Three months after taking over the Barras Centre, New Yorker Camille Lorigo has convinced a healthy crowd of Scotland's fashion forward to come to the east end of Glasgow and spend their Friday night contemplating Obscure Couture's £400 neon lace party dresses.
At 10:30am the next day, Obscure Couture's unit at the corner of the Barras Centre is still locked up. The cutting table, on which there was dancing until vodka o'clock, has taken a beating. Lorigo, however, is up and on, babysitting a group of German travel journalists, showing them the market, talking up her adopted city. She has had two and a half hours sleep.
"I was on my way home last night," she says, "and the guy in the kebab shop gave me a funny look. When I got to the flat I looked in the mirror and saw I still had a huge roller in my hair. It had been there all night. No-one had mentioned it."
Fizzing with charm, energy and Manhattan sass, 34-year-old Lorigo has, single-handedly, plugged the city's fashion industry into the mains. She arrived in Scotland in 2006 with a notion to start a fashion boilerhouse. Her first base was the Chateau in Govan, the former jailhouse where Franz Ferdinand held their first gigs. She moved to a shop in the Saltmarket and sold avant garde clutch bags and made-to-measure jeans beside criminal lawyers, windowless bars and the kind of off-licence that has security grilles around the stock.
After a stint on the sixth floor of the Argyll Arcade she decided, in July of this year, that an unprepossessing vacant unit with an arched glass roof, squeezed in between a row of antique markets, a council-run nursery, a hard-core Celtic bar and the back of St Alphonsus Catholic church was exactly the place she needed to realise her vision of a retail-market-cafe-modelling agency-press hub-cool HQ for Glasgow.
At the moment this vision is still a work in progress. The Barras Centre has shop units round the sides and an internal square with a few wooden barrows dotted around.
One barrow is selling sparkly cupcakes. The rest are still empty. There is a cafe that opens out on to the square. Lorigo's office base is up above, with a balcony from where she can keep an eye on her new empire.
Lorigo also runs one of the units stocking selected designers from the Argyll Street unit,
some heavily edited vintage and bonkers hats. Next door Made in the Shade has hand-printed eco bags and Dot Cotton notelets. Kootch, which has no connection to Lorigo, is selling bags, jewellery and ceramics. The other spaces are either empty or used as offices during the week and locked up at the weekend.
The cafe's mismatched green velour chairs spill out in the courtyard. By 1pm several of the models from Lorigo's nascent agency have dropped in to sign contracts. Behind the counter Esca Hossack, another regular on Lorigo's catwalk shows and photo shoots, dispenses coffee, pancakes and plum jam made by her grandfather. Just 18, she is already one of Lorigo's long-time collaborators and stars-in-waiting.
"Every space Camille has had, people want to hang out," says Hossack, pushing back her red hair with short scarlet nails. "Before, people used to say we were cliquey and elitist, which we're not at all, but having a cafe gives them an excuse to come here. Everyone is loving the cakes."
Beyond the cafe, tables of stallholders are selling the kind of knit-your-own-robot nicknacks that have become a fixture of the contemporary craft scene. There are bird-shaped cushions, boxes of sushi, rings made from old buttons, vintage Japanese banknotes. Trudi Shillum produces a bottle of mandarin-flavoured mineral water to demonstrate her pornographic sake cups. When liquid is added, a naked man becomes visible at the bottom of the glass.
This is just the kind of oddity that gave the Barras its once mighty reputation. The market has, in its 90-odd year history, coped with more than the invasion of art school graduates and their acolytes. It was founded early in the 1920s by an enterprising greengrocer, Margaret McIver. She and her husband bought land in Moncur Street and rented barrows to weekend traders. It grew arms and legs, the McIvers and others built sheds to house their stalls until, in 1934, Margaret McIver opened the grand Barrowland ballroom. This was rebuilt in 1960, following a fire, and now has market space underneath the sign.
At his heyday the Barras was famous as the home of cheap towels and priceless patter. When the rest of the city closed down on a Sunday, the Barras was hopping, selling curtains, bananas and bargain versions of the latest toys and gizmos. Up fusty stairs there were what would now be called retro clothes, medals, dog-eared pornography, hunting weapons, boxes and boxes of ancient records. Legend told of a stall that sold fake Transcards, Glasgow's all-purpose travel tickets.
Made In The Shade is launching its campaign by hosting a ‘Supermercado’ event on Saturday, November 6, the first in a series of weekly markets celebrating local designers, craftmakers and musicians.The Grand Opening Party will bring together around 20 businesses including artisan coffee roasters, vintage clothing retailers, specialist bakers, florists and fashion designers under the arched glass roof of the courtyard.Shoppers will be served old-style treats including broken biscuits, hot doughnuts, and peas and vinegar, while being entertained by buskers and a live acoustic set from The Meatmen.The Made In The Shade owners will also be leading tours of the market and talking about plans for the future.
