Shopping: Out with minimalism

Designer Megan Park is at the forefront of the new vogue for Bohemian chic. Sumptuous fabrics, embroidery and beads - her clothes say `no' to Nineties austerity

On the face of it, Megan Park is an exemplary Nineties designer. Her own clothes are fashionably monochrome, she sports a gamine crop and she lives and works in a sparse East London loft, its severity softened only by clusters of moss-green candles and paintings bought, one suspects, from a nearby Shoreditch gallery. All very hip - until you spot the idiosyncratic wares she designs: opulent silk neckscarves, wraps, dinky evening bags and tunic dresses in vivid colour combinations, intricately hand-embroidered with cut-glass beads. Park's message is loud and clear: minimalism can go hang.

It isn't a heresy to decry minimalism these days, thanks to the current vogue for "Bohemian chic" (as in Indian and chinoiserie fabrics fashioned into everything from frocks to decadent bolsters). But, in the boho-chic stakes, Park has truly pushed the boat out, scattering her designs with enough beads to sink a battleship, and revelling in the pairing of muted colours with cheeky acid splashes - claret collides with fuchsia, midnight blue with tangerine, and olive green with lime chartreuse. "I like to work with muddy, dirty colours and inject them with hot, bright colours," she quips.

Park, an Australian fashion graduate from Melbourne, has been doing baroque for 10 years. In the early Nineties - during those wilderness years of relentlessly "tasteful" and Prada-inspired minimalism - Park regularly travelled to India, a country she loves, buying sumptuous fabrics for an Australian fashion company. After moving to Britain six years ago, she was offered a job as designer for the Delhi-based company Sreepriya, a specialist in hand-embroidered fabrics. Since then, "we've built up a great relationship," says Park, "and my designs are now sold regularly to Dries van Noten, Givenchy and Kenzo."

Park still works for Sreepriya, but last year she launched her own label and now produces two collections a year, available in shops all over the world. Known for her delicate bags and scarves, Park has recently started designing lavishly embroidered, simply cut clothing. The tunic dresses, aprons, sarongs and camisoles are made from fantastic silks - taffeta, organza, satin and georgette - or nylon net, and occasionally combined with velvet and wool. Metallic block prints are a common feature, on to which beads are embroidered, often incorporating metallic yarns. A beguiling combination of Eastern and Victorian, the designs are reminiscent of 19th- century Orientalism, and its associations with the dandyish figureheads of the Aesthetic Movement, such as Whistler, Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley.

"After six years with Sreepriya, I'd built up the experience to start my own label," says Park. "It seemed natural to do scarves and bags because they're small and manageable. It was easier at that stage to make something that looked this precious, without having to deal with a huge expanse of fabric."

Park's own-label designs are made by another Delhi-based company and Park spends three months of the year in India. The skilled workmanship of its embroiderers, and the good wages they are paid, were attractions to that particular company. "I found the company three years ago," she says. "It does embroidery for Dolce & Gabbana and Anna Molinari and the embroiderers are all men. Their workmanship is amazing."

Taking a very hands-on approach, Park prides herself on enjoying a symbiotic relationship with the embroiderers. "We work closely together. I work on one design with a couple of guys for a week, slowly developing it. I might change my mind about it and ask for an element to be dropped, while the embroiderers always show me little samples that inspire me. The most exhilarating part of my job is seeing something develop from a boring drawing to the finished product."

Spare though her loft is, it is dotted about with evidence of Park's inspirations: photocopies of Victorian samplers, broderie anglaise and Art Nouveau flowers; a page from a Seventies fashion magazine showing models in dresses with hippy-influenced embroidery; an abstract painting in an Art Deco style in rusts and browns; postcards of Aubrey Beardsley illustrations from the current exhibition at the V&A - a favourite place for research.

Only one year after their launch, Park's own-label accessories and clothing are selling world-wide: at Harvey Nichols, Liberty, Joseph, Browns, Whistles and The Cross in London; at Colette and Le Bon Marche in Paris; at Barneys and Nieman Marcus in America; and Joyce in Hong Kong. And the orders are rolling in, in ever higher quantities. Does she worry about completing them on time? "No, if a shop orders anything, it has to give me three months lead time."

Park initially approached these companies directly, but now buyers flock to see her collections at London Fashion Week and in Paris, where she shows her work in a friend's apartment. The fashion press's enthusiastic response work has helped her enormously. "The first people I saw were at Vogue, and they loved my stuff," she says. "They did a profile on me. As soon as I could say that that had happened, all the stores I'd been hoping would stock my stuff were keen to do so."

Naturally, the prices of her designs reflect their detailed labour-intensive craftsmanship. Her Resham Lily two-tone wrap sells for pounds 232; her Lyon Floral georgette tunic, pounds 275; while her jewel-striped evening bag - in either claret or powder blue with fine bands of differently coloured beads - costs pounds 63.

In fashion terms, grey might be the order of the day this winter. But the popularity of Park's designs suggests that the trend for bohemian chic isn't a flash in the pan. Oh, and fashion next summer, as those who pore over reports of the collections will know, is set to be rampantly colourful. So, if Park's hope is that monochrome minimalism can go hang, she won't have long to wait. Who knows, as I write, she may even be giving her fashionably austere East London loft a rococo makeover.

For more information and stockists, contact Megan Park on 0171-739 5828