MENTION some of fashion's most famous names such as Versace or Yves Saint Laurent and you're likely to know as much about the designer as his clothes.
Propose Nicole Farhi, on the other hand, and it probably won't evoke much other than a label neatly stitched inside a garment. That's because Farhi prefers to, remain as low key as her clothes. Meeting her in the company's equally understated headquarters off London's Regent Street, she's dressed simply in a pair of white jeans and a black polo sweater with matching cardigan. The biggest statement is made by her hair, a generous shoulder length frizz" that looks, shall we say, cheerfully casual.
The same description can be used for Farhi's manner. "I try everything on," she says of her own work. "If it feels good and right for me, then it'll be so for a lot of women they're putting on weight after a certain age, so I'm getting very good at hiding that. I'm very conscious too that I'm going out to work everyday, so I don't want to think when I'm getting dressed in the morning. I just want to put it on." Admitting "I think of myself a lot when I'm designing," she has a bit of trouble trying to summarise who might be a typical Farhi" customer even though there are now an awful lot of them. "Very often they are women who work," she eventually concludes. "They're intelligent, not fashion victims, never follow the last trend but still sexy. I think my clientele is aged from 30 onwards price is an element because they're not cheap clothes, so young girls probably won't buy them.
It would be a mistake, looking at her collections, to equate understatement with under design. French born Farhi has sound training and experience behind her. As a child growing up in Nice, she admired haute couture. "Luckily one of my aunts lived in Paris and she'd take me to shows there by Balenciaga and Dior. That was many years ago, so pret a porter didn't exist." After school, Farhi trained in Paris where she worked freelance before meeting Stephen Marks with whom she subsequently developed the French Connection label in the early 1970s. "The seventies were fantastic years," she says in retrospect. "As fashion, looking back maybe it wasn't so good, but I had a wonderful time and came out as a designer." The only problem for Farhi was that during this period, she didn't want to wear the clothes she was designing. Only in 1983 did she launch her own label and thereby start truly to create collections that reflected her own taste.
Central to her character is a dislike of ephemeral design. "I don't like fashion," she remarks bluntly. "I think it's ridiculous." And she would agree that any clear differentiation between seasons has been lost of late. "Yes, what matters now is not to be over dressed. For me, it's much more wonderful to make clothes people want to wear." If she is dismissive of much contemporary fashion, Farhi is fascinated by advances in fabric technology which play so critical a part now in deciding the direction of design. "New fabrics are extremely exciting. You don't have to design fancy details you just look at the fabric and let it cork for you. It's much more sculptural."
As far as Farhi is concerned, the range of materials now available helps justify fashion's currently retrospective mood. "You had long coats in the 1970s, for example, but they didn't look anything like those one does now because of the changes in fabric.
When you look at the shapes now and compare them with what existed then, you really don't get a sense of retro."
Three decades after she started in the business, Farhi has plenty of retrospective memories on which to draw. But she insists that working in fashion still holds sufficient interest even though her company has now grown to daunting proportions. Five years after starting her own women swear label, she began designing a diffusion range called Diversion. This was then followed by menswear in 1989, after which came a capsule collection with the self explanatory title Black on Black and a swim wear range. Most recently there's been a comprehensive collection of accessories for women and sportswear for men. She has her own shops in London, Manchester, Glasgow, New York, Oslo and Tokyo as well as selling to stores worldwide. Of particular significance recently was the opening 18 months ago of a flagship Nicole Farhi shop on London's Bond Street which includes not just all her ranges but also a highly successful restaurant serving the kind of food she likes. "I'm really involved with it I do the windows there with the girls and constantly pop in to check that it all looks good. I wanted a really friendly environment like home and the first Saturday after it opened we had all these families coming in with their kids. I was really touched because I thought, they think of it as a place of enjoyment."
Meticulous she may be, but Farhi doesn't allow herself to be totally preoccupied by the business. "I've never been obsessed by fashion," she says. Still after 30 years I love creating, but when I go home I' want to do other things. I don't have so many friends in the fashion world." Contemporary theatre is one world with which she now has close associations thanks to her husband, playwright David Hare. Does he have any interest in fashion? "When I met him first, he used to go to Paul Smith, so he was well dressed and had a sense of colour. Now he's not 100 per cent faithful to my clothes, but I like that as well." It's not only from her husband that she doesn't expect total fidelity. Farhi understands if's customers choose to mix her clothes with those by other designers. That's one reason why she has achieved such widespread popularity and also another explanation for her relatively low profile. But she says this, is a personal preference for Nicole Farhi, there's no necessity to share her life in, order to sell her clothes. As a loyal clientele can confirm, every collection manages to be bought on its own merits.