MASTER OF FASHION DVD:5

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MELBOURNE

Everyone is knocked out by the success. My mother says " You can't sew"...she is still in a paddock in Tasmania. I still send her a magazine with my clothes in it and say mum look at page 44, that is my dress. She'll call up and say "That girl didn't look like you. She is not you". I say "Mum it is not the girl, it is the clothing".

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SYDNEY

I met Katie Ingland who is Alexander McQueen's stylist and she asked if I could help so I went and helped on a show and I worked on every show since. That kind of energy, that kind of competitiveness is what makes London a really interesting and exciting place because if everyone is competing it means you have to work even harder which means that standards are higher. And then I worked on a James Bond film 'Die another day' and as soon as that finished I moved to Australia.

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PARIS

I am totally crazy in the creation, and very serious in the management. I work each morning in the areas of business, finance and administration. We have everyday a good lunch, I need the lunch to cut the day because the morning is taken up with the accounting, the lawyers, and in the afternoon I work at the studio with my girls, my models, and my people of the workroom, and I create the garments in the afternoon. Everyday is like that.

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PARIS

We are considered in the profession, like a laboratory of new ideas. We are small, we can afford the risk of innovation much more than people who spend millions and millions when they launch a new perfume.

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MELBOURNE

I was unemployed, I was unemployable, I could not hold down a job, people didn't like me, because I was very serious and also as a young person I was also very clever - older people don't like that necessarily, they try to slap you down a bit. I needed money, I had come into some misfortune family wise. I was a bit on the street kind of thing, starving if you will, very hand to mouth

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MADRID

The last time that I went to New York with my father, Oscar [de la Renta] asked, "You want to do something in fashion?" I said, "Yes! I am thinking of going to school in Milano", and he offered to me the opportunity to work with him, once I had finshed my schooling. Oscar said "You can work for 6 months, or something like that, and you will see that you will learn a lot with me". This six months turned into 3 years.

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PARIS

I was only 32 and I had the cheek to say to my father " I'll only take over the business it if I can really do what I want". He looked at me and said "What are you saying?". He said after thinking it over a little bit, "On two conditions. I want the name of our family and the crocodile emblem surname to be always well considered. that means only high quality products, sold in the right shops and the right boutiques, First condition. Second condition, I will not give you any family money to invest so you must manage without asking the family for the money. O.K?" I said to him "O.K".

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MELBOURNE

Some denim I have used is too good, and it just takes forever to bash up. The manufacturer of the fabric will spend so long making this bullet fabric and then only for me to come along and think, it has cost me too much money to fuck it up. Or they will make a denim that is really tight in its weave and I will want one that is looser in its weave so that it can release the fibres, so it is a bit hairier, there are all different aspects to everything.

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SYDNEY

We were a very small company at the time when Fashion Week happened, we had no money but it was always the most successful move that we have every done. By picking up those wholesalers we got an interview with CNN with Elsa Clench and from that we picked up a US distributor and from there we are with Victoria Secrets, and we do significant volume in the USA.

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NEW YORK

When I went to Balmain I helped the designer prepare the haute couture and once you have seen that you really aren't interested in t-shirts any more. People think "Oh, how can a dress or a jacket cost $100,000.00?" Well when you take fabric that has been on some special loom by the most technical advanced or the most knowledgeable person and it is $1,000.00 a yard, and then you employ the 5 best technicians to create that garment at about $50.00 - $100.00 hour and they work 100 hours a piece, suddenly that garment is getting very expensive. But the thing about haute couture is that it is a laboratory, like a Formula 1 racing unit, where all the new ideas and techniques are tested out and proven and figured out so it is much simpler and less expensive once these ideas are put into ready to wear.

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MILAN

The soul [of fashion] is really the fabric, then it develops into style. The English product was very similar season after season. Being Italian, he wanted to add the love of Italian beauty, culture and innovation to the process. For example he used a lot of diagonal threads, he mixed different types of yarns together to be able to get a more resiliant fabric or a better feeling fabric. He used to make "tessutti diopi" which means double faced fabrics - on one side one colour and on the other side a different colour and a different structure. He did a lot of innovation to the 'cooking' of the fabric.

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