independent.co.uk: I spent my early years growing up in Casablanca in Morocco. Back then, in the late 1950s, Casablanca was very French, very European. My parents, like the city, were glamorous and dressed really beautifully. So it came as quite a shock when we moved to the East End of London when I was eight. London seemed so bleak – dark and cold, the people looked so grey, nothing like the pictures of elaborately dressed Victorian women I had seen on the tins of Quality Street that my father brought back from business trips.

These days I return to Morocco to take a break from my busy London life, which revolves around the demands of my design studio and boutique in Knightsbridge. And though it takes under three hours to fly there, once I arrive my London life seems light years away; Morocco submerges visitors into a completely different and exotic culture. [ read more ]