Cover
World of their own
by Amanda Spratt
Denise L’Estrange-Corbet of fashion label World has always lived with depression. The demons, she says, will never go away, but she knows how to deal with them now.
Her first memory of her illness was at age five: she remembers bleak days and tears, “wanting to curl up and die”. And the demons, she calls them, kept coming back. At 14, she tried to take her own life, an attempt at escape.
Hushed up by her family – mental illness was an aberration, suicide an abomination – it left her more trapped than ever.
For the next 20 years, Denise L’Estrange-Corbet suffered. Too embarrassed to tell her doctor what she was feeling, she was in her thirties before she came clean. Finally, the doctor was able to give the demons a name.
“I said I felt really black, and nothing could get me out of it,” says L’Estrange-Corbet, one of the couple behind fashion label World. “I described my feelings, and how suicidal thoughts often came to me, and she said, ‘You have depression.’
“I felt so good that a name had been given to this thing, and that it could be treated. For the first time in my life, I felt like a normal person.”
All the same, with a background like that, the fashion industry – likened by some to high school on steroids – scarcely seems a natural career choice. But L’Estrange-Corbet and her husband and business partner, Francis Hooper, thrive on being the underdogs. For 18 years, they have been the problem children of fashion, pushing their own barrow down the runway. They’ve used drag queens as models, they’ve put slogans on T-shirts, they’ve used yellow and said the “F” word a lot. And they’ve succeeded.
“We were the brand they said would never make it,” she says. “We were too different. People thought we were a couple of loony anti-establishment whack jobs.”
World has opened five shops here and is opening four more this year. It sells clothes in Australia, Europe, the US and Asia. It was the first Kiwi label to show at Australian Fashion Week and London Fashion Week, has exhibited in the Auckland Museum and, in 2002, L’Estrange-Corbet was awarded an MNZM (Member of the Order) for services to fashion.
And just when you thought World couldn’t get weirder, it has taken on the corporate world: Christchurch-based corporate clothing company Deane Apparel asked World to design its new uniform line for Australasia, precisely because it wanted to shake up the status quo.
“You can’t hold a good thing down, I guess,” L’Estrange-Corbet says. “You can poke it and prod it and take the mickey out of it, but at the end of the day it’s going to rise up.”
But only so far up, it seems. Despite its success, World was not invited to take part in this year’s Fashion Week. Organiser Pieter Stewart says she took them off the mailing database after seeing them on a 60 Minutes show three years ago saying that they wouldn’t show here again. She claims that they were inadvertently left off come invitation time.
“It’s no skin off my nose,” retorts L’Estrange-Corbet. “But I do think it says a lot about the event. Do you really think that these young and up-and-coming designers – and let’s face it, every f---ing person who is doing a design course calls themselves a designer – do you really think they’re going to lead the way? Who are they going to follow?”
L’Estrange-Corbet and Hooper like to play up their reputation as the king and queen of anti-establishment. Their ageing Ponsonby villa hovers on the verge of abdication. It looks as if it was decorated by a gay colonial gamekeeper. Flayed, stretched and stuffed animals grow out of every spare surface like weeds, between antique apothecary jars and silk screens. Gerald the giraffe stretches out over the stairwell, a kangaroo still with her joey guards the entrance. Table legs are made out of antlers. You almost expect to see jars of body parts in the china cabinets and Hooper out the back with a cleaver and the latest kill.
The couple share a taste for the “beautiful but macabre”, says Hooper: they even had a personal taxidermist for a while. His name was Wayne. He lived in Ngaruawahia.
But beyond the gallery of the dead, the Hooper/L’Estrange-Corbet household is the very model of traditional society. Afternoon tea – cupcakes and Belgium biscuits – is eaten off blue porcelain with cloth napkins. A note on the door to remind their 19-year-old daughter Pebbles to lock the doors and turn off the lights is disappointingly responsible. A hair tie is used to keep the bathroom cupboard doors together.
They like it like that: it messes with people’s preconceptions.
“It’s in my upbringing,” says L’Estrange-Corbet. “We’re very down-to-earth and conservative. We’ve never had a cleaner, we don’t drive European cars. I would rather go home and clean my bathroom and watch Coronation Street. I do my best thinking with my hand down the toilet.”
Both she and Hooper were born into families who found out that wealth could come and go very quickly.
Hooper, whose mother is Chinese and whose biological father was English, arrived in New Zealand from Hong Kong when the first oil shocks hit. To him, it was like Albania compared to the consumerist mecca of Hong Kong.
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