get them.’ The punch landed.

‘Fuck!’ Five second gap. ‘Fuck!’ Another gap. ‘Fuck! Quick, split the bags.’

‘Split the bags how?’ she said calmly

‘Just split them.’

‘Can’t,’ she said. ‘We have to work out where each girl will be, in what outfit, at what part of the show, and split everything up into bags – which we don’t have – accordingly.’

With only one hour to go and four models lost, Naomi at the airport with her bag nicked and the other assistants unaware of the mess, drinking back vodka at the Polish Club, I panicked. I couldn’t think how to bring any order to what we had to do.

Someone stuck their head around the cordoned-off end off the tunnel where we were and said cheerfully, ‘The tunnel’s flooding.’

Rather hurt at my reply, they disappeared. The tunnel was dry when we started the show.

Only a matter of seconds later another head came through.
‘Naomi can’t get here.’

This I just ignored. I threw a look like vomit at Nick. He covered his face with the running order for the third time and I told him to go away, find a corner and change it yet again.

‘Don’t even ask,’ I said. ‘Just do what you think is best.’

As he left the area, pulling back the curtain with a great whoosh of anxiety, a giant and overwhelming stink of urine came blowing in.

Bailey and I just looked at each other.

‘Suzy Menkes,’ she said. ‘You can just see it, can’t you?’

Someone was sent out to replace the water that had been sucked up by another somebody to spray away the stench.

Bailey finally realised I had reached my end and she became an angel. She threw her halo like a Frisbee the length of the tunnel. She told me to go to the Polish Club and get some vodka down me, which I did. When I returned, she smiled. My little world was back in order.

I stroked the clothes, each one hanging where they ought to be, tapped the odd heel to sit next to its patent partner and waited. Looking down at myself, having not been aware of what I looked like for the past 48 hours, I realised I was grubby: jeans with no socks and a T-shirt. I had to do something about it. I disappeared into a corner and came out in velvet.

The Alfa show went well and even changing the outfits went remarkably smoothly. However, unknown to me, backstage, our puddle of rising water had blown the lights at the Natural History end. A gentleman from London Transport grabbed a plate-sized torch, stood on a chair and flashed it inadvertently on to the bare backside of a model.

Mark had watched the first show and came towards me.

‘Well?’ I pleaded desperately. ‘Well, what was it like?’

‘Needs work,’ he said gruffly.

‘Needs work?’ I repeated. There was only half an hour between this one and the next.

‘What work?’

‘Get Nicholas and Cameron,’ he demanded.

From time to time Mark and I would spark an idea. Cocooned only by a few other opinions, we occasionally came across something that excited us and that, when least expected, would blow others away.

I had designed many of the features in the collection over, under and around the bum, not a new concept in itself. But Mark and Caroline can spot the things I miss just because my ideas spill out without effort. The lace-and-flesh dress with no back at all was one of those drawings that was a natural conclusion to a string of commercial ones behind it. Stupid and without reason is okay if there are ten others that aren’t and have.

My nerves about using it were calmed by Mark’s comment: ‘tell them an old queen told you to do it.’

Following the show, the debate was astonishing. Bums everywhere – in cartoons John Major’s crevice was displayed; on the radio Desmond Morris backed up my instinct for them; and on TV the breakfast crowd giggled at them.

The last show was close to how it should have been, the right faces backstage once again. It can never be thought of as perfect or final – in some ways it wasn’t even in keeping with the general direction: that would be to admit you have finished. I haven’t.

Pulled towards the next something, I feel catwalks are not right any more. The tunnel was on the way to somewhere else, but I have yet to arrive.

Originally published in The Guardian Weekend, 14 September 1996, p.30-35