Although she’s often out in the evening she doesn’t really like leaving us and will

Although she’s often out in the evening she doesn’t really like leaving us and will come back at midnight and start working again. It was hard going getting up at 6.30am and coming back from work at 9.30, but we became close and I realised how hard she has worked to get where she is.She is only able to spend half her time in the UK – this means that when she’s here she has to fit 100 per cent of her work into half the time it would usually take The rest of her time she spends in her studio in California. It was a fast and exciting experience, particularly when Honor Blackman came to see us backstage.I also lived with Zandra for three months. I felt confident with her; we worked together in a small team in a family atmosphere, with Zandra cooking for us when we needed feeding To her workers she’s always been known as “Mummy”.

I also did a fashion show with her at Dickens and Jones, working backstage as a dresser. I don’t think that designing has ever been done in this way before.While I was doing a fashion course I wrote to her to ask her if she’d take me on for work experience and she agreed. She struck me as being as much of an artist as a designer; her watercolours feed directly into her prints, and she has never been afraid to let her prints govern the shape and size of the dress. Instead I found her alone in her office under a pile of paperwork, with no make- up on and dressed in a practical yellow jump suit with a waistband containing scissors and designers’ tools. She was very down-to-earth and calmed me down immediately.
I’m only 23, so I was still in nappies during the punk scene, but when I saw the pictures from the period I was amazed at how innovative it all was, particularly the clothes Zandra was designing.

I come from Chatham in Kent, where Zandra was born, and I went to the same grammar school as her I became interested in her work during my A-levels. It inspired me to see how far she’d got without a privileged background, and I was astonished to discover that she is the daughter of a lorry driver. I met her when I went to her studio in Hammersmith to interview her for a project I was writing on her work. I was terrified of meeting her, expecting her to be wearing full make-up and be dressed to the nines. While many are content to stick with an occasional flutter, those with an addictive personality are likely to get hooked “for the kick”.Aside from receiving threats of violence over money owed, he has also lost his job, his partner and the family home.