Interview: Jonathan Saunders, fashion designer

Saunders is refreshingly straightforward, cutting through the bullshit with alacrity and candour. He loves his work and loves working hard – on the business end of his profession, as well as the creative side – and despite the exquisite refinement of his work, refuses the label “artist”.

“The exploration of who you are as a designer happens in the first few seasons. That is where this fantasy-based wardrobe comes from, because you don’t know who your customer is yet. It’s quite self-indulgent. In the past, learning your craft would take a couple of decades, but I was 24 years old, straight out of St Martins. A kid. So you do all of your exploration while you’re becoming known. It’s the completely wrong way, but it happens. It’s only in the last couple of years that I’ve had a chance to study who my customer is. She’s very varied – thankfully, or else I’d be screwed.”

He says the relationship between designers and these customers is far more intimate now, thanks to the internet, and to trunk shows – one-to-one shopping experiences where customers can meet their favourite designers while seeing the new season’s clothes.

“It’s not elitist any more. Once it was a small group of key journalists telling everybody what they should wear, and then the sheep mildly followed. We care less and less about what those people think, and care more and more about our sales report from Net-A-Porter or the response from the women who actually buy the clothes. It’s a liberating and humbling experience.”

Surely the cost of the clothes weeds out many a potential plebeian customer? The cheapest Jonathan Saunders frocks cost several hundred pounds. “I mean elitist in terms of the connection. No matter how rich you were, you were still told what was fashionable and dictated to by newspapers and magazines. In terms of being able to buy the products, let’s be simple about it. I’m in the wholesale business, at the end of the day. Fashion is costed and sold in exactly the same structure – in fact, with less of a margin as most forms of design – a chair, for example. We make a 60 per cent profit margin. Say I make it for a tenner, sell it for twenty, and the retailer sells it for £60. It’s that ratio.”

Fashion is fickle. Hemlines rise and fall, trousers are skinny then voluminous. The only constant is change. I know designers don’t hold meetings to decide the new trends, so who decrees which colours and shapes will feature in the coming seasons?

Saunders giggles; he knows where this is going. “Fashion is about newness. It’s a reaction against what you’ve just done, and it’s always the antithesis of what you’ve just worked on. In terms of different designers all working on the same thing, I think a lot of it is that you can see a connection in anything if you try hard enough – there are enough collections. So if you look at trend reports, there’ll always be a floral story, there’ll always be a colour blocking story!”

There’s a danger of over-intellectualising his profession, he warns. “Ultimately, we’re trying to sell clothes. We’re trying to get the woman who buys those clothes to buy something completely new the following season. She wants to look different every season. She wants people to know that she’s investing in how she looks. I believe in real clothes, but clothes that have a point of view – it can be about humour, it can be about emotion, how a colour makes you feel. It’s an artistic approach, even though I’m not an artist, to simple clothes.”

Scottish fans will find Saunders’ wares at Harvey Nichols and in Cruise. But he’s full of praise for the high street which, he says, does its job incredibly well, and because of that, encourages designers to make their products really special and unique. “High-street quality is fantastic, and they start off with an infrastructure of massive quantities. There’s no way we can compete in doing a plain black trouser. You have to think about how you dress a woman, whether you’re aesthetic, for certain times, rather than a complete wardrobe. I think that’s where young high-end designer ready-to-wear is blossoming.”

For inspiration, Saunders collects art books, visits museums, and travels, though he jokes that he hasn’t collected too many passport stamps because he was so poor for so long. Working as hard as he does, I wonder where he finds the time to go in search of ideas. Well, he says, excitedly, “It becomes a treat, almost your break from work. The creative side of it is your holiday, because so much of what we require now is problem-solving.”

Where’s he visited recently that fired his imagination? “Tel Aviv. The majority of the Bauhaus school, after the Second World War, moved to Tel Aviv, so wherever you look there’s either a Bauhaus building, or a derivative of [one]. There’s a real energy about that city and a rawness to the art there. It’s the epitome of cool. I love that city.

“And probably one of the most inspiring places I’ve been to is Reykjavik, because of the extremes of colour there. You land on Mars, you drive through Mars – and then you see a British bus stop. You are surrounded by black soil and candy-coloured painted wooden houses. It’s a world of extremes: bright, bright sun, freezing cold light all day, and then dark all day. Everybody is really extreme in their personalities, as well.”

As a younger man, he confesses, he felt fashion design was pretentious, which is why he started out at Glasgow School of Art studying furniture and product design. But his perspective’s altered, now that he understands the practicalities of making garments people can actually wear, and the business savvy required to flog them. “There’s many things in business that I’m not good at, but I’m good at problem-solving and I’m good at making things happen. I read the sales reports every week to see what sold best, and what sold where. Why is it selling, why is that desirable?”

The internet is an important and welcome marketplace. His biggest stockist is Net-A-Porter. “Online retail is a fascinating growth area. There’s no price resistance, which is amazing for me. The positive of being in a store is that you can touch the clothes, try them on and buy them. The negative is that you feel that you’re being watched. Plus, in a recession, you’re working your ass off to get out of it, so [people] have less time available. [The internet] becomes the only option for them. It’s a no-brainer as to why it’s working so well.”

How does he feel about bloggers? Is he resentful that so many “amateurs” are weighing in with their opinions? Just the opposite, it seems. “Bloggers have shown that it’s a law of averages. You have a range of opinions, a more informed vision. I remember speaking to a very important journalist who wrote a bad review of a collection of mine. I saw her a couple of weeks later, and she apologised. She said, ‘I gave you a bad review because I got stuck in traffic for an hour, the seat was uncomfortable, and I was in a really bad mood.’ At the end of the day, there are plenty of designers who get terrible reviews, and they’ve still got a business because they’ve got a customer. You can be a luvvie in the press, but if you don’t sell frocks, you don’t sell frocks.”

Speaking of the internet, where a video can go viral in minutes, its existence makes me wonder why designers bother staging fashion shows any more. They’re expensive, stressful, and short. Surely they’re not worth the effort? He shakes his head and grins with real delight. “For me, the notion is romantic. You’re putting on a show! Come on! For an egomaniac fashion designer? I mean,” he laughs, “it’s a way of controlling all the elements.

“For a young designer who doesn’t have an advertising campaign, it’s really good because you get to see [the clothes] on a woman and see how that look works, and then you get it publicised in loads of magazines, so it’s my form of advertising. I think the concept of fashion shows will become more and more nostalgic and therefore more and more relevant.

“I hope so, because I love doing them. It’s the best part of my job. The lead-up – you think that we have loads of time to create this [but] we basically do it in four weeks. It’s that buzz I get from having an idea and thinking about designing it, then changing it completely, because it doesn’t quite fit and maybe that [idea] works better on a different dress. The next thing you know you’ve done a fitting and you’re doing a show and you can see it. You don’t have time to sit and stare at it. That kind of creative buzz is an amazing experience.”

As, it has to be said, are Jonathan Saunders’ gorgeous clothes.