Hello, I'm Kirstie Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive

for rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The program was originally broadcast in 1995

and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

My castaway this week is a fashion designer, the son of famous parents who divorced when he was

very young. It wasn't until he left his English public school education for art college in New York

that his career began to take shape. In 1977 still only 18 he returned to London, he got a

bank loan and he started his own business. Less than 10 years later he was voted fashion designer

of the year. Today age 35 he remains a fashionable success, admired not just for his classic clothes

but his designs for theatre and ballet as well. In a family like mine he says if you're not successful

you drown. He is Jasper Conran. Have you ever felt you were drowning in the midst of this Conran

clan Jasper? Oh yes quite frequently, really quite frequently. But the name Conran is one which

immediately suggests superwoman and superman indeed and style and success and all of these things

that there must have been a terrific owner upon you to achieve. Yes, is the answer definitely

because otherwise I was always going to be my parents son. But you had to say how do you do my name

is Jasper Conran? Yes certainly I encountered prejudice. Did you? Yes. In what way? Well because

everybody thought it would be easy for me you know. My brother had a terrible time at art school.

My father was on the board of governance of most of the art schools. So how'd you get into an

art school without anybody thinking that you've been got in by the back door, so to speak?

But do you think that if you hadn't had the name that Vogue would still have given you as they did

when you were 19 years old, virtually unknown, they gave you a six page spread. Now it wasn't

it the name Conran that got you that? I don't actually believe it was because Vogue is a commercial

enterprise and whoever the fashion editor was certainly didn't do it for the love of me or for

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