Deborah Linton meets Manchester fashion designer Matthew Williamson.

As a teenage girl in Manchester, Matthew Williamson was a boy you'd want to be friends with.

Over a decade before the flamboyant schoolboy from Chorlton would become one of British fashion's runaway successes, Williamson was honing his design skills in the hallways of Saint Thomas Aquinas high school.

"I was very popular with the girls," the designer, now 40, remembers of his teenage self as we recline on a plush velvet sofa amid his Autumn/Winter collection in Selfridges' Exchange Square store.

"I was fascinated (with what they wore) and wanted to dress girls at that age. So I would make them little polka dot rara skirts for the Saturday night out."

Williamson would later come out, but back in those days, the girlfriends he had were treated to glimpses of his embryonic talent.

"Say you were my girlfriend - I'd make you a bra top and I'd make me a shirt to match. We were a little double act and we'd go out matching. Although, I'd hasten to add that the stitching has improved since then."

Williamson has more than a touch of northern soul. Read any interview with him and writers in the London-centric fashion world are taken aback by his Mancunian accent and sense of identity.

It is something he attributes to his solid upbringing, the nights out at The Hacienda and Saturday afternoons spent among the punks and rockabillies in Afflecks Palace.

"I think I took inspiration from people I met in The Hacienda, for example, who were different, because I knew I wouldn't work in a bank, or be an accountant, from a very young age, so I took solace in those characters who were also a bit different."

Williamson's individuality would be his fortune. At 17, he won a place on the fashion design course at London's Central St Martin's College. At 26, he blew fashion editors away with his legendary debut collection, 'Electric Angels' - and not only because he had Kate Moss, Jade Jagger and Helena Christensen on the catwalk.

The show featured only 11 outfits but the beautiful bright colours, bias cuts and intricate detailing were irresistible. Williamson's brand of bohemian elegance and its coveted 'jet-set party girl' aesthetic, which continues to uniquely combine silks and chiffons, ostrich feathers, beads and sequins,  became a red carpet favourite with torch-bearers like Sienna Miller.

The overnight success of the brand - set up with then boyfriend, and current business partner, Joseph Velosa - has never faded. If the first collection was inspired by India, next season's takes influence from Japan, including  blossom flower prints, corals and burnt orange.

"It was a source of inspiration that we'd not really looked at before. We tend to look into countries that are more exotic and tropical and it just occurred to me that it would be nice to work with that part of the world - something a little more serene and elegant."

He confides that he actually got his inspiration from a book; clearly a very good one judging by the front row he drew to Fashion Week in September - Miller, Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour and celebrity stylist Rachel Zoe among them.

It would be easy to be swept away with the glamour of it all - but not this northern boy.

"While, yes, on the surface its absolutely quite a fickle, glamorous and thin veneer, behind that there's a solid and sound business," he says.

"I like to attribute our success largely to the qualities that I had instilled in me as a child and my up-bringing from my parents in Manchester. They had a really strong work ethic. They really believed money is precious - you work hard and you earn it and I think I've remained true to those beliefs."

He has long cited mum, Maureen - an optician's receptionist who, with Matthew's father, upped-sticks to London for seven years to help their son set up his business - as a focus for his boyhood fascination with fashion, when he would watch her meticulously arrange outfits on the bed. Is his mum his muse?

"Yes," he replies. "She's inspiring because she's 63 or 64 now; she's very young-hearted, very young-spirited."

He confirms the local legend that she has been known to host the odd Matthew Williamson sale for select gatherings in Cheshire.

She's also dragged mums into the changing rooms of his Mayfair store to try on clothes for themselves instead of watching their daughters.

"Now, she only wears Matthew Williamson and she looks great, " he beams.

The product of his own unique fairytale, Williamson is now at the helm of a multi-million pound business which produces four collections a year, of up to 200 pieces each, stocked around the world.

It girls Poppy Delevigne and Olivia Palermo, it transpires, are two of his latest favourites when it comes to celebrity clients.

When I ask if he likes to design for a certain kind of woman, it is the businessman, not the designer, who answers.

"I don' think of a specific woman. It's never really been the way I work. We put together a board when we start work every season, and there might be girls on there who encapsulate the look, but at no point are we going 'she looks like this and she lives in Moscow' because we sell to 170 stores so what might work here, won't work in Dubai, Russia or America.

“It's a multi-million pound business that needs to sell.I have a dual split brain - half business, half fashion. Well, three-quarters fashion."

Thank heavens.

Tweet