Anna Burnside: Passion for fashion at the Barras

ON MY way to the Barras yesterday morning, I check Facebook. Up pop photos and videos taken at a fashion show held at the market the night before. The yellow brick Barras Centre building is barely recognisable, bathed in pink light, filled with hipsters watching Amazonian crimp-haired models walk the runway in wild child evening wear. Further down the page, a friend posts: "Rocking le Louboutins in the Barras, Yeeeaaow!"

Louboutins, for those who don't speak label, are red-soled shoes, high of heel, even higher of price. Their normal habitat is the red carpet, the New Bond Street boutique, the WAG enclosure at Old Trafford. Not a raggle taggle flea market in Glasgow's east end, best known for the sale of sports socks and camcordered DVDs.

Yet three months after taking over the Barras Centre, New Yorker Camille Lorigo has convinced a healthy crowd of Scotland's fashion forward to come to the east end of Glasgow and spend their Friday night contemplating Obscure Couture's 400 neon lace party dresses.

At 10:30am the next day, Obscure Couture's unit at the corner of the Barras Centre is still locked up. The cutting table, on which there was dancing until vodka o'clock, has taken a beating. Lorigo, however, is up and on, babysitting a group of German travel journalists, showing them the market, talking up her adopted city. She has had two and a half hours sleep.

"I was on my way home last night," she says, "and the guy in the kebab shop gave me a funny look. When I got to the flat I looked in the mirror and saw I still had a huge roller in my hair. It had been there all night. No-one had mentioned it."

Fizzing with charm, energy and Manhattan sass, 34-year-old Lorigo has, single-handedly, plugged the city's fashion industry into the mains. She arrived in Scotland in 2006 with a notion to start a fashion boilerhouse. Her first base was the Chateau in Govan, the former jailhouse where Franz Ferdinand held their first gigs. She moved to a shop in the Saltmarket and sold avant garde clutch bags and made-to-measure jeans beside criminal lawyers, windowless bars and the kind of off-licence that has security grilles around the stock.

After a stint on the sixth floor of the Argyll Arcade she decided, in July of this year, that an unprepossessing vacant unit with an arched glass roof, squeezed in between a row of antique markets, a council-run nursery, a hard-core Celtic bar and the back of St Alphonsus Catholic church was exactly the place she needed to realise her vision of a retail-market-cafe-modelling agency-press hub-cool HQ for Glasgow.

At the moment this vision is still a work in progress. The Barras Centre has shop units round the sides and an internal square with a few wooden barrows dotted around.One barrow is selling sparkly cupcakes. The rest are still empty. There is a cafe that opens out on to the square. Lorigo's office base is up above, with a balcony from where she can keep an eye on her new empire.

Lorigo also runs one of the units, stocking selected designers from the Argyll Street unit, some heavily edited vintage and bonkers hats. Next door Made in the Shade has hand-printed eco bags and Dot Cotton notelets. Kootch, which has no connection to Lorigo, is selling bags, jewellery and ceramics. The other spaces are either empty or used as offices during the week and locked up at the weekend.

The cafe's mismatched green velour chairs spill out in the courtyard. By 1pm several of the models from Lorigo's nascent agency have dropped in to sign contracts. Behind the counter Esca Hossack, another regular on Lorigo's catwalk shows and photo shoots, dispenses coffee, pancakes and plum jam made by her grandfather. Just 18, she is already one of Lorigo's long-time collaborators and stars-in-waiting.

"Every space Camille has had, people want to hang out," says Hossack, pushing back her red hair with short scarlet nails. "Before, people used to say we were cliquey and elitist, which we're not at all, but having a cafe gives them an excuse to come here. Everyone is loving the cakes."

Beyond the cafe, tables of stallholders are selling the kind of knit-your-own-robot nicknacks that have become a fixture of the contemporary craft scene. There are bird-shaped cushions, boxes of sushi, rings made from old buttons, vintage Japanese banknotes. Trudi Shillum produces a bottle of mandarin-flavoured mineral water to demonstrate her pornographic sake cups. When liquid is added, a naked man becomes visible at the bottom of the glass.

This is just the kind of oddity that gave the Barras its once mighty reputation. The market has, in its 90-odd year history, coped with more than the invasion of art school graduates and their acolytes. It was founded early in the 1920s by an enterprising greengrocer, Margaret McIver. She and her husband bought land in Moncur Street and rented barrows to weekend traders. It grew arms and legs, the McIvers and others built sheds to house their stalls until, in 1934, Margaret McIver opened the grand Barrowland ballroom. This was rebuilt in 1960, following a fire, and now has market space underneath the sign.

At his heyday the Barras was famous as the home of cheap towels and priceless patter. When the rest of the city closed down on a Sunday, the Barras was hopping, selling curtains, bananas and bargain versions of the latest toys and gizmos. Up fusty stairs there were what would now be called retro clothes, medals, dog-eared pornography, hunting weapons, boxes and boxes of ancient records. Legend told of a stall that sold fake Transcards, Glasgow's all-purpose travel tickets.I never managed to find it.

White bread stuff compared to the traders who, in recent years, have damaged the market's reputation, driven away the old school traders and alienated customers to such an extent that the unit now colonised by Lorigo had lain empty for about ten years. Brisk trade in pirate computer games, DVDs, software, Calvin Klein boxer shorts and Ugg boots, as well as black market tobacco, means that some Saturdays there are more police officers than bargain hunters around London Road.

There have been changes. The Squirrel has yet to be taken over by Starbucks and Baird's Bar has no plans for a cocktail menu, but, with its trees, fairy lights, fur coats and tables of sparkly geegaws, Lorigo's neighbours The Square Yard could fit into Camden Market. Glasgow City Council would like to recreate the Barras in that image but, with about 12 different individuals owning the different buildings, as well as surrounding shopkeepers and now Lorigo all with an opinion, progress has been slow.

Gary Martin, who runs a house clearance business round the corner from Lorigo, has a theory about that. "The world economic crash has saved the Barras," he says. "If it wasn't for that the place would be flattened and sold off to developers." He is delighted to see Lorigo, with her hazel eyes and entrepreneurial spirit, move in. "We have been racking our brains how to make this place a success. Private enterprise is what we need."

So, while twin male models drink espresso and discuss their contracts in Esca's cafe, the old Barras struggle along outside. TJ is selling sports socks, acrylic cardigans and what he proudly calls "ladies' new checked jaikets". These have been bought, he tells me in the best tradition of the spielers who used to tempt customers with their legendary sales patter, by Lindsay Lohan and other A-list celebrities including Naimh, who is Miss Scotland. Then he giggles. "Well, I'll say that anyway."

Across the road, hairpieces are 15 each, or two for 30. Also available in the same strip: beds, "Paul Frank" handbags, "G-Star" jeans (including toddlers' sizes), leopard-print harem pants, hi-viz tabards, boxes of crisps, velour pumpkins with a doll where the stalk should be, air rifles and tweed hunting jackets of the type worn by the landed gentry. These cost 50 - a princely sum by old Barras standards. Ali is cagey about how many he sells. "It depends," he says nervously, "on the customer."

Davie, waiting by the hotdog van for a friend, can recall the market's glory days. "It's not the same since Tesco and Asda," he says, looking down the quiet street. "I remember when you couldn't get up or down here because of the crowds."

Will Lorigo bring back the hordes who once bought all their electrical appliances and Christmas presents at the Barras? Unlikely.

Hugh Murray, 75, has come from Airdrie.He is looking for an electric shower unit and is unlikely to buy a lavender bag made of caravan curtain fabric or a Scrabble tile ring instead. Can she replace Murray and his ilk with a whole new generation of scenesters, German tourists, fashion insiders and experience-hunters? That is the plan. Around lunchtime Naomi Bell, a former customer at the Argyll Street shop, pitches up. She is now a stylist working with EMI, looking for suitable outfits for a new band. Lorigo is straight on it.

"This is not a place for people who want things that are shiny and new and straight out of the box like everyone else. I'm a fluff-in-the-belly-button person; this is for people who appreciate the honesty, can see the threads of the floor, we can keep the real style of it. So the Barras are perfect. The Barras are very, very real."