Capturing the fall of Ruth Tarvydas' empire Perth fashion designer Ruth Tarvydas is featured in ABC documentary series Boomtown. Picture: Richard Hatherly Source: PerthNow Littering the cutting-room floor of a TV editing suite in East Fremantle is proof of Ruth Tarvydas's year from hell. There are a litany of curses - all uttered with frustration, fatigue and a feistiness that only Perth's long-reigning queen of fashion could muster. Not that viewers will ever hear them. "I've been de-f***ed," she says. All the f***s were edited out! And she's not talking frocks. She's talking about the F-words that polluted the air from under her signature leather cap as she was tailed by a TV crew that recorded her most turbulent year yet. The result airs on the ABC next Sunday, as part of its six-part series, Boomtown. "I'm wondering whether I should take an injunction against the producers," Tarvydas says. They made me look too normal. "Normal" and the Tarvydas name have rarely appeared in the same sentence since she began sashaying a satin and sequinned trail through Perth. Ruth Tarvydas at the opening of Silks at Crown Perth earlier this year. Here she opened her first boutique in the late '60s - before unleashing her raunchy, body hugging-gowns on the world. Over four decades later she's still got the fancy moves, but now with a slightly faltering step. In episode two of the series viewers witness Tarvydas's darkest moments of 2012, including the doors closing on her high-profile King St boutique as it went into administration with as little as $200 in the bank. There's the embarrassing technical glitches during her live-stream launch of online sales technology from New York Fashion Week. And there's plenty of footage of her valiantly fighting on. But when the cameras stopped rolling her troubles didn't. One year on, Perth - the fourth richest place on earth - is still more "gloomtown" than boomtown for Tarvydas, whose company, RTI, was liquidated in August when she failed to meet a deadline to honour her creditors. Now she's fighting to stay afloat and relying on the generosity of her new landlord, John Bond. He allows her a special lease at his Claremont shopping complex. But every day she faces the threat of getting a writ from ANZ Banking Group seeking nearly $1 million to secure the money it says it's owed after her King St store closed. Ruth Tarvydas at her King Street showroom before it was forced to close last year. She says she's pulled her head in financially. Now renting back her East Perth apartment, she's also negotiating a new deal with her car-lease company to keep her silver SLK Mercedes. "I'm thinking about downsizing to something cheaper like a little (Mercedes) B180," she says. I have not bought anything for so long it doesn't matter. I'm even mending my own undies. I only buy my underwear in Paris and I don't travel anymore. At least Tarvydas still has her sense of humour. She's all smiles and still attracting plenty of attention as she bounces into the lobby of the Hyatt Regency Hotel for STM's interview. Antique baby leopard fur is swinging from her shoulders - complete with tiny paws - and leather pants are seemingly sprayed on to her hips. She sips water and looks back on her year of being shadowed by a camera crew. "It was a little bit weird," she says. But it's amazing how quickly weird becomes the norm. Some of those moments were very painful to watch, especially when the administrators turned up. It felt like a death, to be honest. I would love to be a businessman who can just have a hard nose and be unattached to a decision but I'm not like that. She hopes the publicity from the TV series will inspire socialites, prom queens, film stars, WAGS, the Kardashians, indeed anyone, to buy more ballgowns so she can pay off debts amounting to $954,425. "At between $500 and $1000 a frock, that's a lot of f***in' frocks," she laughs. I feel like that guy on the tightrope who was walking over the Grand Canyon thanking Jesus for the view. As she lurches from one creditor's deadline to the next she continues to make the news whether she's taking off her clothes for an Archibald Prize hopeful or for extolling the virtues of younger men she's hoping to bed for a quick fling. It's these larger-than-life eccentricities that caught the eye of Perth production company Electric Pictures when they went looking for seven WA entrepreneurs to feature in Boomtown - a doco on what makes our millionaires tick. Professor Barry Marshall, who will also feature in the Boomtown series. Viewers see Nobel laureate Professor Barry Marshall dreaming of his next Nobel Prize while spruiking for funding into research on how the ulcer-causing bacteria Helicobacter pylor might prevent childhood asthma. Sharing his episode is Sasha deBretton, founder of Million Dollar Makeovers - a company that performs fast home renovations for mega-rich clients, such as the couple who pay $531,000 for a makeover of their pink house into a more elegant 55 shades of grey. Then there's iiNet founder Michael Malone, who busses his employees to the northern suburbs garage to show them where he started his company with just a $15,000 loan, a rack of modems, two computers and a cat. Former Penthouse Pet Bree Maddox provides glamour as she shows her keen appetite for hard work and a savvy business sense. She hops behind the bar and plays the ultimate door bee-yatch outside her Court Hotel. Car dealer John Hughes, worth $500 million, shares his 12-minute lunchbox routine - "10 minutes for eating and two minutes for cleaning my teeth" before he heads back to the showroom. Managing director of BC Iron, Mike Young. And Mike Young, iron-ore miner, hangs out with the diggers and dealers in Kalgoorlie. The unlikely group debunks the myths that surround West Australian wealth - that it comes from the sheer luck of having a bucketload of resources under their feet. Their stories are told against various backdrops of red dust, fabulous river views and glittering cocktail parties. But it's Tarvydas's astonishing roller-coaster story that stands out. It appealed most to director Alison James and, consequently, Tarvydas features in five of the six episodes. Yes, there are extreme lows, but there is also upbeat footage of her showing her collection in New York, shots of two Kardashians strutting Tarvydas's gowns down the runway and flashbacks to her own modelling days in the '70s. "She's a Perth fashion icon we wanted to explore," says James. She's got a fantastic personality and is so well known around Perth and also is a bit of an eccentric. James developed a huge respect for her. "Filming was a really difficult time for her as it ended up being a really tough year and the style of the documentary is very invasive," James says. She never once asked us to turn the cameras off and she was incredibly brave and showed incredible resilience. She is a real survivor. She's always seeing the glass half full. Watching the documentary with interest will be John Bond, the businessman who came to her rescue and offered her a lease on a shop in his Times Square shopping centre in Claremont. "I think she's really trying very hard and doing a lot of work (to repay her debts)," he says. It's an awful lot of gowns she has to sell but we just take it as it goes. She's a fashion icon and she deserves to be supported. And she's a huge drawcard for the centre. In the meantime, knowing that she will never be able to pay back her debts on the strength of retail sales alone, she is awaiting the launch of Open 4 Sale, an online sales business that allows customers to buy the gowns in her Claremont store from anywhere in real time. She also took part in New York Fashion Week promoting indigenous models Lisa Marie Rodd, from Karratha, and Jahlana Roe, from Broome. The trip was a collaboration between photographer Russell James, herself and the Roebourne Girls FX group. "Several stores expressed interest in stocking my designs so I have raced back here and sent sample collections to Neiman Marcus which has 41 stores in the United States," she says. And she campaigns tirelessly for her brother, Harvey, a doctor who died of an aortic aneurysm in 2011. She is working on an intellectual copyright of his anti-ageing stem-cell formulas. During Boomtown's making she got to meet Barry Marshall - a role model for her brother. "When I heard he was going to be in it I agreed to do it," she says. Harvey went through very similar experiences to Barry. He gave me some fabulous contacts. We could even be listing his (Harvey's) science and technology company on the stock exchange, which is a way I can pay back my creditors. So now, not only is she walking that tightrope across the Grand Canyon, but juggling all these balls as she takes each tiny step. "I pray and I pray for the ability to love," she says. That's the highest energy one can achieve and it's a magnificent energy. That gives me the spirit to conquer and conquer. And there's no prizes for guessing what words she'll be uttering if this one doesn't work. Boomtown starts Sunday December 15, 6.30pm, ABC1 .