SHIRLEY Wong looked just a little out of place, surrounded by leather-clad lanky women with flaming red hair and pierced eyebrows. Here she was, a petite Chinese woman from Hong Kong, married and a mother of two, wearing a simple black dress and standing in the middle of one of the most avant-garde fashion shopping centres in London.
But take Shirley Wong out of her outlet at the trendy Hyper Hyper in Kensington High Street and there is still no reason why her clothes shouldn't belong here: those skinny, slithery dresses that the lanky red-haired women might buy hang neatly on racks, all shiny satin and lycra. Because even if Shirley Wong doesn't look as if she's about to go to an acid rave party tonight, her clothes certainly do.
These are kitschy, sexy, young clothes for just that sort of women: purple spandex is wrapped, mummy-style, around a curvaceous body with slashes at the navel and under the breasts; diaphanous blouses reveal everything and hide nothing, skirts are ultra-short and super-tight. This is Hyper Hyper after all, and this is the sort of thing people want to buy.
But when Wong sits down to design collections for her overseas buyers - Lane Crawford in Hong Kong, C.K. Tang in Singapore - she immediately reverts to good old-fashioned Asian common sense, but without losing her sense of adventure.
The Hong Kong-born designer arrived in the UK in 1975 for her education, eventually graduating from the highly-respected St Martin's School of Art. During that time, Wong's entire family had emigrated to Britain - her brothers were in boarding school and her father went on to open a Chinese restaurant in Germany.
Fashion and art were subjects that had always appealed to Wong, and once she finished her degree in 1986 she immediately set up a company manufacturing her own labels - 'Shirley Wong London' and 'Aqua by Shirley Wong'. It was the more challenging of two opportunities she had at the time: top Italian fashion house Erreuno offered Wong a job in their studio, and although she took it on for three months, she knew it was her calling to do her own thing.