KEY POINTS:
The face that greets me is not the one I expect. As Denise L'Estrange-Corbet, MNZM, World leader and fiercely independent fashionista opens the door of her grand but ever-so-slightly decaying College Hill home, she smiles and I have to double-check it's her.
It isn't that she's dressed down, in top-to-bottom black, with a small scarf knotted at her neck. Nor that a split second after greeting me she's gone; her two dogs having pelted into the street to bark furiously at the neighbour's pooch - she's after them in a flash, barking furiously too.
No, my puzzlement is in seeing her real face. Though she and her daughter Pebbles are columnists for this magazine, I've never met her. What I know of her is her image, her public face. I'm expecting to meet the woman I've seen in the society pages and on television, the one on last September's Listener cover with her hair pulled back tightly, bold black eyebrows, a powered face and her trademark fire-engine red lippy. I'm expecting to meet a larger-than-life queen of the avant garde. Instead, the person at the door is a suburban mum, with a pale, pleasant face and unadorned complexion.
Perhaps that's as it should be. It strikes me as we talk about her soon-to-be-published autobiography that the Denise sitting beside me in the old leather chair is out of disguise, but fittingly so. The lack of makeup, the absence of the public mask, accords with the astonishingly frank, unvarnished account of her life that is All That Glitters, released by Random House on September 5.
It occurs to me to ask her if there's any difference between the public and the private Denise. She thinks there isn't, though the way she explains this is interesting. "I go to the cafe at the weekends and I have no makeup on and I don't care. What you see is what you get." If only that were true.
There are some things you really don't want to know - some readers of All That Glitters may find this particular thought drifts through their minds more than once - and some things you really do.
For anyone who takes even a passing interesting in the small, bitchy, self-absorbed and over-hyped subculture that is the New Zealand fashion industry and its attendees, the work, visage and, of course, the exotic name of Denise L'Estrange-Corbet hold a fascination that the Karens and Kates and Trelises will never have. You really do want to know more.
Until now, the known facts have been these: she is a Pom - or sounds like one - who married a Hong Kong-born Chinese-European with an Australian passport, called Francis Hooper. They have a 18-year-old daughter called Pebbles. But perhaps most importantly for those of a fashionable bent, 20 years ago next year they created World, a fashion label, a shop (well eight of them) and a factory - as their business card puts it - "of ideas and experiments".
For customers and supporters, World offers a unique world view that you can wear. For the unconvinced, the label and its experiments can appear almost aggressively eccentric. But what nobody can deny is World is quite different from any other fashion business in New Zealand and is a uniquely consistent expression of two uniquely creative minds.
World has had its share of range wars with other local fashion figures and some fashion journalists, of course.
Indeed, All That Glitters might be seen by some as settling scores. L'Estrange-Corbet says she's just giving her side of the story. Still, it could be "It" handbags at dawn come September 5.
Past and potential local skirmishes aside, World has been showered with praise internationally. The creative director of Italian Vogue singled the label out at Australian Fashion Week as long ago as 1997. It has won fashion awards and shown in Paris, Hong Kong, Australia and London.
The clothes are exported around the world and have been displayed at museums in Sydney, Melbourne and Te Papa. World has been mentioned in dispatches in the British papers, on CNN, and been applauded by Sex and the City stylist Rebecca Weinberg. The fashion editor of Time magazine once called their work "witty effrontery".
At home, their anti-establishment - or at least slightly anarchic - ideas have, oddly enough, seen them become darlings of the (albeit centre-left) Establishment.
L'Estrange-Corbet spoke at APEC in Auckland in 1999, was on the panel for Labour's 2000 Business Forum and, in 2004, the Auckland War Memorial Museum held a four-month retrospective of their work called "We fought fashion - and lost!"
The most intimate public fact of L'Estrange-Corbet's life is that she has depression and agreed to be one of the recognisable faces for "Like Minds, Like Mine", the high-profile mental health campaign that began in the late 1990s. This, rather than World, may be the most influential thing she has ever done. Though when she - but not Hooper - was gonged in 2002, being made a member of the New Zealand Order of Merit, it was for her services to fashion, not a greater understanding of depression.
All this we know. These are the glittering successes in the L'Estrange-Corbet story. It is what does not glister that makes her story so confounding.
"A few weeks after Dad died, the unhappiness became overwhelming. I tried to kill myself."
These are the two most profound sentences in L'Estrange-Corbet's book. They report the two most profound events in her life. Readers of All That Glitters may not be surprised by the second sentence, given what comes before it. Her early years were hard; violence, tragedy and poverty were constants.
Both her parents were born to wealthy British families in the failing years of British India.
In the wake of the sub-continent's independence from colonial rule in 1947, her father Donovan's family, the L'Estrange-Corbets, emigrated to New Zealand.
Her mother, Elsie, was wooed from India to New Zealand by Donovan L'Estrange-Corbet's letters and arrived a year later, in 1951.
The couple were married at Auckland's Winter Gardens in 1953 and within three years had their first daughter, Robyn. When Elsie became pregnant for a second time in 1959, Donovan was convinced a son was on his way and decided to call him Dennis, after his late father.
Instead, a little girl came into the world on February 29, 1960.
In her book, L'Estrange-Corbet says her father could not hide his displeasure. "'We'll call her Denise', he said - but the name was little consolation ... he slid into a dark mood that never seemed to lift."
Her father, it seems, turned to booze and other women. By 1963 her mother had had enough and she and her two young daughters shipped out to England by steamer. It was the last time L'Estrange-Corbet would see her father.
Just months after arriving in Britain, Elsie gave birth to a boy, Mark, conceived after a fling with a young ship steward on the voyage to England.
With three young mouths and no money, it was inevitable the family's new life at "home" - a country they'd never been to - in Tooting, south London, would be characterised more by hardship than happiness.
There are some terrific and terrifying characters in All That Glitters. The most memorable is "the Gin Queen", her mother's sister Iris. She could create impressive and - to the reader - hilarious chaos after imbibing large quantities of her eponymous tipple. Typical is a scene where she starts a fistfight at a family do and winds up in a privet hedge. However, L'Estrange-Corbet retains a genuine affection for her sometimes fiery and often extremely generous aunt.
She holds no such fondness for her maternal grandmother, Elsie. Widowed early, she looms over the young Denise's childhood like a depressing fusion of the Wicked Witch of Tooting and a gruesome Cassandra.
Her grandmother bullied her, L'Estrange-Corbet surmises, because she looked so strongly like her father. It would be the lies of her grandmother that led to many beatings from her mother.
There were other calamities. In the original draft of the book - the final version has been heavily lawyered - L'Estrange-Corbet makes specific claims of incest and infanticide affecting the extended family. However, it is the death of her father that is the book's tragic fulcrum.
In 1974, after 12 years apart, her parents reconciled - principally because he claimed to have given up the drink - and air tickets were booked for New Zealand.
Since leaving the country at 3, L'Estrange-Corbet had become obsessed about returning here - and to her father. Finally, an end to an often dismal existence was close.
A month before the flight - and her 15th birthday - she was called home from school. She could not, she says in the book, guess why until her mother and grandmother opened the door. "'Please no, please tell me it's not Dad!' Still, no one answered me. I slid down the wall into a heap on the floor and curled into a fetal position and sobbed."
Her father, who at 46 when he died was two years younger than L'Estrange-Corbet is today, had been attending Alcoholics Anonymous. But it seems he went on a bender, cut himself on something in his kitchen while in a drunken stupor, then staggered around before ending up in the lounge where he collapsed on a couch. He bled to death. It was two days before his body was found. The scene was so grim, the police initially believed it was murder.
Her suicide attempt, an overdose of her mother's Mogadon sleeping pills a few weeks later, was as much due to the despair of her new life being snatched away as it was a response to her father's death.
"You're on a tightrope," she says now, "and if this tightrope snaps, you're f***ed. He was my lifeline on that tightrope." New Zealand - escape - would have to wait.
It seems to be a fundamental of working-class English life that tragedy's close companion is laughter. Humour is a defence, of course, laughter a release. And L'Estrange-Corbet's ordinary English life was as funny as it was sad.
The book includes episodes, with and without the Gin Queen, that deliver genuine guffaws - quite a few of which come from brushes with celebrities.
As a young teen, L'Estrange-Corbet and her best friend Jacqui Manning were mad for pop stars and used to catch a bus to the Kings Rd in the hope of spotting the likes of Gary Glitter.
After finishing school at 17, with a handful of O-levels, she did a fashion production course at the London College of Fashion, later landing a job with a small Knightsbridge fashion house, Crolla, where she toiled in the work room. One day a week would be spent upstairs in the shop, which allowed her sometimes amusing encounters with famous types, including a camp, funny Andy Warhol, a down-on-her-luck Vivienne Westwood and a bewildered Bob Dylan.
Remarkably, one of her funniest celebrity stories is not in the book. It involves, well, stalking Bryan Ferry. In 1973, when she was 13, an ongoing teachers' strike meant every Wednesday was school-free and she and Manning would get the number 49 bus to the Kings Rd, then walk up to number 10 Redcliffe Square, the abode of one Mr B. Ferry.
"I bought a poster of Roxy Music and they were standing outside this house and it had number 10 on a pillar. It had two lovely pillars and they were on the steps. I looked in the phone book under B. Ferry and there was Bryan Ferry, 10 Redcliffe Square and I said to Manning 'oh my God, Bryan Ferry, 10 Redcliffe Square, they're standing outside a house at number 10!"'
"We got the bus up and 'oh my God, it's the house.' I said, 'Let's go and phone the number.' There was a phone box across the street ... and the windows of the flat were on the ground floor with no curtains. So we phoned the number and looked across straight into the house. Bryan Ferry walked to the phone and picked it up and I went ..." Her jaw drops.
"And of course we didn't have 2p to put into the slot because we had no money. So we hung up. We did this like a million times. And we'd go, 'Oh my God, he's coming to the window!' This went on and on, week after week after week."
We shall pass over her story about collecting Ferry's ciggie butts, but the phone calls anecdote has a double coda.
Later the same year, Roxy Music released a song called Street Life. The first couplets are: "Wish everybody would leave me alone - yeah / They're always calling on my telephone / When I pick it up there's no one there / So I walk outside just to take the air."
A few years ago Ferry visited New Zealand and L'Estrange-Corbet met him. "I asked him 'did you write that song for me?', and he said 'yes, I probably did'."
There is no self-pity in Denise L'Estrange-Corbet. There is an engagement with, an understanding of how her past informs her present. Yet there is a detachment from the past too. There's all of that the day we talk. It might have been different the day before I visited, or the day after.
She is, undoubtedly, a wholly emotional creature. One can only guess how much of that is due to her childhood and teenage years. But if the first part of her life was part tragedy, the second has been - for want of a better description - mostly triumph.
Since finally returning to New Zealand in 1985 - she arrived intending to work her way back to Britain but stayed - she has become a wife, a mother, a successful businesswoman and member of the New Zealand Order of Merit.
The key was meeting Hooper. Foremost, he believed in her. "He thought my ideas were great. I'd never really met anyone who said, 'That's a great idea, you should do that'. I was like 'wow', I'd never had that encouragement. He wasn't thinking he was being encouraging, he would just say it. I thought he was fun and had great style. He thought I was nice and kind and lovely and charming and mad and aggressive and angry ... but he just accepted me for who I was."
World was Hooper's idea. But it's their business, 50-50. Roughly the creative partnership seems to be this: he wants to put more rhinestones on the jacket; she worries. "He never says I'm a pessimist. He says, 'She's more business-minded than I am', which is a very nice way of putting it. I err on the side of caution."
I ask her if World has made them wealthy and she asks me to define wealth before answering her own question.
"I would define it by having quite a few millions in the bank that were mine, with no bills ... so, no. Wealth is something I'd never imagine having in terms of money."
Hooper may be less interested in the business of World, but he is, if not a work-aholic, then someone who works seven days a week, she says. All That Glitters also reveals he's long struggled with a rare disorder, Ramsay Hunt Syndrome, a condition brought on by the virus which causes chicken pox. The syndrome struck at 27 and 17 years later his speech is still slurred and the right side of his face still paralysed. He can no longer smile and hates having his photograph taken.
Their relationship has been the cause of some speculation.
Indeed, in her book, L'Estrange-Corbet goes as far as commenting on a recent rumour of an affair, which she calls "preposterous". However, two weeks after we spoke it was revealed that, sadly, their personal - though not business - relationship had ended.
Given all that she discloses in All That Glitters, she is unexpectedly reluctant to talk about the break-up. She says the couple have agreed, understandably perhaps, not to comment publicly for the sake of their daughter.
"It is a very personal and private time," she told me. "Neither Francis or myself are involved with butchers, bakers, candlestickmakers, or anyone else, contrary to salacious gossip reports."
Whatever the reasons for the split, it may well mark the beginning, and an unhappy one, to her life's third act. She has recently returned to therapy too, after spending much of the past year alone writing her book.
"[The episodes of depression] are definitely more intense and I don't know why, whether it's age or just this past year because I had so much time on my own."
Or perhaps it's been digging through her history.
She says in All That Glitters she is unconvinced of the benefit of rehashing past trauma in therapy - "for me, poking into the past can be more destructive than helpful" - and no longer does so. Yet the paradox is she's now doing it in a book, which took five years from concept to publication.
"I think maybe why the book took a long time to do was the head space I had to be in to do it. You have to be in a very strong head space. If I had some depression days there was no way I could sit down and write about the terrible things. There were only certain times I felt that I could write about them. But I was ready to do that now." Ready to remove the mask.
* All That Glitters, (Random House $36.99) is out on September 5. World will be showing at NZ Fashion Week, which begins September 15.
