Jungle fever

Nov 18 2008 by Sean Collins, The Journal

As ITV’s I’m A Celebrity... gets underway, Kathryn Armstrong catches up with North East designer Scott Henshall who’s been there, seen it, eaten the cockroach...

These days, very much post-jungle, Scott Henshall enjoys a charmed and celebrity-packed lifestyle.

It’s fair to say that his time in the jungle did nothing but good for his profile, even though his high-camp antics saw him voted off in the second round.

Today he remains no stranger to television. He’s soon to be seen on Paris Hilton’s new TV search for a British ‘best friend’ for example. In London, Madonna is a neighbour and the red carpet his comfort zone.

Yet Hartlepool remains close to his heart – as the base for his highly successful fashion range, favoured not only by Paris but also by a list of starry women such as Girls Aloud’s Sarah Harding, Charlotte Church (non-pregnant that is), Victoria Beckham and Denise van Outen to name a few.

His style, the ‘shock and awe’ school of fashion. A precocious talent – passing his art GCSE with an A when he was just 10 – he studied fashion at Northumbria and became the youngest ever designer to show at London Fashion Week before winning the Vidal Sassoon Award for Cutting Edge talent in 2000.

He became the man who invented the ‘message dress’. A definite king of bling whose mantra is ‘max out’. He thinks Barbie is a great role model for women and one of his many claims to fame is that he designed what is still the world’s most expensive frock – a £5 million dress adorned with real diamonds.

Today Henshall, the brand, is big business. He once said why spend a fortune slaving over an entire designer range when one of his movie-premiere gowns could garner more publicity in one night than a costly catwalk show?

By managing to engineer such a high profile for himself, Scott has created a fashion empire that is global… and very big in Japan. For the past ten years he has designed a brand called Revisitation in collaboration with the ‘megabrand’ Abahouse. He now has 17 stores in the country and 300 stockists and visits Japan at least six times a year.

“I dress girls who want to have fun,” laughs Scott. “I enjoy making them look like Barbie dolls. They are the maximum attention dress, max out and sparkle at the flashbulbs and go for glam. I like the idea that I can make someone more famous.”

Back home in Hartlepool is where the glam takes shape. “My workforce was in Hartlepool because there were still seamstresses in Hartlepool when I finished at Northumbria,” he says.

“I’ve employed people since 1998 who worked for Courtaulds or Marks & Spencer in factories in the North East who are skilled seamstress, pattern- cutters – a great deal of talent that I have been able to tap into. ”

Read more and see some of Scott’s designs at www.northeast exclusive.co.uk