Joseph Altuzarra, designer of sleekly modern pieces including the best-cut pencil skirks you’ll find on a catwalk, is still only 29 and was interviewed yesterday by Women’s Wear Daily as part of its Ten of Tomorrow series.

Of course, having been producing an independent, eponymous ready-to-wear collection, shown at New York Fashion Week, beloved of the Restoin Roitfelds and stocked in stores like Barneys, Bergdorf Goodman and Harvey Nichols since 2008, he is very much established but it is exciting to think of how much he has yet to achieve.

We round up the key facts gleaned from the WWD interview.

He sees long-time supporter Carine Roitfeld as his ultimate customer, realising perhaps that women over 50 are the ones with the deepest pockets, and in the case of Roitfeld, the best legs:  ‘I was always really interested, and still am, in this woman who is not 25 years old. She is someone who could be in her 50s, her 60s, but who hasn’t lost her desire to seduce, to feel feminine and sexy. Basically it’s someone like Carine.’ 

He thinks having a surname beginning with A is useful in fashion. When asked about his internship with Marc Jacobs, his first after graduating from a at history degree at the exclusive liberal arts college, Swarthmore in Pennsylvania, he says:  ‘I got called back mainly, I suspect, because I was on top of the pile alphabetically. They needed someone right away and I started working there as an intern in the design studio. It’s where I realised that I really wanted to work in fashion.’

Like many other designers, he has designed costumes for the ballet, in this case the New York City Ballet, and like many other designers, he is introducing his first pre-fall collection.

He is equally influenced by his French (his father is French Basque and Altuzarra grew up in Paris and worked at Givenchy before setting up his own label) and American (his mother is Chinese-American and he moved to the US directly after school and is currently based there) heritage. Speaking about his clothes, he says: ‘On the one hand, there’s this incredibly French, almost a bit decadent world, with a certain darkness and richness. And then, there is this other world