'I've always thought she was so amazing looking,' Kane says of Ms Versace today. 'I love her hair. I love her make-up. When you see her, she's always matching, she's head-to-toe in black, or head-to-toe in navy. She's all emeralds, or all pearls. And she's got these huge diamonds, like a Harry Winston 19-carat canary yellow diamond, and she's asking whether Tammy [Kane's sister and business partner] wants to try them on.'
Kane's debut catwalk presentation at the London collections last September, meanwhile, met with such positive reviews that none other than Anna Wintour invited Kane to the hotel where she was staying for a personal audience. She too is now an avid admirer, by all accounts.
'I was really intimidated when I first met her,' Kane says of the woman once famously known as Nuclear Wintour, and the driving force behind fledgling careers as diverse as those of John Galliano and Marc Jacobs. 'She's really great, though. She's got great manners and is really supportive of young designers.'
Here's the International Herald Tribune's Suzy Menkes' review of that first show: 'Imagine Marie Antoinette off to the disco in a concoction of lace, frothing like champagne. And that the silhouette of her stretch dress is as curvy as a corset and in neon bright colour. Absolutely fabulous! And that was the verdict on Christopher Kane.' Sarah Mower, writing for the immensely powerful US Vogue website, Style.com, was equally effusive. 'Even before his first vivid-orange, elastic-bandage micro dress hit the runway⿦ Christopher Kane was an international sensation.'
Praise indeed. And it doesn't stop there. The list of those who worked on the collection in question reads like a who's who of international fashion: casting by Russell Marsh (he of Prada fame and the best in the business), make-up by Charlotte Tilbury ( Pop magazine, British, Italian and UK Vogue), shoes by Versace. When Kane turned down a permanent position at Italy's most famous fashion house (yes, really), Donatella was gracious enough to provide him with footwear for his own line, nonetheless. It arrived with a suitably extravagant bouquet of flowers wishing him every success for the future.
Lastly, there is the fact that, however much his star is rising, Kane remains appropriately cash-strapped and sleep-starved to more than live up to Bright Young Designer status. The front room where he lives and works currently smells of nothing more haute than glue. 'Last night I didn't get to bed until 3.30 working on this dress,' Kane says. 'But I made it work in the end. I hated it at the beginning. Tammy's also my fit model and she's trying it on, taking it off, and we hate it. And then, three days later, we love it. We constantly work at it, looking at every detail. We go crazy when we finally get it right.'
The down-side to this already over-hyped state of play is, of course, that Next Big Things tend to become not quite so big - and can even disappear off the face of the earth entirely - just as soon as the next Next Big Thing comes along to fill their shoes. Fashion, it almost goes without saying, searches endlessly for that rare thing - the shock of the new - mercilessly throwing out that which came before it without a trace of a conscience. Perhaps thankfully, then, that which ensures Christopher Kane stands out in the crowd is neither the starry beginning nor the church-mouse financial circumstances, but his talent and, perhaps more importantly, steely ambition. In person, Kane is entirely engaging: on one level as surprised and even overwhelmed by the attention as any 24-year-old might be; on another, he is clever enough to take full advantage of his considerable good fortune without ever allowing himself to get carried away by it. 'I'm always very cautious,' he says. 'I'm scared of the press and of the wrong press particularly.'
Christopher Kane was born on 26 July, 1982 in Newarthill, near Motherwell, in north Lanarkshire. The youngest of five children, his mother stayed at home while his father - who died five years ago - was an engineer and draughtsman. Kane remembers that even as a small child he was positively obsessed with his sisters' wardrobes. 'They were always in the house and they were always immaculate,' he says. 'Tammy was a fashion plate. She wore this great John Galliano T-shirt, really early on. She still has it.' Her brother, meanwhile, a self-confessed hoarder, and judging by what he describes as his own 'plain' taste in dress nowhere near so flamboyant, saved up his pocket money to buy his elder sibling a rose pink, wet-look Versace mini-dress to wear to her school's leaving dance. 'She was 17,' Kane says. 'I was 12. The boys were all like that⿦' For his part, Kane first knew that his future was in fashion when he saw the aforementioned Galliano's graduate collection one Sunday afternoon on the now-defunct BBC Clothes Show. 'I know it sounds cheesy and dreamy,' the designer explains, 'but then it just clicked.' As if on cue, an enviably lithe Tammy, dressed today, perhaps sadly, in skinny jeans and stripy T-shirt, enters the room: 'It's just all both of us ever wanted to do,' she says.
Kane wasn't much interested in his contemporaries at the local primary and secondary schools where he was educated, he says. Instead, he hung around the art department. 'My teacher really supported me. I never really socialised with anyone except her. She was funny, and she was normal, and she always encouraged me to do different things.'
Aged 18, Kane followed Tammy, five years his senior and by then in possession of her own degree in fashion, to London where he completed a foundation course in fine art at Saint Martins, then a fashion BA and, finally, the prestigious MA. At the same time, the designer worked with more established names including the maverick Russell Sage and Giles Deacon, whose own first show was a fashion happening that could teach a budding Next Big Thing how to reach for the stars if ever there was one. Kane was suitably impressed by Deacon's supermodel line-up (Linda Evangelista, Karen Elson and Nadja Auermann all walked the walk for his first season) and unusually ambitious presentation with statement clothing to match. 'All that luxe, those models, those amazing shoes,' he remembers.
Fast forward to his own first collection and Kane, displaying a degree of self-deprecation as charming as it is perhaps not entirely convincing, attributes at least part of its success to luck.
'It was a continuation of my MA because that's what everyone expected,' he explains. 'I thought I'd do it brighter - bright, bright, bright. It was a summer collection so I just thought the shorter the better and the brighter the better. I came across the elastic by chance, in a really dodgy haberdasher in Shepherd's Bush. I just wanted to do a small collection of dresses, stricter, and with more binding and stretch. So that was it. I suppose that, with those colours, it was a bold statement. I did that on instinct but after seeing the New York collections the week before I showed mine in London and it all being really dark that was quite good. No one was expecting that first dress, that neon orange dress, so everyone was like⿦' He affects a gasp.
In fact, even given a world famed for its attraction to shiny, happy, objects, it would be fair to say that not just any old neon-orange dress would have had the same effect. Kane's was indeed dazzlingly bright and so brief only the very brave would ever be inclined to wear it. Constructed entirely out of horizontal strips of elastic, with a delicate, pale flesh-coloured lace trim and full-length zip from hemline to throat, it was also a feat of technical engineering that harked back to the 'clothing as no mess alternative to plastic surgery' aesthetic designed by Azzedine Alaïa in his heyday. In Kane's hands, orange gave way to neon yellow, to lime, to peacock blue, rose, raspberry, poppy red and more in a display of rainbow colour that brought the work of southern French couturier Christian Lacroix to mind. Wheels of more elastic, ensuring the perfect fit at the hips, and winsome ruffled embellishment were all Kane's invention, however, and noteworthy for it.
If much has been made in the few months following this first presentation of Kane's debt to the power-driven 1980s, it is perhaps worth mentioning that this is a rather more determinedly youthful offering than that. Certainly, Kane sees it that way. 'It's designed to be worn by beautiful young girls, with messed up hair and not much make-up,' he explains. What the designer does share with those who rose to fame in the decade that made shoulder-pads so wide they barely fitted through the door, however, is an unashamedly elitist stance that decrees that over-exposure is a dangerous beast indeed. Kane's clothes are currently only stocked in five of the most exclusive designer fashion outlets the world over - including Browns in London, Maria Luisa in Paris and 10 Corso Como in Milan.
'I want to set up my brand slowly,' the designer says. 'I'd rather put my energy into the next collection than spend all my time producing this one in large quantities.' With this in mind, next week, at the autumn/winter 2007 London collections, Kane's second show will be among the most hotly anticipated. Although he is first to admit that this time round clothing is hardly likely to be relentlessly dark or - heaven forbid - baggy, he does say that he's moving his signature forward. 'I don't want people to think that I'm a one-trick pony,' the designer confirms. Inspiration pictures stuck to one wall provide clues to the nature of the forthcoming proceedings, although of the abstract variety. There's Sylvester Stallone in Rambo ('it's not too literal, it's not like the girl's going to come out wearing a dress with a gun strapped to it'), Vivien Leigh in Gone With The Wind ('as my Mum would put it, she got an Oscar for screeching in that film, she's a spoilt brat') and, rather more politely, a postcard of Paul Delaroche's The Execution of Lady Jane Grey (because 'the colours are similar,' Kane says).
Still, more statement dressing is only to be expected, all created in-house by a team of no more than a handful of people and looked over by Kane's meticulous eye. Given the high-octane nature of his viewpoint, as our interview draws to a close, Kane admits that he would hate for any of his dresses to fall into the wrong hands - any publicity is not good publicity in this instance, it seems. Putting his money where his mouth is and mentioning no names the designer has already turned away some of the more obvious celebrities who came calling to borrow his clothes, preferring to dress industry-insiders instead. 'You know what, I don't want to sound presumptuous but I've worked too hard for my stuff to be seen on the front of the Sun newspaper,' Kane argues. 'I'm worried that that would affect my credibility. You can just imagine them saying 'She'd stop an aeroplane in that yellow dress' can't you?'
Christopher Kane pauses before adding, if only as an afterthought: 'Come to think of it, wouldn't it be quite funny if they said that? Wouldn't it be quite funny if they said 'She'd stop an aeroplane in that yellow dress'. It would be like⿦'
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