Jonathan Saunders: 'I want to make women feel good'

Britain is at present populated by a crowd of excellent fashion designers so jostling that Health and Safety might want to stick on its sunglasses take a look. Jonathan Saunders, 34, has been part of this renaissance ever since his first collection in 2004. Now, though, he has shimmied his way right to its forefront. During London Fashion Week, where show after show after show can soon spark an ugly weariness amongst the high-heeled onlookers, it is to the Saunders catwalk - along with Christopher Kane's and lately Mary Katrantzou's - that they really skip. Only over the last 18 months or so, with Anna Wintour in his front row and both Samantha Cameron and Michelle Obama in his clothes, has his star really risen.

Just a glance at his zingily pulsating, colour-drenched clothes confirms Saunders' appetite for brightness. It is this - along with his never-the-same prints and the increasingly attractive silhouettes cast with them - that has helped propel him to prominence.

Personally, too, his brightness is not easily supressed. Yet he seems glum, even (he's Scottish) borderline-dour on the morning we meet. It emerges that Saunders is suffering from an evil cold, nagging post-birthday blues, and the terrible realisation that the flat he's trying to sell might well have damp. Add to this a painfully cracked rib (whether picked up at Fitness First or during a bout of more personal gymnastics, he's unsure) and that glumness makes sense as rapidly as it passes. A coffee, a cigarette, and an enthusiastic pawing from his 8 year-old Battersea dog, Amber, and Saunders is revived.

Through curls of smoke he rattles out his USP, making it sound simple: "I've never been one for a black pencil skirt, or just a basic working wardrobe. I want to introduce something into a woman's wardrobe that is highly identifiable, and that makes them feel good: something special. And the tools that I use to give them that are colour and print."

This formula is now so refined it has a heady hand-to-pocket effect. Even the pickiest customers of all, fashion magazine staff, patiently queued (itself a rare sight) to buy (albeit at cost-price) at a recent Saunders "selling event" held by Matches, one of his main stockists. Although not there (the dresses don't suit me) I heard the turnout was borderline unprecedented. He says "I got almost as much fulfilment from that event as I did from the show. Because it's verification to see such interest in what you're doing from a wearibility point of view." (A polite way of saying its much more meaningful when fashion opinion-formers buy your clothes than just blithering about them.) Furthermore, he adds: "you learn a lot when you listen to what women say about how they want to wear it, what they need it to be."

Jonathan Saunders spring/summer 2012

Yet Saunders refuses to appear even fleetingly smug. "Things shift constantly," he says, chin set :"that's the nature of the beast. I have to get better and better in what I do and learn from each collection."

What he has now got - a growing business based in this ramshackle building on a fume-clogged Islington corner, and seemingly enough critical petrol to keep motoring - Saunders is resolute about keeping.

He left home in Burnside, Glasgow on his 16th birthday went to Glasgow School of Art. Then "I got to London on a bus. I didn't have any money at all", and decided to study at Central St Martin's after meeting British fashion's Simon Cowell-scary, pre-eminent talent-spotter, Professor Louise Wilson. "What she hates most is if your work looks like anything else." This, he believes, is why so many of that jostling, Wilson-trained crowd of young fashion designers get on so well: "Mem Christopher [KANE] Richard [Nicholl] and Roksanda [Ilincic] are all good mates, and its because none of us want to be like eachother."

Wilson allowed Saunders (who thanks to being Scottish had his fees paid but was otherwise unfunded) to take a job at a printers, where for a year he would secretly sneak back after work and sleep in a cupboard he'd furnished with a mattress - "it was very comfortable: I've had worse beds".

Saunders is carefully positive about how his early upbringing equipped him for life. "Every teenager rebels against what they're brought up with, and me it just happened to be a bit more extreme."

This is because his parents are third-generation Jehovah's Witnesses. He says: "They're very devout in what they believe and they live by the principles of the religion very tightly. My parents happened to be quite strict. But that's not necessarily a negative thing, it taught me to be a certain way."

To become a fashion designer, however, it was a course he had to stray from. "They embrace humility. Anything that involves putting yourself out there, saying 'look at me, this is what I can do' is frowned upon. And anything you do on a creative level has to be practical, craftsmanship."

Jonathan Saunders for Smythson

This is why his first degree was in product design and his second in textile design, he believes - "In a craft context rather than a frivolous context". Yet in the final analysis, he says, this at-odds with his character upbringing has proved "maybe a positive thing. It's certainly made me very independent, and equipped me to be my boss and have my own label."

He had good luck in London when his graduate collection caught the eye of Alexander McQueen, who would become a close friend and commissioned a print. This led to work at various fashion houses - Chloe and Lacroix - before he founded his own. Now their are high-street collaborations (Target in the United States and Debenham's here), plus money-spinning work with Escada and Smythson.

Saunders uses references aplently - often modernism and 20th century artists. For spring/summer 2012, however, he went back a notch, "to ornate Edwardian pattern, William Morris - something that I never really liked. It's working with things that make me feel uncomfortable: total Prada-ism."

Today, his fashion-designer insecurity (they all seem to have them) seems to be whether he really counts as one at all. "Do you think of me as a print designer?" he suddenly demands "Just as a print brand?... No: I'm definitely a fashion designer now."

As soon as this doubt passes, The Daily Telegraph cruelly raises another one by pointing out that his company is closish to its ten year anniversary. He reaches aghast for the reassuring ear of Amber. "Not yet babes," says Saunders, "Not yet."