'Would you like to see a video of the show?' Vivienne Tam is asking, standing in the hallway of her office in Lai Chi Kok next to some Chinese characters which say, approximately, You Need To Have Patience To Succeed. As you can imagine, this is always a tricky moment. Sitting next to creators while their creations are being unfurled can be a real test of character for everyone concerned.
She switches on the set and the music, from Pakistan, begins. It's her Spring/Summer 1997 show which was first unveiled at the American collections in New York's Bryant Park last November. And, honestly, it's absolutely great, as anyone who saw it again last Thursday, during Hong Kong Fashion Week, will testify. Leaving aside the Pseud's Corner semantics of the fashion trade, the simple rule of thumb to be applied is - does this collection make you want to rush down to one of Tam's four shops here and spend, spend, spend? And the simple answer is - yes.
There are plenty of pretty frocks, some terrific jackets, many stylish references to traditional Chinese garments plus a new motif. Two years ago, she sent her famous - some might say notorious - Mao T-shirts down the catwalk. Mao, glittering with sequins, appeared in a number of unusual incarnations including one with a bee on his nose, another in pigtails and a third in which he wore lipstick. This season, Mao has been replaced by the Buddha. There are no little jokes, just serene images printed on swirling fabric. 'I didn't do anything with Buddha,' she explains. 'Buddha is beautiful already.' The American press, fed up with industrial nylon and clashes of geeky patterns, loved the show. Women's Wear Daily, the trade Bible, gave Tam a front page during fashion week and described how she had captivated her audience with a 'memorable collection' that was 'really something special'. What with a general yearning for a return to feminine froth combined with a surge of interest in the East (1997 and all that), Tam could hardly be better placed to take off in a major way. She happens to be opening her first US store later this year which is a collision of perfect timing. And the moral of the story is - you need to have patience to succeed.
Tam, perched fragilely on the sofa, looks about 17. In fact, her exact age is a mystery because her mainland Chinese grandparents destroyed family documents during the Cultural Revolution in order to hide the fact that they had relatives in Hong Kong. She's about 40 but isn't sure what animal she is in the Chinese zodiac. In any case, she's sufficiently young and gorgeous for People magazine to have included her in their 1995 list of The 50 Most Beautiful People In The World, alongside Demi Moore and Claudia Schiffer. Being a wise businesswoman, she wore a Mao T-shirt dress for the accompanying photograph.
It so happens that, although she was born in Guangdong, she grew up in Lai Chi Kok a few streets away from where she's now sitting. 'It felt so far from everything then, now it's so near . . . When I was a child, I loved doing things with my hands, crochet, sewing, things like that, more than actually drawing. I made my own clothes, I was always late for things because I was at home sewing the dress I was going to wear. My brothers and sister were my three-dimensional models.' She laughs, quietly. 'They were young, they had no choice.' She is the second in a family of four and must have been a forceful sibling: her younger sister, Terry, is now her assistant in New York and her younger brother, Larry, is overseeing the plans for the new store in SoHo. Her parents and elder brother live in Vancouver so there is no longer a family in Hong Kong. 'I found it confusing growing up here,' she recalls. 'It wasn't a country, it was a colony. I went to a Catholic school but I had Buddhist parents. I'd speak Chinese at home and English at school. We had one class of Chinese history and one class of Chinese literature a week. And in Hong Kong, they only liked Western labels. Nobody accepted Chinese things.' Of course she became a fashion student. She was among the first class of graduates in fashion design from the Hongkong Polytechnic's Swire School of Design. She went to work for the Trade Development Council as a fashion co-ordinator for six months and then took off for north London which was then, rather like Lai Chi Kok, something of a backwater. 'I was working in Islington as a designer for a Hong Kong company. It's amazing now to see Islington, it's changed so much, it's a joke. Then it was nothing, deserted. Now I can't find that building anymore.' Still, in a year she learnt much about European fashion and could travel to Paris for inspiration and knowledge.
In 1981, she arrived in New York and she has never really left. From the start, she made a point of deliberately marketing her cultural apartness while managing to make it accessible to others. This concept was expressed through her original label, East Wind Code. When the important Henri Bendel store held an open day for new designers, she turned up 'with my hair in braids and wearing a quilted Mao jacket because it was so cold'. While the other designers dutifully displayed their wares on racks, Tam, who for all her demure reserve is no slouch in the memorable gesture department, merely folded her collection into a Chinese carrier bag. When her turn came, she threw open her jacket, opened the bag and said, 'This is what I do'. The buyers bought it. So, eventually, did Sak's Fifth Avenue, Bergdorf Goodman, Barney's and Neiman Marcus.
She has progressed in steady increments of media approval. There has never been the ker-pow! element of, say, Alexander McQueen, Givenchy darling of the press, but she's always had a consistent, and growing, level of discerning fans. And she has not abandoned her past. Tama Janowitz, author of Slaves of New York and woman about town, provided a programme note for Tam's latest collection. 'The billowy pants, the slinky dresses accented with lace, feel like the back streets of old Hong Kong but subtly and ironically aware of their sources,' she wrote.