You grew up in Lancashire, what were your early memories of fashion and style?

My mum was incredibly beautiful, but she worked on farms and it was the '80s so she just wore jumpers and leggings, and I guess my vision of what was beautiful was that natural strength in a woman. I didn’t have any connections to fashion at all, it wasn't something we talked about or did. In fact, we only had a tiny mirror in our caravan! I was into art at school, and I started reading magazines in my teens, but there was no fashion background. And the fashion in the North of England wasn’t like London – I grew up in a time where a full adidas tracksuit meant you were insanely cool. That was my fashion. When you look at the MoP collections, there’s my adult version of fashion in there, and there’s also an element of that sporty, almost tacky time. Having a pair of Reebok Classics was the dream, but we couldn’t afford them. At my school, clothes meant you were either cool or not cool, and because I couldn’t have them, there was a real desire for me to understand about this culture; that how you dress equals whether you’re integrate-able or not. We used to get our shoes from a second-hand shop, where shoes were sorted by size, and they hole-punched a hole in the back of the shoes so they could put string through them and sling them on the shelf, so everyone knew you’d got your shoes from the second-hand shop because there were two holes in the back. Not fitting in and not having these things made me much more interested in them; I wanted to make my money and work, and buy fashion.