Hannah Marshall: A new queen of darkness

Travelling east on a train through the green of the Essex countryside doesn't seem like the usual sort of trip you'd make to visit an up-and-coming young fashion designer, but I am in the quaint estuarine village of Wivenhoe, just beyond Colchester, to visit Hannah Marshall.

She picks me up from the station in a clapped-out white Vauxhall. "I love it round here," she says as we race through the countryside. "Because of communication, email and phone, you don't have to be based in the capital. Look at it out there, it's beautiful and it feels very safe. It feels like home." She is pixie-like pretty; long straight, jet-black hair with a precise short fringe, traffic-light bright reddy-orange lipstick, wide brown eyes with top lids rimmed with liquid eyeliner. She is wearing one of her own designs, a translucent black chiffon shift-dress with short sleeves over a black racer-back vest-top and leggings. This outfit is adorned with an industrial-size knotted thick skein of dull silver chains by Patrizia Pepe and a pendant by silversmith and friend Hannah Martin. She wears simple thong sandals on her feet. Her studio is in a garage attached to a mock-Georgian house which belongs to her fiancée's parents.

Marshall's studio is a long, thin room with a couple of computers on a dark, wood table. There are rails of samples along either side of the room, a tailor's dummy situated prominently and shelves with books about business management, art, fashion and architecture. The wall above her computers is plastered with photographs of strange sculptural buildings.

"Architecture is always in the background of what I do," she explains, "I came across the work of this architect called Santiago Calatrava and that has been a great inspiration." She shows me a monograph of Caltrava's work that a friend gave her, and it is full of swooping lunar shapes, monolithic Modernist warehouses, curvilinear airport terminals, and strange white arcs of towers.

I first fell in love with Hannah Marshall's architectonic dresses when I saw two of her little black dresses, from her second collection, Void, on mywardrobe.com and ninaandlola.com. One, the Trapeze dress, features six layers of silk organza which swoop out from a regular shift top. It's not so much the perfect cocktail dress as a talking point, a beautifully sculpted swinging and kinetic A-line that moves as you move and lifts like wings taking flight in a breeze. Her other stand-out piece is a fitted opaque black dress with a blousing, bubble-like, organza top: the bottom half fitted pencil-tight, the top half a translucent, almost inflatable-looking egg-like cocoon around the upper body.

"A lot of what I do is quite classic," she says. "It's all based on the little black dress, but with an edge. I wear dresses every day, its effortless, its a really easy way to dress. I like to layer them too. Nothing I design is unwearable, even the trapeze dress, which was meant to be a showpiece.

"A lot of my work is about the silhouette," continues Marshall. "When I design I tend to think in black." Another of her hallmarks is working Braille messages into the clothes: her first collection, Quiet Noise, had laser-cutting with Braille words in velvet, and some of her fitted jersey-dresses have leather buttons spelling Braille words on the skirts. "All of the collections have Braille," she explains. "That's really my signature. It's the concept of having messages within your clothing rather than being for blind people."

Marshall's first two collections were exhibited at OnOff and her third was shown as part of the British Fashion Council's New Generation initiative. There were only 12 pieces in the first collection but there are 18 in her third.

She grew up in Brightlingsea, a picturesque village on the coast, and also around Colchester; she graduated from Colchester School of Art and Design with a degree in fashion in 2003. By 2005 she was working in Jonathan Saunders's Brixton studio as an intern and, by 2007, had set up her own label, although she continues to work at two other jobs to finance her label – she lectures foundation students at Colchester School of Art and Design and also works in a boutique in Colchester.

The clothes aren't obviously influenced from one place; there's a touch of late 1960s and 1970s Yves Saint Laurent in their appropriation of cocktail-hour archetypes, and echoes of Alber Elbaz's work for Lanvin. Her more "body-con", insectoid, pieces for autumn/winter this year have a whisper of Boudicca about them, a slight touch of body-armour-chic, but she denies these have been major influences. "I love the Jil Sander label and what Jil Sander did in the Nineties," she says in her chatty Essex way. "When she designed collections they were so ultra-simple to look at with just a touch of masculinity about them. A lot of the styles were quite androgynous."

This love of minimalism manifested strongly in her spring/summer collection, Void. "I wanted to create a really easy-to-wear collection. I called it Void because I wanted it to be void of any fuss, any detail, anything flowery or busy. I wanted to strip it away and keep it ultra-simple and quite classic."

Her autumn/winter collection, Code Black, includes a lot of leather. There's a show-stopping strapless black leather bustier dress, tightly fitted but slightly bloused out around the hips, and another, fabulous, long-sleeved A-line volume dress (an evolution of the Trapeze), rippling outwards with layers of organza and gilded with leather inserts atop the breast.

"I love Alison Mosshart of the Kills," says Marshall of the rock'n'roll inspirations behind the collection. "I started to look at a lot of imagery of her on stage and also of Siouxsie Sioux and Grace Jones. Really strong female music icons inspired autumn/winter. I really love music, and going to concerts, from The Kills to the Raconteurs and Erykah Badu."

She has introduced acutely tailored jackets and skirts for autumn/winter, alongside her signature dresses. "I've done a few separates for autumn/winter; for example there's a tailored jacket with really, really, sharp shoulders. The attention was more focused on the shoulders – it was an edgier silhouette." There's a harder feel to some of these new pieces that will appeal to killer rock-chicks.

But Marshall herself isn't hard at all – she's a chirpy, bright Essex girl who loves her countryside roots; a pretty unlikely maker of such sharp urban architectonic clothes. But the contrast, like her clothes, is fascinating.

Marshall's collection is available from www.my-wardrobe.com(0845 260 3880)

How to wear the little black dress
By Carola Long

"You can wear black at any time," said Christian Dior in 1954. "You can wear it at any age. You may wear it for almost any occasion; a 'little black frock' is essential to a woman's wardrobe."

Dior's advice is particularly timely now, as the LBD was all over the autumn/winter catwalks, with film noir and femme-fatale inspired styles smouldering like a lit cigarette.

Strike the right balance between classic styles and next season's details, and you can buy a dress now that will look chic for years. Fresh motifs include large pattern lace – as seen at Prada, one-shoulder styles and draping at Lanvin and austere, moulded silhouettes at Balenciaga; while crisp ruffles and tiers still look modern.

For evening Reiss has a good selection of LBDs, including a strapless cocktail pencil dress with a frilled front, and Warehouse have a slinky jersey dress with one strap.

For the day a plain jersey dress in a slightly Grecian style (try Topshop) is a comfy, timeless option that provides the perfect foil to retro belts and chunky costume jewellery – next season's statement accessory.

In more practical terms, make sure you use a deodorant that doesn't leave white marks, choose a fabric that appears expensive, and look for garments that are lined – particularly in real silk. Approach dresses in high-shine satin with caution, as they can look unflattering and a bit cheap.