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Financial Times:

Off the beaten rack

While every other celebrity these days seems to be talking about launching a fashion range, ask long-time fashion insiders what they dream of and they'll talk about escaping to the middle of nowhere. (Except, of course, for the rule-proving exception that is Karl Lagerfeld, who has never exp ressed the faintest desire to even take a holiday.)

In rare cases, they actually do make a break for it - only to find fashion is harder to shake than they thought. Take Giorgio Armani, who after years of just enjoying the raw beauty of the Italian Island of Pantelleria, has now harnessed his holidays to work with the launch of Crema Nera, which is enriched with the minerals that form the island's obsidian rock. Or Yohji Yamamoto, who after being encouraged by Miki Yahara to travel to Noumea for ages, finally took his friend up on the offer and then insisted they open a hotel together on Ouvea, New Caledonia. As for make-up artist François Nars, he sold his company to Shiseido and bought his own getaway island in the South Pacific. But did he just lie back and smell the frangipani? No. With ex-Alaia designer, Sophie Theallet, he launched a line of pareos and has also introduced island colours into his make-up range.

It seems you can take the fashionista out of the fashion scene but not the fashion gene out of the fashionista, as other, less known industry insiders have discovered. Take Sophie Cranston: she quit her job at the London label Temperley to learn flamenco, bought a beat-up camper van and drove it all the way to Spain's southern tip. What's she doing now? Heading up her own little fashion company, Libelula (Spanish for dragonfly), which includes skirts in hot pink and fiery red just right for dancing.

"One morning, I'd just had enough," she says. She was working in a Tarifa hotel when a colleague asked her to make her wedding dress, "which I couldn't do in a camper van". Studio space was found in a little whitewashed mountain village called Facinas and word spread that here was someone who could cut for girls with curves.

Launched in 2002, Libelula's joyfully bright pieces are now such a hit, Cranston commutes between Tarifa and Chelsea where, every Tuesday and Wednesday, her London studio welcomes shoppers by appointment. As to her Spanish shop, "if I'm not there, I can put a sign out telling people where to find a friend with a key," she says. "The locals love any excuse to pop in anyway."

Similarly, Lise Strathdee was on her weekly five-hour commute between Bermondsey and Bologna when she decided she and her boyfriend should move to New Zealand. (While she holds a New Zealand passport she had lived there only briefly as a child.) They headed to the Hokianga, a region way off the beaten track even in Kiwi terms, spotted a pink villa perched on a hillside and bought it. "Even people in Auckland thought I was a nut case," says Strathdee. "The Hokianga is a remote, low-density area without a supermarket or an ATM." How to make a living?

As chance would have it, an old post office came up for grabs and Strathdee saw the potential for "a general store for the 21st century". Hence The Outpost, which astonishingly, given its remote rural location, could rival Milan's famed boutique 10 Corso Como - which Strathdee knows well, since in her other life it was Romeo Gigli's design studio.

"The Outpost is the antithesis of what people expect to find up here. It's not craft-sy, it's not cute-sy," says Strathdee. "I come from an urban language, although here the clothes have to work with a gumboot. I was so over the Italian cliché of what femininity is, and the Little Black Dress and 'Breakfast at Tiffany's'; I never wanted to look like that woman, and I thought I was over fashion. It turns out, I'm not." As for the customer, she might shop in person or online. "The internet has made the city/rural divide pretty irrelevant," says Strathdee.

Except when it comes to pesto, that is. "You're a long way from another source," she says, and so pesto, plus organic foods by local producers and balsamic vinegar imported from Tuscany sit next to the Chinese satin cargo pants. The Outpost also works for the local community. There's no library nearby, so Strathdee has filled a room with her own books and this has become a local hub.

"We're challenging the perception that nothing happens in the middle of nowhere, " she says. "In fact, it's the new frontier". (As for Strathdee's boyfriend, Claudio Annicchiarico walked away from a high-powered job and is now an artist and a volunteer for the region's ambulance service.)

Then there's Alberto Vivian, whose new frontier was "a little island with hardly any cars". It was the early 1980s, he was exhausted both with his job at Fiorucci (the label was then at the height of its fame) and from witnessing the early ravages of Aids, and a jaunt to French Polynesia was supposed to be a quick pick-me-up. Instead he's still there, and has become the go-to-guy for those wanting to shoot advertising campaigns against exotic island scenery.

When Vivian called his boss to say he wouldn't be getting back on the plane, "Elio (Fiorucci) said 'you're right'", he says. But, fascinated by how the local women dressed, Vivian soon acquired a pedal sewing machine and started offering dresses in bright colours decorated with sea shells. "Then I had the wives of hoteliers in Papeete calling, and then the mistresses started to call."

He hired seamstresses until "demand got so big, I had to buy a house with electricity." Along with a growing fashion line, he became the man-on-the-spot for the Paris model agency, Marilyn's, for whom he organises model search competitions in the region. He is also the producer of photographic shoots against white sand and palm trees. (He recently worked on a television, print and catalogue campaign for the Australian department store David Jones).

"When I came here, I just wanted to live like a local, but I found I have fashion in my blood," says Vivian who, although he enjoys the local diet of "poisson cru", has lost none of his appetite for gossip from the fashion world. "I combine work with doing nothing, which is the Polynesian way," he says.

"Or perhaps it's the future and I'm just ahead of fashion."

Be an escape artist

Hotel Paradis d'Ouvéa (part owned and designed by Yohji Yamamoto), Fayaoue Ouvéa, Nouvelle Calédonie Tel: +687 45 54 00 www.hotelparadis.com.

For more details on accommodation on Francois Nars' Motu Tane, (near Bora Bora) and merchandise, visit www.motutaneisland.com, www.libelula.com, www.outposthokianga.com.

Marion Hume: 19 January 2008