Interview: Louise Gray, fashion designer

AS ANOTHER London Fashion Week ends, our special issue has all you need to know about spring/summer essentials. And no designer captures the colourful essence of the season more than Scotland’s Louise Gray

LOUISE Gray has just come backstage following her triumphant spring/summer 2012 show, held in the old Eurostar terminal at Waterloo. It's a dramatic setting for an even more dramatic collection – the runway set across the disused rails, the glazed, arched ceiling acting as a constantly changing backdrop as the sun disappears behind the industrial landscape outside.

But while the skies threaten rain, inside, Gray's palette is anything but grey. One of the most exciting designers who shows at London Fashion Week, her trademark is a vibrant mix of colours, prints and textures, all seemingly thrown together to create a mad, dressing-up-box feel. “It's how my mother taught me to dress," she says, “everything matches if you like it.”

She's clearly buzzing, smiling broadly, laughing often, her eyes sparkling as she meets and greets friends and colleagues. Maybe that sparkle has something to do with the bright blue and gold eye make-up she's wearing too. Blonde hair piled on top of her head and wearing a shimmering turquoise, green, pink and orange tunic (“It’s vintage,” she says), she is tiny – almost fragile-looking but with a steely inner strength – and is probably the best advert for colour it’s possible to get.

I silently wonder how all that quirky, explosive style would go down back in her hometown of Fraserburgh. Small towns are notoriously unforgiving of anyone who stands out. And one thing is for sure: Gray stands out in a crowd. She is nothing if not an antidote to the dreich Scottish winter.

Her collection sees tribal prints mixed with patchwork coats and chiffon overskirts; corkscrew curls tied up with oversized scarves and a flash of neon eyeliner finishing the look. There are sequins and embroidery, socks worn with platform sandals, and lots of layering. The models can’t help but swagger as they walk down the runway to an attitude-heavy remix of Gwen Stefani’s ‘Rich Girl’.

Inspired by strong, independently minded women – the list includes the artist Vali Myers, Gypsy Rose Lee, Gala Dali and Poly Styrene – Gray says, “There is silk, screen printing, velvet devoré, voile. It's for a girl and a woman. It's about a mentality.

“It is a mixed bag of things,” she adds. “I went back to the beginning and used the embroidery work from my MA collection. I was also trying to simplify things. I looked through my wardrobe at all the things I wear anyway. I was thinking about sportswear but wanted to make it as wearable as possible.”

Sponsored for the last three seasons by Cotton USA, and for spring/summer 2012 part of the prestigious Topshop Newgen platform, Gray has most recently won the British Fashion Council’s 2012 Fashion Forward initiative (Jonathan Saunders, Erdem and Christopher Kane are all previous winners, so she’s in illustrious company). Add to that a recent collaboration with cashmere label Brora and a commission from the V&A to design iPad covers and it’s only a matter of time before this girl goes stellar. She is a worthy heir to Dame Vivienne Westwood’s throne, a true fashion maverick.

Born in Fraserburgh, Gray left home at 17 to study textiles at Glasgow School of Art, then completed an MA at Central Saint Martins in London (Christopher Kane was a classmate). She cites her fashion idols as Mary Quant and Coco Chanel (“She was amazing. I love her, and she is one of the first reasons that I wanted to start doing fashion stuff”), and the girl who wears her clothes, she says, is “someone who is fun”.

She has always been this way; always loved playing with colour, from her earliest childhood days spent outside in the fields surrounding her Aberdeenshire home. “The Scottish landscape is really nice,” she says, “but then in the winter it can be really depressing. It’s a mixture of seeing all the nice colours and imagining what could be there too. When you’re boxed up in your house and it’s snowing, it’s as much dreaming as what you are surrounded by. I know that I’m obsessed with colour. When I close my eyes I see everything in colour. When I was at art school I dressed insane. Like I learned how to get dressed in the dark, but that was the funnest thing.”

Brought up in a remote house, she and her sisters would play at dressing up in her mum’s “hilariously 1980s bits, and romp around the fields. We also used to wear old clothes and go and throw mud at each other”. Early musical influences included Michael Jackson and Madonna. “My mum really wanted me to be into Take That. I think she thought it was quite strange that I wasn’t. But I cut off the fingers of my lace bridesmaid’s gloves to be like Madonna.

“I remember choosing all my outfits – I always wanted pink and yellow, and everything not matching – and I was obsessed with getting my ears pierced but my mum wouldn’t let me. So with my pocket money I’d buy all these really big dangly earrings and wear them on my clothes and go to the roller disco with loads of jingle-jangle on.”

The move to Glasgow at 17 was an early sign of her precocious independence, yet by the time she graduated from Central Saint Martins the last thing she expected was to see her own name in lights. Rather, she thought she would begin work for someone else. But her bold eye for colour was picked up by Lulu Kennedy, the fairy godmother behind the Fashion East platform, which provides designers with funding. PR support and advice. Gray’s eponymous label was duly launched into an unsuspecting world in 2010. It was called ‘Get Some Stuff’ and featured bottle-top-embellished shoulders, multi-coloured streamer headwear and bags of popcorn. “I don’t want to design dresses just because they sell,” she maintains. “I like to have fun with it.”

And fun she has. But it’s a tough business road, strewn with the bodies of those who have failed before her. Is there also an element of competition? Does Christopher Kane pinch her favourite fabric samples the minute her back is turned? Or Holly Fulton give her a Chinese burn as they pass each other in the corridors of Somerset House? “There is no competition between us,” she insists, “and I like that. I remember when I was starting out, calling every person that I knew and being like, ‘Hi, where do I get buttons?’ I think it’s because we all know it’s not easy, so it just seems natural that everyone would get along because you’re all in the same boat and pushing for each other.”

Fast forward to today, and Gray has just shown her autumn/winter collection in London. Never far from her Scottish roots, the pre-show snacks include champagne and haggis toasties. And while fashion-watchers suggested she may have reined in her infamous ‘more is more’ remit, looking at an increasingly commercial vibe, there is still plenty of colour and clashing pattern.

Taking inspirating from two more strong women, Cyndi Lauper and Debbie Harry, as well as her three of her favourite things – clubs, nightlife and nail bars – it sees graphic prints and stripes, and lots of metalics, while much of the madness is in the layering and the styling – oversized mohawk headdresses and stiletto wellington boots (the former by Nasir Mazhar, the latter by her longtime footwear collaborator Nicholas Kirkwood).

One thing’s for sure, as long as Louise Gray is around, British fashion will never be dull.

• louisegraylondon.com