The reputation of Prof Louise Wilson, OBE, the 50-year-old director of the fashion MA course at Central Saint Martins, precedes her, so I recognise her response to my opening gambit as what we'll call Classic Wilson.
'Well, that's not a good question to start with, is it?' she huffs loudly from behind her desk. 'How am I feeling after the MA show? Hasn't stopped. Haven't had a day off, have I? And now I've got a new assessment form being presented to me that I can't understand. With 32 learning outcomes and…' She continues for several minutes in her stroppy boom, a deep Scots-turned-Estuary accent that's all dropped Ts like a teenager might affect.
There aren't many people I enjoy being upbraided by, but having heard so many stories of Wilson's wall-trembling yelling from young British designers - household names, mind, who still pull scared faces when they talk of her - I relish a glimpse of her scorn. When she tells me she will hunt me down and shoot me if I report anything of her rant against the shortcomings of the fancy new building in King's Cross into which the college moved last year I feel like part of an elite gang. 'The red beret' she calls it when you've completed her two-year course. 'We've been through something together and we all recognise what we went through and it does create a bond,' she says. 'It doesn't mean we all have to love each other but there's a camaraderie.'
Formidable she is, shouting away behind that desk in her all-black garb, a 10ft wall behind her covered in flashy fashion show invitations from her former students and postcards bearing rude slogans (same s- different year; we have nothing to say and we're saying it - 'that summed up this year') and yet she's got minders - Jo from the press office and Fleet Bigwood, a textiles designer and head of the print course, to guide me', she says. 'Because without Fleet the course wouldn't exist. He's my best friend, he's worked with me since the beginning and he never gets any credit. He's also Mr Calm to Mrs Crazy.' Yin and yang, as Fleet prefers to put it.
At Buckingham Palace with her partner, Timmi, after receiving her OBE
Outside her office the outgoing MA class is swimming around the studio preparing stands for the end-of-year static exhibition. I meet some of them afterwards and I'm surprised at how shy, humble and vulnerable these talented young people seem to be. Maybe that's what two years in this place does. I ask Wilson how she'd sum them up and she looks at me, baffled.
'While they are here they are not formed beings doing the most perfect work,' she states precisely. 'They're insecure, some of them are untalented, some of them are lazy, some of them are talented but can't focus their work, others are poor, others are having nervous breakdowns… Probably next week, when that exhibition is up, you can sit back and reflect, "They did well there." But the journey to get there is nothing short of insurmountable with the resources, so I can't really say how they are as a year. This fallacy that they are all these interesting people when they come… Woah, no.'
Later I see Wilson's pedagogic touch in action with Hellen van Rees, a student whose womenswear collection was inspired by cityscapes and created out of a fabric studded with blocks and cuboids. 'She used second-hand fabric, took it all apart, and she made new fabric with it by gluing it, by hand, so there are no seams within that clothing,' says Wilson. 'And it cost her nothing apart from her sanity obviously.' She calls in Van Rees. 'Have you got one of those things with no seams?' Van Rees scurries over with a garment. 'A f- skirt? Have you not got something with some bloody blocks on? Christ, who wants to see a f- skirt?'
A jacket is hastily produced. 'You see, there are no seams on any of those blocks…'It is amazing up close. Thousands of threads for this one piece. She must have been making it for months, I say. 'I had helpers,' murmurs Van Rees.
'Who got the helpers?' snaps Wilson.
'My mum helped me…'
'WHO GOT THE FIRST BATCH OF HELPERS?'
'You did.'
'Thank you. But when you see the work up close it's seamless, it's got a beauty to it. You know, if old Karl [Lagerfeld] whipped that up he'd be happy.' All that verbal slapping around and then she only goes and compares your work to that of one of the greatest living designers. Really, the CIA could learn a thing or two from Louise Wilson.
These days, thanks to the success of its ex-pupils, the words Central Saint Martins summon up a place of crystal-embellished glamour. Most of our well-known British designers - Alexander McQueen, Phoebe Philo, Christopher Kane, Jonathan Saunders - graduated from the MA course, along with stylists and journalists. As a result there is a tendency to think of it as a kind of glitzy staging-post for ready-made stars rather than a cuts-damaged educational institution that is not only fighting to survive (in desperation, last year Wilson launched a fund and invited fashion houses to pledge £20,000 each to the course) but is a place of intense slog. 'It's bloody hard work,' says Wilson.
Christopher Kane's MA show in 2006 Photo: REX FEATURES
It is March when we meet. October to March is considered 'show period' when the second-year students are building up to the catwalk show that takes place during London Fashion Week. (With 20 students showing a total of 229 looks, and 70 models, it is the biggest of the week). During these months Wilson, who has suffered from breast cancer and famously worked through the treatment, works from 9am to 8pm or later every day. Her PA, Debbie, vouches for this. 'And that's without lunch,' says Wilson. 'It's not something to be proud of, but you have to work those hours to get through it.' Anyway, it's realistic, she says. 'They're the hours a design director would be working. They're the hours I used to work.'
Wilson grew up in Scotland, the daughter of a gentleman farmer, and went to art college before doing the same MA course in the 1980s. She had a grant, wore the eyeliner, danced at Taboo, the lot. Now her students are 'doing the 1980s'. 'When I was at college we did the 1960s and my course director Bobby always used to say, "Oh God, it was much better than that, darling. I had my hair cut at Leonard's." And I do always check myself when I think, "Oh, for f- sake, Yohji [Yamamoto] was much better than that!" You try and keep yourself not clichéed.'
After graduating Wilson worked in Hong Kong as a designer and consultant, returned to Central Saint Martins to teach in 1992 and from 1997 spent two years working in New York as Donna Karan's design director. Her partner, Timmi, and young son, Tim, stayed at home in north London. In 1999 she came back as course director. This year she celebrated 20 years since joining the faculty at the college. In that time she has been witness to huge changes in education, the most significant of which she says was the abolition of student grants.
'It is the anomaly of the world to me because grants not only enabled people from different backgrounds to come, but it also enabled the art teachers to encourage the bright kid to go to art colleges,' she says. 'But you'd be hard-pushed to do that now when they've got to lay out 30 grand. And because you were on a grant you could take risks and have a bit of fun, which to me is a big part of it, and you weren't poverty-stricken and working in Starbucks all the time so you could mess up. But now it's almost that you can't mess up because you've paid all this money or you've got a loan, so you're desperate to find out what you have to "do". As I keep saying, there is nothing you have to do.'
She mentions a journalist she's just met who, in like spirit, asked what the secret of becoming a designer was. 'Like how to make a muffin or how to make the perfect tart. Well, that's a secret society,' she says. 'Why has everyone got to know how to do it? We're always fighting against that.'
Jonathan Saunders has said that what Wilson encourages above all else is originality. She pushes and pushes until your idea becomes no one's but your own. But she won't have the process pinned down even to that. 'You work with them, you discuss ideas and you push them a bit harder and at the end of it you just see what happens,' she says. 'But in doing that they have an awareness of their market and what they'd like to do. We're quite brutal to some. We say, "You'll never be more than the most perfect assistant," but there's nothing wrong with that. There are not going to be 40 creatives going to the top level.'
Wilson with the designer Phoebe Philo, a former student. Photo: CAMERA PRESS
So they don't all think they're going to be star designers? 'I've never come across a designer with their own label who wanted their own label when they came here. Because the truly talented usually have a humility or a lack of confidence, so that would be the last thing on their minds.'
Although she is happy to point out that 57.6 per cent of their graduates show under their own labels at London Fashion Week, she also stresses that those who go into other jobs within the industry are as important. 'Kim Jones, menswear director at Louis Vuitton, Christopher Lundman at Acne, Frances Howie at Stella McCartney…
The head of Levi's is from us, we have people go to Adidas. I hate the idea that people come thinking they're going to be the next Alexander McQueen. Alexander McQueen didn't know he was going to be Alexander McQueen. And that was all about Isabella [Blow] seeing his collection. You could be brilliant and it be the wrong time for you.'
She stays in touch with many of her ex-students. 'Oh yes, I quite like seeing them. Not that they produce any handbags that I can have - I did think I should have had a garment made for me [by them] every season and then have a big sale on my deathbed. No, I like a lot of them: Jonathan [Saunders], Christopher [Kane], Louise [Gray]. I mean it is a privilege - I like more than those three by the way - it's a privilege to be around youth. It keeps you young in your thinking.'
Three outfits by this year's students. Photo: REX FEATURES
She shows me 10 or so place cards from a Topshop dinner where almost all the designers in attendance were her ex-students. Was she proud? 'No. Not proud. Greedy would be a word. Greedy. Show-offy I could sometimes be accused of.'
'But we have to do it again,' says Fleet.
'We have to do it again!' Wilson agrees.
She is a workaholic, it seems, but she also talks about how the job takes its toll. Later, when she mentions again her lack of lunch hour, she suggests her illness has returned. 'I mean, for f- sake I'm a grown adult suffering from breast cancer and I can't get to a door to go out into the fresh air,' she yells. Can't you change something, I ask, alarmed. 'I managed to get a printer for Debbie, that was a bloody miracle.' For her health, I mean. She bats me off. 'What would I do? I can't imagine taking up running. I'm not going to do needlework. I've got a gardener now. What do others do? It's very bad but I do enjoy my job.'
She pauses. 'Actually, that sounds a bit radical. But the industry is a wonderful industry. It gets slammed but I've rarely met a person I don't like, and I mean that. And the other privilege of being in education is that it gives you an autonomy. I don't have to sell anything. People think I'm rude. I'm not rude, I'm just not networking, it's just honesty. In Who's Who my hobbies are listed as eating, sleeping and voicing one's opinion. Not necessarily the right opinion but it's mine.'
Via: Professor Louise Wilson: 'I'm not rude, I'm just honest'
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