BY HER own admission, Holly Fulton was never really considered the Girl Most Likely To. Studying for her fashion degree at Edinburgh College of Art, then her Masters at the RCA in London, her classmates and possibly even her tutors didn't have her down as the go-it-alone kind of girl.
And yet, here she stands, two and a half years after launching her own label, beloved by celebrities including Jessie J, Jaime Winstone and Ellie Goulding, and about to show her spring/summer 2012 collection at London Fashion Week. You could safely say the girl has proved all her detractors wrong.
When we speak, there is still a fortnight to go before fashion week and everything in the studio is relatively calm.
If your idea of calm means working 14 or more hours a day in the middle of a major building renovation, when your printers won't return to their desks until a week before one of the biggest events of your career. No pressure then.
"At the moment I get into the studio at about 8am," she says matter-of-factly, "and it shuts at 10pm. Then I'll draw and things when I get home. So it's quite busy." Understatement.
"But no matter how far ahead you plan, it will never work out the way you'd like. The big issue we have for this season is that the main printer we're using is in Italy and they don't open until 5 September.
So, basically, we're on hold until we can get any prints from them. The majority of what we're doing won't happen until the last week before the show because we won't get most of our stuff until 12 September. That obviously makes for a fairly intense week.
"Unfortunately we currently have a lot of building work going on in the studio as well, so it's all go. Maximum disruption. Not ideal."
Born in Edinburgh, Fulton joined Lanvin as accessories designer after finishing art school, before branching out on her own and debuting in London in February 2009.
Famed for her iconic use of art deco, geometric prints and vibrant colours, her previous collections have channelled the girls in the Robert Palmer videos, Coco Chanel in Scotland and Joan Collins. But, really, she likes nothing more than seeing the average Josephine made a little less average by wearing her eye-catching creations.
"There's usually some woman behind a collection," she says, "and it's not always an obvious choice. But that's deliberate because I'd never want to say it was set on one particular woman; I'd like to think it has a bit more diversity than that, with a lot of different elements that people could come at and enjoy wearing."
Her spring/summer 2012 collection is based on "the idea of the character of Sharon Stone from the film Casino spending a weekend in Margate; the combination of her style in the early part of that film – a bit of a luxe 1970s look – combined with the kitsch of Margate.
There's quite a strong nautical theme about it and quite a lot of marine references, possibly not in the literal way, but just in terms of the embellishment."
A major reference point for many of the pieces is Margate's famous Shell Grotto, combined with "sentimental shell jewellery that sailors had made", translating into heavy embellishment to compliment Fulton's signature prints.
"I'm going back to a lot of the geometric prints I did when I started out – my main love is hand-drawing and all that side of things, and this collection is very print-based. But I'd like to think it's quite a three-dimensional collection, in that it features what I love best in the prints, with the embellishment on top of that to create an almost trompe l'oeil effect.
"I'm also working with a lot of pure colour – spring/ summer is a strong theme for me because it is so colour- based. There's a strong black-and-white theme running through it, and there's a really large blue contingent, but I'll always go back to black-and-yellow because that's just my all-time favourite colour combination."
Yellow? For a Scot? Surely the worst shade for the sickly Celtic pallor.
"I'm quite dark with dark eyes," she laughs.
"Obviously I'm completely pale because I'm Scottish, but I think yellow just has a real strength about it. I hadn't really come round to it until my mum gave me a huge yellow jacket for my Christmas one year and I was a bit dubious, but I just became addicted to it."
However, her main inspiration, the thing she always goes back to and from what most of what she does is generated, is her first love: drawing.
"I wouldn't initially know exactly what a set of prints is going to look like but I'll draw them all to scale, generate them digitally and take it from there, and that will often dictate what it ends up being on the catwalk."
A self-confessed, bona fide hoarder, she surrounds herself with objects she has picked up along the way, whether that be books or fabrics or unusual pieces of jewellery.
It's not untidy, but there's lots and lots of stuff. In her studio, part of London College of Fashion, an eclectic selection of images lines the walls, there are bottles of water lying around and bits and pieces for the collection are starting to arrive.
"Obviously the line-up for the show is on the wall along with all the fabric swatches, and any embellishment we have is put up as well so that we can keep track of everything visually.
"I'm a shocking hoarder," she adds. "The problem is, it's most things; it's not that selective. I have a huge collection of jewellery, a lot of books. It probably stems from my family, in that my parents are quite extensive collectors. Not things in particular but anything that aesthetically appeals.
"If something has a great colour, it doesn't matter if it's a vase or a shirt, I'll probably want to have it. Or if the print combination is interesting or if there's just something that catches the eye, I'm not very good at refusing that."
But for all that she likes to have "a lot of objects" around her, that doesn't extend to her admin.
"I think, especially when you're working in a space that isn't as large as you would like, you have to be quite organised to keep on top of it. I guess as I've learned more about the business side of running a label, it really pays to have everything in hand, because it turns into a nightmare if you have paperwork everywhere. If you can keep all that in an organised format it does make life an awful lot easier."
Most of her bits and pieces are currently shoe-horned into a couple of premises in London. "I still have a lot of stuff up in Scotland at my parents' house", she groans, "much to their chagrin; it's still sitting around there until I graduate on to something a little bit larger down here."
But before she can get round to sorting out the boxes in her parents' attic, she has fashion week to deal with. And this year she hopes she might even get to enjoy some of it as a spectator instead of just a participant.
"This time, because my show's on the Sunday (today] – in previous years I've always been on the Monday – I'm hoping I might actually get to see a couple of things. I'll still have two days after mine to catch up. It's interesting to see your peers; I'm always interested to see what Christopher Kane does. He has such a strong thematic link in each collection; it's quite a fascinating approach. And obviously Tom Ford's coming this year and everyone will be excited to see what he generates in London."
But, with family and friends in town to see her show, she adds, "In some ways I'd prefer to spend my time catching up with them rather than doing fashiony things. I'm possibly not on dazzling form anyway, having been up for 72 hours."
Besides, she'll have no more than a week of down time before she heads to Paris to do all the selling on the back of her catwalk show, then it's New York's turn. "Most of October gets absorbed just dealing with the PR fallout from the collection," she says. "Hopefully I'll manage to get away at some point, at least for a couple of days' respite. I'm quite keen to go back to Edinburgh because I haven't been up for a while."
Another factor that is luring her north is a forthcoming knitwear collaboration with Scottish mill Caerlee, in Innerleithen, which is launching this season.
"But obviously it's not an appropriate season to be doing knitwear so we're just doing a few pieces to get the relationship going, then I'll be maximising that for autumn/winter. That's another reason I'd like to come back up to Scotland: to catch up with them and visit the mill again. It's important to me to go there in person and see people face to face and see their working methods."
So everything in the fashion garden is looking pretty rosy for Fulton. Is she representative of the industry as a whole in the UK? "I've had my label for about two and a half years and I've had a wealth of support," she says enthusiastically.
"I couldn't really ask to be backed any more or to have any more funding. I've been very lucky in the direction my career has taken. There are always glitches, of course, but based on my time in Paris and seeing what young designers get over there, I think we're in quite a strong position in the UK and there is a genuine international interest in what we're doing here.
"If you go, for example, to New York, to the showrooms, they will all turn out to see what we're doing, even though designers over there probably have a much more substantial business infrastructure, whereas here we're known more for creativity. And that's not a bad thing. I do think we need to be better at business, but if you have the creativity you can follow on from that."
As to the news that another big-name Scottish designer, Pam Hogg, is leaving London to take her collections to Paris, Fulton says, "This is where it started for me and this is where the people who are important to me are based, so I wouldn't want to leave or relocate my team. I think it's good to stick to your roots, so it seems right to stay."
So has she got advice for young designers starting out? "Never be discouraged and learn to take criticism. I had a massive amount of negative criticism before I started my own label. No one would have ever picked me as the one who would go out on their own.
"But you have to stay true to what you believe. You have to have your style and stand by it because people will tell you it's not appropriate or it could be better. But if you have a genuine belief that what you do is good and you know what you want to represent, stick with that and face the criticism and learn to deal with it. Because you will come across it all the way along."
This article was first published in Scotland On Sunday, 18 September, 2011
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