Fashion pioneer Dame Denise L'Estrange-Corbet is known for speaking her mind and unapologetically telling you how she feels. But the fiery Aucklander, raised in London, has a softer side.
L'Estrange-Corbet cackles through a thick South London accent as she recalls the beginnings of her avant-garde fashion label WORLD - an unplanned venture fuelled by boredom and a love of art, she says.
It was 1989 and she was two years into a relationship with her then-husband and business partner Francis Hooper, and pregnant with their daughter. In that defining year of firsts, the couple opened the first WORLD store on Auckland's High St, tied the knot (the same week they opened the shop) and became parents.
Hooper, who L'Estrange-Corbet met when she worked for Zambesi and he was at neighbouring retail store California, had recently been fired.
Later, the pair sat in an Auckland bus stop one night, planning their next move. They each had $200 to their name and pooled their savings to open the store next door to the legendary Alfie's nightclub.
"We were talking at a bus stop in Queen St and said, 'what are we going to do?' We had been to DKD cafe behind the Civic and we shared our usual $3 rice bowl because we were skint and he said, 'do you have any savings?' and I said, '$200' and he said, 'me too, do you want to go into business?'" she recalls.
"I said, 'oh I don't know, it's all I've got'. And thought, 'I don't know if I wanna do that, I don't know anything about business'. I said to him, 'can I think about it?' and we laugh about it today. He says, 'I still can't believe you said I've got to think about it!'"
At the time L'Estrange-Corbet hadn't been in New Zealand long, having moved back to Auckland at 27 after leaving for England as a 3-year-old with her mother and sister.
"We had both been working for fashion companies and we were both really bored."
She says there was no real master plan for where the shop would go. "There wasn't any thinking, that's the thing. We just said, 'we'll just open a shop, we'll contact our friends and we'll see if they want to sell their things in our shop'. Those friends were Matthew von Sturmer, Helen Holmes, Tracey Collins - all artists starting out."
L'Estrange-Corbet would make her own hats each evening, and the next day Hooper would take them to the shop to sell, later moving on to make waistcoats and other items. "That's how it started and it was very hand-to-mouth. If we didn't have a good week, we would close down because the rent was $100 a week, it was 100sq foot shop; tiny like a shoebox."
But the pair noticed their store had attracted a bit of following, some of it from their monthly fashion shows in nightclubs.
Today, WORLD has been in business for 33 years. "In those 33 years everything has grown to such enormous proportions - it is almost bursting at the seams," says L'Estrange-Corbet, now 62 years old.
WORLD has four stores: one each in Auckland's Britomart and Ponsonby, Wellington and Christchurch.
She says it is harder than ever to run a fashion retail business - thanks largely to the internet. "It's the competition, and everyone wants cheap.
"There's a million of everything and people spend hours looking at things to buy on the internet, whereas they would have gone to the local shops and had a wander around. Even though all the shops they could have gone to also have websites, it's become so global now - you can buy anything from any part of the world with a tap of the finger, and you couldn't do that in 1989."
Today, Hooper and business partner Benny Castles, who became a director and shareholder in 2008, work at least one or two days a week in the shop, while L'Estrange-Corbet is there less frequently.
"I'm not an enormous people person to be honest - love animals, love children - can take or leave people, but I have to be on the floor to see what is going on," she admits.
Recently a customer complained about her to her business partner, over her request that no photos be taken in the shop. She finds it amusing that she was mistaken for a sales assistant, the customer oblivious to the fact she is the founder.
The situation took her back to 1999, she says, when she asked a customer not to eat their ice cream in the High St store. It has become a bit of a running joke now that she "can't be in the shop more than 10 minutes without someone fielding a complaint".
But that doesn't stop her from spending time on the shop floor. L'Estrange-Corbet firmly believes she has to work on "ground level" to know what is going on in the business. "A lot of companies lose that [founder] interaction with their customer."
WORLD recently expanded into the former Kate Sylvester store next door to its initial Britomart shop. It is now double the size at 280sq m and performing much better than expected, she says.
"Our main aim now is to bring to our customer so much more of what we are already doing because we have such a huge space to do it in. We're always looking at bringing in new things and sourcing local product, particularly - we love supporting local artists because we are very much art based, and always have been."
WORLD is available in just four stores worldwide: its own. "It's like Louis Vuitton: you buy it there or you don't buy it," explains L'Estrange-Corbet.
"We hold on to our brand very closely and how it is displayed. We've sold in shops all over the world and we decided that it was never displayed how we liked it, so we pulled it all back and said no, you come to us to get it or you don't, and we sell online."
In 2021, WORLD decided it would no longer hold any sales events to discount its stock.
"Brands like Louis Vuitton, however many shops they have and wherever they are open, there's queues.
"But for me, [I think] you do have to be careful because the market does become flooded and everyone tries to emulate you with rip-offs, you don't know what's real, you don't know what's fake, and when it becomes too available it's not special."
WORLD doesn't want to be a brand that everyone owns, or move away from being a small-scale operation.
"It is inspirational and aspirational but we hold on to it. We don't want to be on every street corner. Our numbers of manufacturing are very low, that we know that if you buy this jacket the chances are you are not going to bump into anyone with that jacket ... we do lots of designs but very small batches, which does put the cost up, but for our customer once it is sold it is gone - it makes it really desirable."
L'Estrange-Corbet, Hooper and Castles design all the pieces themselves. "That's why when you are selling to the customer, you know what you are talking about.
"We know the history of every garment in the shop. We picked the buttons, we picked the zip, we picked the thread. It is still a very tight business and I doubt there is any other New Zealand-made business like that where the founder is still on the ground.
"There are so many people that say they are designers and they have a fashion shop, and you say, 'oh, what have you designed, what's your look?' and they say 'oh the team, the team do it' and there are so few designers that actually design."
Early beginnings
She reminisces about the early days of WORLD. On Sundays she used to take her daughter Pebbles into the shop with her to give it a vacuum. The shop was so small it couldn't house a vacuum.
After Hooper and L'Estrange-Corbet were married in May 1989, they spent their honeymoon ripping up dingy carpet and sanding floorboards. Their daughter was born in October.
"I think that was another reason people thought 'how the hell are they going to work that one?', as we had no parental support here, all of our family were overseas. It was just the three of us, and it was make or break.
"Some nights were sleepless because we were thinking, 'if we don't have a good day tomorrow, we can't pay the rent and we are going to close', that's what it was like. [Francis] would come home and say 'oh my God we had a great day, I sold this and I sold that', and we'd go 'great, we're open another week'.
"If someone would have said you're still going to be going in 33 years, I would have laughed. We lived in a rented flat, we had furniture that had all been given to us by friends and it was so hand-to-mouth. I think that too is what has kept our feet on the ground and that has stopped our egos from getting big.
"I can't stand those designers that have egos so big that they think they are bigger than the brand. You are never bigger than the brand. The brand is bigger than you baby and don't you forget it," she says. "You work for that brand; that brand doesn't work for you.
"I've always seen the brand as another child. It needed to be fed, watered, it needed to be loved, it needed attention and it needed things given to it that would make it prosper.
"I had two children in the same year and I still have that, and that's because I treated the other child - not the physical child - like a child. Like, what does this need to keep going? And if it wasn't doing well, if it was ailing it needed to be loved and cared for."
Today, L'Estrange-Corbet and Hooper live in Ponsonby. She says she sees herself running the business until she leaves this world, which is when Castles will take over. The only reason she would hand it over sooner was if they were not well enough to continue.
"That would be the only reason that we wouldn't do it anymore is if we're unable to do it. Benny is quite a bit younger than us, and [this] was his first time job ... now he is a director and shareholder, and he knows everything about how we run the business.
"New Zealand without WORLD would be a much sadder placer, a much less colourful place."
New Zealand homecoming
L'Estrange-Corbet was born in Remuera, and when her parents split up, her mother took her and her older sister to England, where the trio lived in a one-bedroom flat for the first couple of years.
She is open about the borderline poverty she faced growing up in a council estate in Tooting Bec, South London.
She says she still loves London, and ordinarily visits once a year.
Before her return, L'Estrange-Corbet was working for designer and British high fashion brand Scott Crolla in London, overseeing a store opening in Tokyo. On the way back she returned to New Zealand to visit family, fell in love with the country, and went back to London to give up her job and come back again.
"Fate had different ideas. I met Francis Hooper, and that was it," she recalls.
"I was working at Zambesi in Vulcan Lane and he was working next door in a shop called California and every day we would talk on the doorstep and we'd say 'Okay, let's see who can sell the most, and it was always him. He was born to sell.
"We started off doing fashion shows once a month in a nightclub, where we would take designer clothing from New Zealand designers and we'd embellish them and then we would have a show. There was such an enormous following, it was incredible, and that money we made enabled us to start the business."
L'Estrange-Corbet holds a fashion degree, having studied at what was then the London College of Fashion, now the University of the Arts London.
Originally, she left school and got an office job, then did an evening course in dressmaking. "I made my sister's wedding dress, it was a lot of hand sewing of lace and I thought 'you know what, I could quite get into this'.
"I'm someone who gets extremely bored, extremely quickly. I have the attention span of a gnat ... but fashion was something that actually held my interest even though I didn't know much about it, so I thought I would study that."
Over the years the designer has brushed shoulders with some high-profile fashion designers and artists. She met Andy Warhol and since the early 80s has been a great admirer of English artists Gilbert and George.
In 2002, L'Estrange-Corbet was recognised by the Queen, being made a member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for her services to fashion. It opened the door for other accolades, and in 2018 she was made a Dame Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for her services to fashion and the community.
In 2015 WORLD became the first fashion label endorsed by the United Nations, where it worked on a label for the organisation's Sustainable Development Goals. It also had a four-month exhibition of its work from 1989 to 2005 at the Auckland Museum. It has garments in collections at Auckland Museum, Te Papa, the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne and the Sydney Contemporary Art Gallery.
The label has participated in more than 10 Fashion Weeks worldwide and more fashion shows than L'Estrange-Corbet can remember.
L'Estrange-Corbet is also an ambassador for the Mental Health Foundation and for Diabetes Auckland.
Garment labels scandal
WORLD faced an outcry in 2018 over its garment labels which said its products were made in New Zealand, when some elements such as sequin patches and t-shirts were found to be made in China and Bangladesh.
The Commerce Commission found the tags were liable to mislead consumers and probably breached the Fair Trading Act.
L'Estrange-Corbet called the situation a "witch hunt". "The media went crazy and said the Commerce Commission had 10 complaints. I'll say it now: they got one complaint, and they only had to look into it because of the public interest."
She admits the founders of WORLD came through the other side of the controversy "a bit more wary of people", but says it never took a personal toll on her and the business had continued to grow despite the scrutiny. "If you run a business, you have got to be pretty strong. There are a lot of mean people out there who will try and discredit you and try to say you have done things you haven't done.
"We wouldn't still be going after that if our customers didn't believe in us, and we wouldn't be expanding if our customers had believed what was being said."
