Luckily Harvey 31 and Carolyn 34 are used to such rude behaviour

Luckily Harvey, 31, and Carolyn, 34, are used to such rude behaviour. “People do tend to come in and say ‘Wow’,” says Carolyn, kindly. (Bike couriers, not the most easily shocked breed in London, are often particularly taken aback when they swagger through the door, she adds.)
The room is lined with souvenirs of an enterprise that, in just six years, has spanned more aspects of fashion than many designers get through in a lifetime. Bundled on a shelf is the Christmas-tree mini-dress that transformed Ulrika Jonsson into last year’s Evening Standard Christmas Fairy.

Dripping from a hanger is the ethereal web of a dress, supposedly spun by spiders, that stars in New RenaisCAnce’s latest project, a television advert for Gordon’s Gin which goes out from tomorrow. Next to tins of spray-paint and glitter is a jam jar full of tiny, naked, pink, plastic, baby dolls. “You’ve got to have a jar of babies, it’s essential,” says Carolyn (quite possibly she is serious).Harvey (resplendent in T-shirt that proclaims “supermodel”) and Carolyn (skirt with panoramic vistas of the New York skyline, plus French chateau- patterned shirt) met, conventionally enough, at the Royal College of Art – that proud big “CA” in their name refers to the RCA. He studied fashion and she studied embroidery, but neither had “Making Nice Frocks” at the top of their career agenda. Unusual for fashiony types, surely? “At college, everyone was geared up to enter the clothing industry,” says Harvey. “The aim at the RCA was to get a good job in Italy.” And what’s wrong with knocking up posh collections in Italy? “We think of fashion as almost intangible. It’s a feeling, a mood, it’s relevant to society, clothing is only a part of it.

Fashion is as much photography, advertising, music and pop videos as clothes.”It’s a handy philosophy, because their work embraces all of the above. Their showreel, a fast-moving whirl of the glamorous and the kitsch, introduces them as “art directors, stylists, set designers, image managers, costumiers, supermodels and fashion darlings”. They do make clothes, and have had lines on sale in the poshest of London’s department stores, but most of their pieces aren’t ones to wear. “We didn’t want to make seasonal collections with the idea that they will be thrown away when they go out of fashion.

We wanted to make stuff you could keep as a work of art,” says Carolyn She pulls out a bustier made entirely of labels. “If you wear one designer label, why not wear a thousand?” Another favourite, hanging in the studio, is a white sheepskin coat, decorated with laminated real flowers and real insect corpses – “We didn’t kill them,” explains Carolyn, “we found them in a light fitting.”They are responsible for the fantastical WeatherGens that introduce the weather forecasts on ITV; each WeatherGen is a living symbol for rain, snow, hail or sun and there are 17 of them, all baroquely over-the-top confections of sequins, feathers, PVC and.. Sellotape (a very versatile material, says Carolyn. They also used it in the costumes for a pop video for Bryan Ferry. “Fifty layers of Sellotape have a strange, fragile density.”)They have designed the Christmas window display at Harvey Nichols, which also hosted the New Generation of Fashion Designers show, where Naomi Campbell modelled for them.