During London Week, Mary Katrantzou Talks About Prints LONDON - Mary Katrantzou, born in Greece, trained at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence and at Central Saint Martins in London, has a three-dimensional way with prints. She has taken oversize jewels, home interiors and undersea creatures and wrapped them around the body as if they were sculptures. The effect is hyper-realistic patterns mapped to female curves. After brief stints working for a fellow Greek, Sophia Kokosalaki, and for the Bill Blass brand, the London-based designer has become a star of fashion week. She also had a sold-out collaboration with Longchamp, the French accessories maker - her first attempt at handbags. A third collaboration with Topshop was introduced last week. On the eve of unveiling her autumn/winter 2012 collection, the designer talks with Suzy Menkes about wearing black in a world of color, surreal prints, her background and her plans for the future. You are the queen of trompe l'oeil, effects that create illusions for human eyes. Can you explain a bit how you do it? A. I think for me it happened gradually when I started working with print. I wanted to work with different objects and tried to engineer them around the body and see what kind of effects that would have on flattering the woman. When I started, I did a collection of oversized jewelry. I was trying to find what's distinctive in my style of working with print in order to have enough of a "signature" to start my own label. It started becoming about filtering beauty through design and being able to provide something inspired by design that a woman would not be able to wear if it were real. It became about liberating the woman that way, so it started with the perfume bottles that obviously signified the hourglass silhouette. Then it went to blown glass and interiors and objects of art. Last season was a little bit more abstracted. But I think fit just allows me to almost guess design within a field every season because you are looking in-depth into a discipline of design - but then making it really beautiful for a woman to wear. Then, if you take a step back, it is all about abstraction of color and the way the shapes form around the woman. In the end, it's just a pretty, colorful dress. It gives you a lot of scope in creating a very surreal world, which obviously I enjoy doing. It's given me a direction, and now it is much easier to find inspiration for every season. Q. "Surreal" defines a lot of what you do. But surely many women don't feel secure even wearing a simple print ? A. With print, it is about educating the customer to try it on and see what it does with the silhouette. For me, with print, it is being really flattering on the woman, trying to do with print what a black dress would do onto their body. And it works! I've seen it through the feedback we get from our stores, when a woman takes it from the hanger and doesn't get afraid of the color and the surreal context. She puts it on her body, it's very flattering, and it is cut as an elegant dress and without too much fuss. I have a maximalist aesthetic, but I don't like fussy. I like it clean. I like the cut to be simplified and very flattering on a woman, so I think that's what makes it wearable. Q. Tell me about the process. Is it made in England? Do you play on the computer? A. I play on the computer a lot! We do all of our printing in the U.K. We do our knitwear in Italy, but the manufacturing happens in London. When I started, it was a very intricate process because, in our production, all the sizes are specific to the prints. You need to have the right cutting guides, and you need to be in close proximity to the factory. For the show, we do all of our sampling in-house because there's a lot going on in the construction and the crin and the boning and the foam. Q. You were brought up in Greece, with your parents in interior design. What was your childhood like? A. I don't think I consciously realized I was being brought up around design, although my mum was an interior designer and we had stacks of Architectural Digest and World of Interiors. It trained me to have an affinity towards classicism because that was her style. And growing up in Greece, you do get geared towards that direction. I did obviously have an understanding of beauty and design, and I remember tearing out sheets and doing little collages of beautiful things.