Helen's story

British fashion designer goes broke! Well, don't they all? But in Helen Storey's case, personal misfortune and business setbacks have interrupted a special, vivid, angry talent. Report by E Jane Dickson. Portrait by David Gamble

"I've always been attracted to trauma," says Helen Storey. "The creative part of me is coming from a very angry place, it needs to be in conflict."

When fashion designers do "conflict", they tend to mean dodgy colour combination; the "tension" of plaid against polka dot; the unbearable lightness of beading. Helen Storey, however, has never fitted in with the "think pink" brigade. At 35, she is arguably the most original, and undoubtedly the most cerebral, figure in British fashion. Last month, the designer whose "need to design is a way of expressing anger about witnessing what women are going through" sent models down the catwalk with bare bums. As creative conflicts go, it was a corker. (Luckily Desmond Morris was on hand with an explanation about "the erogenous zones men and women share".) The tabloids followed the ensuing debate with close attention.

Trauma of the most immediate and desperate kind has, however, dogged Storey of late. Since 1993, she has nursed her husband, the architect Ron Brinkers, through a particularly virulent form of cancer and seen her one-and-a-half million pound company, Coates and Storey, fall into receivership. On 13 June, with the plaudits for the Autumn/Winter '95 collection still loud in her ears, Storey signed on the dole. Her case is by no means uncommon among independent designers, but it is spectacularly undeserved. In spite, or as she maintains, because of the strain of her husband's illness (Brinkers was also financial director of the company), Storey's famously erratic talent had found new focus. A bulging overseas order book, including long-standing clients, such as Madonna, Cher and Sandra Bernhard, could not shore up a depressed home market. British women clawing their way out of recession do not splurge on a Storey trademark sequinned bolero. And when the bank withdrew Coates and Storey's factoring facility (money advanced on orders about to be shipped), it was the final straw. Fresh out of survival strategies, Storey is running on anger.

"I'm shaking a fist at someone," she says. "I don't know who, exactly, but I haven't come through this mess, thank you, to settle for anything less than I'm capable of. I realised through Ron's illness that I had no idea how good a designer I was. Afterwards, when I was just a tiny bit removed from the illness, I was very interested to look back and see what still mattered and what didn't matter. And what did matter for me, beyond belief, was to be able to work and to design. I thought I was driven before, but I hadn't even begun."

The unnerving thing about this speech is that Storey doesn't look the least bit driven. She has the face of a Burne-Jones angel, luminous with serenity, a face you could pray to. Her voice, as she vows vengeance on her unidentified enemy, is low and even, modulated to a tone of sweet reason. It would frighten Hannibal Lecter into fits.

The rage in the blood is partly hereditary. The daughter of the radical playwright and novelist David Storey, Helen realised at an early age that she was "full of opposites". At her Hampstead ballet school, she looked around at all the other four-year-olds in their leotards and pink tights and was immediately, painfully aware of "the hierarchy of women, the intensity of vying for position through your body". A naturally gifted dancer, she worked hard to improve her "ranking". "I had the ability to kick my leg out sideways and hold it above my head for an amazing amount of time," she remembers. "It was the first time I came to terms with that driven part of me. But gradually I developed a kind of love-hate relationship with ballet. I suppose I rebelled at the idea of a standard of excellence, the point of which was to make you exactly the same as everybody else, doing the same steps, wearing the same clothes, not even smiling unless Coppelia said so."

Hampstead Comprehensive in the Sixties was choc-a-bloc with media kids stretching their parents' liberal principles to the limits. "My dad is very good at recognising the essence of a person and he obviously recognised something in me that wouldn't get on with a normal academic education," says Storey, loyally, but the school, "a bloody rough place in Cricklewood, nothing Hampstead about it", was purgatory for a highly-strung child. In a bid to blend with the in-crowd, Storey dressed up as a skinhead, but the neat ballet dancer's bun on the back of her neck gave the game away and gangs of girls would wait outside the school gates with scissors to scalp her as she ran past. Eventually, she resolved the ballet slipper/bovver boot conflict within herself by jumping off a wall in platform shoes and breaking her ankle.

"I still find it very difficult to watch ballet. Part of me still thinks that I've failed at it. I think it may be that the only way I was able to stop doing it was to find a mechanism that physically prevented me from carrying on. I remember my parents being quite angry that I had "acted out" the end of my dance career instead of discussing it. But I think it was quite symbolic of the way I behaved in my teenage years."

Alerted to their daughter's emotional emergency, Storey's parents removed her from Hampstead Comprehensive. A stint at an exclusive crammer "full of ambassadorial children with no brains" was followed by a further education college in Southwark where Helen was the only white pupil "at once rather special and rather different. Again, Dad thought if we stick her in a rough place, she'll do well. And I was in such a hurry to get out of there that I did manage to get a handful of O'levels."

Modelling seemed like a reasonable career for a disaffected dancer and Storey duly enrolled at Lucie Clayton, an experience she found even more traumatic than ballet. "They weren't teaching you to be a model so much as teaching this bizarre vision of what women should be. It made me feel like a bloke. In as much as these women just weren't real to me."

Storey's experience of the opposite sex was hardly more encouraging. "I was popular for my looks, but also abused for them." At Hampstead, one boy would pin her arms behind her back while another flicked at her breasts with a ruler. A male teacher assiduously checked that she was wearing the regulation navy knickers. Unsurprisingly, a visceral and sometimes violent reaction to her body image and that of other women figures largely in Storey's designs.

"It is my greatest wish that women should develop the confidence to define themselves without that struggle to put themselves into whatever shape is deemed to be the lovable one for the moment," she explains. There is no doubting her sincerity - an untruth, you instinctively feel, would choke this ethereal figure as surely as a fudge doughnut. Yet the statement sits oddly with an oevre that is merciless in its demands of the female form. The designs that made Storey an international success - the crotch- grazing disco shorts, the cut-away bondage dress and latex sheaths bristling with frightening furry bits - are worn by supermodels at their peril. Storey has famously maintained that black plastic breastplates are less daunting to women than spriggy smocks from Laura Ashley (sprigs, in her book, spell servitude and the submissive feminine stereotype), but it is an argument that cuts no ice with the average British size 14.

"I know, I know," says Storey, offering up sketches of elegantly etiolated women like sacrifices on her kitchen table. "These women don't exist, and I don't even know why thin is desirable. Why is this shape [Karate chop] more acceptable than this [hands waved in blessing]? As a rule I like roundness as opposed to straight lines. My favourite car is a Jaguar Mk 2, which is flat and curvy. I also like fat furniture. Maybe I relegate all my fat feelings towards objects and not towards humans. Maybe it's the media. The perfume industry, the cosmetic industry and fashion all predestine how we think about ourselves. Perhaps," she offers, miserably, "you just instinctively design for the shape you are. [She is, at a liverish estimate, a perfect size 10.] That's why Donna Karan makes for size 14 to 16 and I don't. But I guess that's just abdicating responsibility."

Such is Storey's distress that you almost feel like lobbying Parliament to have all women over size 10 cleared from the streets forthwith. At this point, however, the argument takes a surprising tack.

"Maybe," she reasons, "there is a hidden agenda which is that women don't choose to explain why 'thin' is desirable. And maybe the fact that we don't choose to explain is saying something very telling about our sex. It's a very anti-feminist thing to say, but I'm not sure that we're ready to take control of the way our bodies are perceived. I don't think we know where we are now. And it's not a case of brightness or intelligence. It's something that evolves in its own time. I think women feel very disparately about themselves right now. You have the feminists and those who absolutely hate feminism, and, as someone who considers herself intelligent enough to hear both arguments, I don't think I can vote either way on that one. Often in my work, when something has happened which is bigger than the industry I'm in, I have found a way of recognising it through my clothes. I suppose the most dramatic example of this was during the Gulf War, when I designed a collection full of clothes sexualising and glamourising the idea of war. I didn't realise, until I started getting publicity saying that all this was in very bad taste, that I had even done it. In the same way, I think that when a real shift in women's attitudes comes along and can be documented in clothing, I will be one of the first to pick up on it. It's to do with instinct."

Storey's most controversial foray into sexual politics was undoubtedly the "Rage" collection of 1990, which featured garments, for men and women, imprinted with a human foetus. This was a direct response to her own pregnancy with her son Luke. "I very rapidly fell out of love with my body," she explains. "I felt completely taken over by my stomach, as if it was robbing me of my personality. I always imagined that I could control my body, and suddenly it was just going its own way. That was very, very frightening to me."

Conversely, it was the lack of control that Storey found so liberating on her arrival at Kingston Polytechnic in 1979. Flirting at the time with shop-lifting and unsuitable boyfriends, she had no notion of a career in art. But Dad, impressed by her obsessive drawings of her idol, Donna Summer, had organised them into a portfolio for submission to the Art Foundation course.

"During my teenage years, I hadn't a clue who I was supposed to be. I was always trying to force myself into the same mould as someone else - skinhead, hippy, punk, Hampstead blonde. The huge, air-gulping relief about Foundation was that you didn't have to be like anyone else. Everyone was different, and there was something about the texture of that difference that made me feel I had a place in that world."

These early schizophrenic ghost-selfs have been systematically exorcised in succeeding collections. The shaven-headed divas in bin-liner ball gowns of "Present Times" (1991). The Ophelia-goes-hiking "Wild Heart" look of 1992. "For some designers, the six-month cycle is like being on a hamster wheel, because they're basically turning out variations on an idea they first had ten years ago. For me, it's a chance to reassess who I am twice a year and that process is one of the things I'm addicted to."

Every so often, Storey sends out an idea that takes your breath away. A sinuous faux-monkey fur train on an elegant tea gown recalls the faintly sleazy Surrealism of Meret Oppenheim. An outsized boa of recycled rags combines opulence, parsimony and a dig at the fashion industry. "You don't need a message today," argues Storey, "you just need a look. And if you give a look a message, it's a bit like being a really bright person in a class of below-average intelligence."

Sometimes the message is more coherent than others. Occasionally, however, the big idea dissipates to a mess of mad woman's underclothes. The risk- taking is all part of the process. The fact that, after 11 years, there is no definable "Helen Storey" woman is a matter of quiet satisfaction to her. "I always feel overwhelmed when I see people wearing my clothes," she admits. "Partly, because if that woman has understood exactly why I did something, then it is quite intrusive; she's touched a bit of me that I thought I was keeping private. I know it's perverse, but I guess it's that old thing of opposites again."

The tension of opposites is not always enjoyable. "Ideas and commerciality are two things which tend to hate each other and one of the reasons that fashion is called the barometer of society is that it holds these two things together. But ideas and commerciality have to wrestle together for quite a long time before they can agree with each other and that is the constant battle for a creative person working in the industry. At any one time, a designer is working on three seasons; trying to get the money in from the previous collection, working on the current one and shipping the one before. If either end decides not to pay, the buck stops with the person who came up with the idea. That can't be right. In a rather silent way, you are tricked into being everything but a designer."

Storey and her partner, Caroline Coates, are now looking for an angel to relaunch their label. "The person I'm looking for is somebody who accepts, unquestionably, that I have talent and who isn't poking me for it all the time. Somebody who will allow Caroline and me to take the brand and make it international, while all the other non-creative areas - manufacturing, administration, shopping and deal-making - are siphoned off to a central nervous system. Above all, my backer will have to be someone who isn't scared of a moving object."

Storey recognises that it's is a tall order. "But then again, I don't think what I do is easy either. I think I belong", she concludes, a touch melodramatically, "to a very lonely set of people."

And who are the others in this select group? "Well, actually, if you ask for names, I'm not sure," says Storey, giving the matter lengthy consideration. In a final bid for inspiration, she laughs and raps on the table.

"Hello?" she calls out to the ether, "is anybody there?"

And then again, rapping more loudly:

"Hello?"