10 years of Mary Katrantzou: the designer talks showstoppers, dressing Michelle Obama and her ultimate inspiration

Dresses don’t normally look like Fabergé eggs, or tessellated Duplo bricks, or typewriters gone haywire.

Brocaded suits don’t generally resemble banknotes. Lampshades aren’t usually skirts. But for 10 years now London designer Mary Katrantzou, 35, has designed for women who wear said eggs and eccentricities with verve and panache. They include Cate Blanchett, who opened the 71st Cannes Film Festival as jury president in a gown by Katrantzou, devised as a half-finished page from a paint-by-numbers book, only with the colour hand-embroidered (it took six months to complete). ‘She’s the big one,’ says Katrantzou.

‘I’ve wanted to dress her for a long time. Meeting her, I was a bit awestruck. Celebrity doesn’t usually have that effect on me at all.’ Which is good, as she also counts Keira Knightley, Taylor Swift and Sarah Jessica Parker as fans. Other more eccentric customers include the flamboyant Italian fashion editor Anna Dello Russo and a Canadian socialite who buys Katrantzou by the collection rather than the item.

Katrantzou has designed some of the boldest clothing in fashion since her debut a decade ago. Her hyper-realistic photoshopped collages of pattern are painstakingly engineered to the female form through digital print, then elaborated with embroideries, specially woven jacquards and custom lace. Yet the designer herself almost exclusively wears an ascetic wardrobe of black Azzedine Alaïa skater dresses. ‘When you’re in this industry, you’re surrounded by really beautiful things, but from such different aesthetics,’ she says. ‘On a day-to-day basis, we make so many decisions on colour, on pattern, on form, that you don’t want to make those decisions for yourself.’ She shakes her head, laughing. ‘It’s like, I don’t want to decide what to have for dinner!’

Katrantzou was born in Athens in 1983. Her grandfather was Nikos Katrantzou, the goalkeeper of Aris Thessaloniki FC. When he retired, he began importing sports shoes and founded a chain of department stores, Katrantzou Spor, which was one of the biggest in Greece. Her father trained as a textile engineer, but an arson attack destroyed the department store flagship so he quit the business for a career in security. Her mother is an interior designer — her connections helped Katrantzou get some of her early jewellery manufactured (there’s a reason some of her first necklaces looked like door-knockers).

Katrantzou herself studied textile design at Central Saint Martins, intending to work in interiors, hence her obsession with translating unlikely objets d’art and interior scenes on to her garments. I first met her backstage after her MA show — a pupil of the famously strict late professor Louise Wilson, her collection had been chosen to open the graduation ceremony, a position of honour. It was composed of brief, block-coloured bonded jersey dresses printed with enormous, fantastical constructivist necklaces. The idea was that they were too big to be real, until Katrantzou made them so, in a final surreal twist. The graphics, though — the prints — did all the talking.

The next season she presented in London and took her dresses to Paris to sell. It was September 2008, as Lehman Brothers was crashing. Against all odds, her clothes sold. ‘I told my parents, “If I sell 30 dresses, it’s an extreme success.” In the end I sold much more than that… I didn’t even take my order forms with me. I was writing my orders on the back of my press releases.’ She was in business.

Today, Katrantzou is flushed with recent investment (the Chinese heiress-turned-investor Wendy Yu acquired a minority stake in October last year), with a staff of around 30 and a studio in London’s East End. ‘I think in a lot of fashion cities, you just don’t get the opportunity that you get in London,’ she says. ‘First, it’s a launch pad. Then you’re part of a generation, or between generations of designers, where you feel you’re part of a dialogue. So what you see around you, that inspires you. The creatives you befriend. I think other cities don’t have that new voice coming in that allows you to maybe look at your work again…’ she stops. ‘My aesthetic has been reshaped and reformed by studying in London, and living here. What I consider tasteful now has nothing to do with what I considered tasteful in Greece.’

She is currently preparing for a show celebrating her 10th anniversary. There’s also a capsule collection with Matchesfashion.com, a selection of 10 dresses from across her history specially reissued — starting with a look from her graduation show. A far savvier businesswoman today, she not only has order forms but has sold the commercial bulk of the collection already, offering it to buyers several months ahead of her London Fashion Week catwalk show. That exercise is now much more about show-stoppers, like that Cate Blanchett dress. Only she doesn’t have six months to create them; rather, when we meet, four weeks and counting. She shows me through the collection — an ode to her own rich heritage, and the women and objects that inspire her. But that’s as much as I’m allowed to say. ‘A collection about collectables,’ is her official sound bite. There’s not much black.

There is, however, plenty of print, though she claims to be image-led. ‘Textile is still an image,’ she says. ‘Brocade still stems from an image. We create an artwork. We’re lucky enough to work with amazing mills in the world that can take an idea and a graphic and create the most beautiful fabrics.’ The prints that form the basis for each pattern and fabric are devised using Photoshop and the designer works on every single one. ‘I don’t like to be pigeonholed,’ she says. ‘But more than anything it was my inquisitive nature wanting to try new things, and see how my aesthetic, my vision, filters through other techniques.’

Over the course of her career Katrantzou has built a thriving multi-million-pound business fusing high fashion with wit and panache, that links her right back to Elsa Schiaparelli through Franco Moschino and Christian Lacroix. Their clothes were excessive, vibrant, bold and playful. So are Katrantzou’s. When Cate Blanchett steps out in a Katrantzou dress, people don’t laugh. They gasp.

It was Katrantzou who gasped, however, when Michelle Obama stepped off Air Force One in July 2014 in one of her dresses, which the First Lady had bought herself. ‘You do have small moments when you feel your work is appreciated by somebody you appreciate,’ she recalls. ‘And that’s a very nice moment. It’s very rewarding. You’re like, “Oh wow, that person I admire is a Mary Katrantzou woman.”’ How would she characterise that elusive ‘woman’ — whom many designers mythologise but seldom elucidate accurately? ‘She’s bold,’ she begins, immediately. ‘She’s very confident. She’s well-travelled…’ Katrantzou knows this woman; she visits many of her clients, from Dallas to Doha, designing bespoke wedding dresses and event looks. ‘They’re amazing women. I have never met someone who buys my work who I didn’t think is amazing. They lead very interesting lives,’ she says. ‘And I feel honoured that they choose my work.

Video by Daniel Lowenstein www.lowensteinphotofilm.com/