GOING GRAPHIC
ABOVE: MARY KATRANTZOU’S READY- TO- WEAR SPRING/ SUMMER 2014 COLLECTION FOCUSES ON BRIGHT TROMPE L’OEIL DIGITAL PRINTS
they would be on the female form. It was a challenge because as soon as you put a print on a body, everything changes. But it was also a lot more exciting than working with curtains.”
After completing her undergraduate course, she began an MA in fashion at CSM under the tutelage of Fleet Bigwood. “Mary arrived at CSM with no real knowledge of fashion but with an amazing sense of colour that was completely instinctive and at times very beautiful,” says Bigwood, the school’s head of print. “Her output was prolific. We could have a tutorial on Tuesday and by Friday she would have 30 swatches designed to a very high standard. However, her relevance to fashion remained weak, so I suggested she look at the work of an airbrush artist from the 1970s called Michael English. This was the turning point that allowed her to create the hyper-real effects she later gained so much success with.”
In 2008, Katrantzou left CSM with a distinction but found herself in the midst of a recession and in an industry still obsessed with the Phoebe Philo genre of minimalism. “When I started, print was niche,” Katrantzou says. “People wore floral or geometric but they weren’t used to ‘wearing’ a perfume bottle.”
Topshop rescued her from obscurity by sponsoring her show at London Fashion Week in 2009, and it was there that she garnered a reputation for being something of a print magician. The industry was captivated by her ability to create hyper-real patterns from the most unlikely subject matter—fabergé eggs, pencils, spoons, vases, teacups— and then place them on bold structural shapes that managed to be both ultra-modern and flattering. When Anna Dello Russo was featured on The Sartorialist blog in a Mary Katrantzou perfume bottleprint dress, the designer’s career went stratospheric. “Anna has been a great supporter of mine,” Katrantzou says. “She is very daring and brave in her dressing, and is such a champion of young design talent.”
Today, Katrantzou is one of Neta-porter’s best-selling designers and her collections are available in more than 200 shops across 47 countries. Collaborations with Topshop, Longchamp and, most recently, Adidas have sold out in a matter of days, and the designer counts Keira Knightley, Rihanna, Sarah Jessica Parker and every fashion editor worth their