"Today a good designer has to say 'okay, we want to be designers, what are we trying to say, what brand do we want to be?'" says 'L'Estrange-Corbet. "Do we want to be high-end, mid or fast-fashion? Then you have to come up with the concept of how you want to market your label, having a website, whether or not you sell online or whether you open up a shop. I can see a lot of the young designers who are coming through and I love watching to see where they are going and how they develop their style, but it's just so different - how they are going to find it in the industry and where the industry is going."
Hooper agrees. "Information now is so free-flowing and so instant that they [designers] also have a great empowerment that we never had. When we first started, New Zealand was so isolated that it made our fashion signature very strong - we were unsure of who we were, there was no one to copy, so in that sense it made us very strong because you just did what you did. We stood out. Now we exist in a very noisy market, but the opportunities are still there for very few designers to succeed."
World now has stores in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch and, eight years ago, opened a sister store, WorldBeauty, selling fragrance, skincare and objet d'art. L'Estrange-Corbet and Hooper now share the business with designer Benny Castles, who has become such an integral part of the label he became a business partner six years ago.
Castles admits that the fun is not just developing a World "personality", but making sure that it exists in a way that people can enjoy every day, from business women to the discerning male customers who appreciate the brand's point of difference in an otherwise earnest menswear market.
"The key to keeping World relevant is keeping it what it is and not disseminating it and not trying to be too smart or too thoughtful about ways to fit into the market. It's about being true to the personality because that is what people have connected to for 25 years."
In their workroom in central Auckland, a former Wesleyan chapel built in 1858, Castles, Hooper and L'Estrange-Corbet multitask and speak fast. With a mantra based on being a "factory of ideas and experiments", there's a sense of organised chaos too.
From juggling responsibilities in their stores and workroom as well as a burgeoning online store, there are projects outside of the business too. L'Estrange-Corbet writes her popular weekly column in Canvas with daughter Pebbles, and they both, along with Hooper, judge several awards and speak at events. There are also the several charities they work closely with such as Starship Hospital, Diabetes NZ, the Mental Health Foundation and IHC, the latter seeing a member of the IHC working two days a week in the work room.
"It's been an evolution," says Hooper. "The fundamentals have always remained the same in that the brand is really opinionated, colourful and irreverent. We've always been the 'naughty' brand, but we're very serious about fashion."
Top 25 World moments
Francis Hooper:
1. Opening our first World store 25 years ago - it was 10ft by 5ft and the coolest little store in Auckland.
2. Being a part of the Smokefree awards, entering every year and winning the Avant Garde award in 1995 with an origami paper dress made with $7 of paper. It taught me ideas can take you everywhere.
3. Blowing the late Anna Piaggi away at Sydney Fashion Week in 1997 with our unique feathered collection. She bought our bustled feathered cocktail dress and we kept in touch with her and she mentored us over the years. We miss her genius.
4. Opening the NZ4 show at London Fashion Week in 1999 with our 2525 collection, looking to the future. We got noticed by Liberty's and Selfridges and clinched great orders with them. We proved to all Kiwi designers that anything was possible.
5. Showing at Paris Fashion Week with our WorldMan brand - showing menswear in Paris! So cool. We forged many fashion friendships and opened our menswear ideas to the world.
6. Being stopped by Kanye West while away on business. He politely asked me where I got the shirt I was wearing. I proudly told him it was designed by World. He took my photo and Pebbles and I got front row seats to his concert that night. Boom!
7. Opening our marvellous Wellington store 23 years ago and becoming a major part of Wellington's high fashion scene.
8. Pigheadedly opening our sister brand WorldBeauty eight years ago at the height of the global financial crisis, creating a glorious luxury oasis of rare perfume, antiques, beauty, skincare and objet d'art.
9. Seeing Denise front the Mental Health Foundation campaign (she was so brave) and her getting a MNZM for it. She's a star.
10. Designing the costumes for the 2000 New Zealand movie, The Irrefutable Truth About Demons, starring Karl Urban. It was an experience.
11. Re-opening our Christchurch operation after the devastation of the Christchurch earthquakes. We lost everything in the February quake. Opening two years later in Ballantynes was a dream.
12. Purchasing our head office and design studio - a glorious historic church. It's the first Wesleyan church in Auckland, the building was the first Sunday school in the country - plus it was the venue for the suffragette movement in New Zealand. And now it's now World's HQ, the place where all our ideas and experiments come to life.
13. Seeing wonderful people over the years wearing our brand and feeling powerful, sexy and young.
14. Our 2008 collection, "There Is No Depression in New Zealand". It opened NZ Fashion Week and was held the day the stockmarket crashed. We collaborated with Swarovski, creating a collection that was diamond encrusted to the max. The show bedazzled and seared your eyeballs. It was a fashion moment and a high step up in luxury for us. Everything changed.
Denise L'Estrange-Corbet:
1. The first day of the store's opening week and making our first sale - a button badge for $3! I could have kissed the ground the customer walked on, as that started the ball rolling, and 25 years later ...
2. Giving birth to Pebbles Maria Alice L'Estrange-Corbet-Hooper (yes, that's her name, triple-barrelled!) on October 10, 1989.
3. Being asked to be the first of four New Zealand designers to show at Mercedes Australian Fashion Week. We received the letter and thought it was a joke and threw it in the bin. A few weeks later the organisers phoned and asked if we had received it. We had to really rush to get a collection of 15 pieces together. I worked until 4am every morning. After we showed, the artistic director of Italian Vogue, the iconic Anna Piaggi, came backstage and kept repeating "bella, bella".
She visited us in New Zealand also, and was always so encouraging of our brand.
4. Meeting the Dalai Lama and having him sign a World bag.
5. Designing a range of children's T-shirts for the Starship Foundation and raising $225,000 in six weeks for the hospital. We did this again the following year.
6. Being in the "Like Minds Like Mine" campaign to raise awareness for mental health in 2000. The whole thing snowballed, I had no idea how many people I knew - and didn't know - suffered from depression and mental illness.
7. Visiting an orphanage and school in Arusha, Tanzania in 2003 and working with an abandoned children charity, and raising $119,000 for the school.
8. Having a 15-year retrospective at the Auckland Museum for 4 months in 2004.
9. Releasing my autobiography, All That Glitters in 2008. It was in the best-seller list for the year.
10. Judging the IHC Art Awards in 2009 and meeting an artist called Joanne Lynskey, who asked if she could work for me. Two years later a vacancy came up and I gave it to Jo, who has worked two days a week for us since then. It is amazing, as we have learnt so much from someone with special needs. She is adored by all the staff and makes the best coffee in town.
10. Having the legendary editor at large of US Vogue, Andre Leon Talley and Miss Jay knock on our workroom door and ask to see our range in 2010. We nearly fell over. We were then invited to the America's Next Top Model filming, and I had a lunch with Tyra Banks. All very special memories.
11. In 2012, moving our flagship store from High St, where we had been for 23 years, to Britomart.
