Johanna Ho is a Hong Kong designer who is smart, talented, funny and a happy blend of self-confidence and self-deprecation. Two months ago, she opened her first shop, at 74 Queen's Road Central, and so she is dealing with those location problems peculiar to Hong Kong (the showroom is on the 20th floor and the building entrance is actually in Stanley Street). 'Every time the doorbell rings, I hope it's not just the postman,' she says. Local tai-tais and overseas buyers are homing in on Ho with an accuracy possessed only by those with the uncanny ability to identify fashion's hot young things. Ho would be the first to say that she has some way to go before reaching the attention being focused on, say, Stella McCartney, her fellow student at Central Saint Martins in London. But she is certainly having a fashion moment: Barneys of New York bought her first collection earlier this year, that super-cool store Language, in New York's SoHo, is stocking her pashmina line (called Pasha-mina), she has appeared in such magazines as i and Scene, and a photograph of socialite Louise Kou in a Ho outfit was in September's American Vogue. Ho has called her business 'i' - 'as in individual, 'i' is me'. And who or what is Johanna Ho? 'Clean, simple, classic with an edge, sophisticated. I think the whole reason I started is that there aren't clothes in Hong Kong which are the right prices, there's a gap of well-made outfits in beautiful fabrics. 'When I started making couture clothes for friends, I found a traditional Shanghainese tailor who is amazing and I realised that not only is there a market out there, we're not making use of people with immaculate skills. 'It's like London has Savile Row - we have these trained and talented people, too.' Britain seems to have been the (occasionally painful) catalyst for creating the individuality which led to i. Ho was sent to school in Hertfordshire when she was 13. 'I have mixed feelings about it, it was like going to a nunnery but you do learn to depend on yourself, which you don't in the spoiling environment of Hong Kong. And the school really supported me when they realised that I had a talent in art and design.' After a year's foundation course in Wimbledon, she went to Central Saint Martins where she did both her BA and MA. Louise Wilson, then head of the fashion department and who now works at Donna Karan, pummelled Ho's latent creativity into shape. 'Louise is good at kicking those who don't know their talent is hiding. I can be lazy, a dreamer, and I needed that. It was a love-hate relationship, she marked me for life.' For good? 'Oh yes. For good.' During her MA years, Ho also worked as an assistant designer to Tomasz Starzewski, the fashion darling of the London social circuit (no doubt excellent training for dealing with tai-tais). The culmination of such experiences, in the studio and tutorials, was a strong, sensuous graduation video which she showed at London Fashion Week this February. By that time, she had returned to Hong Kong, supposedly for a short holiday at the time of the handover. She was asked to do a bridal gown by a friend, others put in their sartorial requests . . . and, eventually, in February 1998, she had registered a business here. She now has three lines - couture, ready-to-wear and Pasha-mina. She has wisely resisted putting the Johanna Ho label on the pashmina range 'because I see it as more of a trend' but it consists of much more than shawls: the tunics ($4,410 in muted greys, lilacs and blues, and strong turquoises and reds) are selling 'like hot cakes', and the trousers ($3,510) and bias-cut dress ($5,500) are divinely luxurious. Those who want beading can put in special requests. For autumn/winter, Barneys has taken on her leather pieces (she has done some exquisitely embroidered wide waist belts) and her draped-collar jackets and A-line skirts. Their buyers came to her when she took a room at The Metropolitan hotel during February's London Fashion Week. 'It wasn't until the last day. Language had just been in and looked around, and they said 'OK, we're ready to order', and I was trying to look as if I did this every day. And then reception called up and said: 'Barneys is here, do you want them to come up?' ' Ho looks as if she still cannot quite believe she ever heard such a glorious sentence. Not that it is an unmitigated blessing for a Hong Kong designer to be invited to sell to the US. 'The quota system kills us, that's what is killing the fashion industry in Hong Kong,' she says, seriously. 'It's a complete nightmare.' So is it worth the hellish bureaucracy at this early stage? 'I was in American Elle in October, and if I wasn't in Barneys, I wouldn't be in Elle. And Barneys hold trunk shows, they push new designers. 'That was my first collection, I couldn't have done better. So I'm over the moon.' If you should happen to visit her shop this week, Ho will not be in residence; she is wooing buyers in Japan during Tokyo Fashion Week. She is becoming practised in the art of such commercial courtship: at her second London Fashion Week, in September, Liberty's agreed to stock a Johanna Ho 'high-summer' collection next May and Barneys pledged to take some of her spring/summer 2000 collection. What is that new range about? Ho, ever the individual, laughs and sighs simultaneously. 'It's a Mongolian theme, but I hate having themes. It sounds so naff.' Johanna Ho can be contacted at i on 2851 8351
