By Amy Shih and Grace Chang (That's Shanghai)
Updated: 2007-02-02 11:05

Fashion designer Megan Fischer is sassy, confident and so blunt sometimes it makes you cringe. If you aren't convinced that these qualities necessarily make for good design, you can be sure that they make great TV. Throw in a few emotionally fragile wannabe models, a prize, a little cunning and a lot of jealousy and you have the much-awaited Chinese version of America's Next Top Model, known here as Fashion Star.

For the first episode of the Canadian's two-episode stint as guest designer, contestants strutted their stuff in a bid for a spot in one of her fashion shows. Two hours after the cameras were due to start rolling, the models finally showed up. "The problem was," Fischer said, "they gave a bunch of models a map and asked them to find my studio." A variety of poses and 100 polaroids later, Fischer had tucked away her first TV experience.

"It was interesting because I obviously don't speak Chinese and there was no interpreter prepared so I didn't know how much of what I was saying was actually coming across." Still, the communication gap was bridged enough for her to tell one girl she was too fat to do the job. "Well I didn't say flat out that she was too fat. I mean I don't want to come across as totally horrible. I told her that I loved her curves but models were usually slimmer and she needed to hit the gym."

Two years ago, doing corporate sales for Polo Ralph Lauren in New York, Megan Fischer never dreamed that she would be coming up with her own designs, let alone playing industry bitch on Chinese reality TV. "Designing clothing never occurred to me, because I simply didn't think I could," she says. But finding nine-five office life a bore, she took the advice of a friend who lived in Shanghai at the time and escaped New York for a three-month sabbatical to study Chinese.

In Shanghai, she encountered the inevitable newcomer hardships, particularly the fruitless search for clothes to fit her long limbs and medium build. She eventually resorted to the fabric market where she purchased some lengths of silk with gold embroidered dragons and made a modern version of a qipao. "I cut out the back and a deep V in the front instead of doing the traditional Chinese dress you see which hides the décolletage." She couldn't believe the huge response she got carousing Shanghai's social scene in her newly-made outfit. "I gave out every business card I had on me," she remembers.

Not long after, she started her company, MATSU by Megan, named after a Taoist sea goddess. She wanted a catchy moniker that reflected the clothing's Asian-inspired elements and, perhaps, her desire to make women feel like goddesses in their own right.

Since parlaying a street-market-designed dress into her own fashion business, Fischer has dressed dozens of clients in her bespoke garments under the label Megan Fischer Couture, prescribing an unorthodox sense of style that she describes as a "play" on other designs. Her designs run from a corseted bubble dress using traditional qipao fabric, to a syrah silk cowboy shirt with a Mao collar and puffed sleeves ("I'm from Calgary, the land of the cowboy, so I thought why not have a Western/Chinese-styled shirt") and a pair of drainpipe pants offset by a billowing tank shirred at the front, kind of Cristobal Balenciaga meets Marc Jacobs. "I like to see contrasting pieces worn together," Fischer says.

With plans to launch her inaugural capsule collection in spring 2007, an elegant new studio space in the former French Concession, and mega media exposure (Fashion Star will air across Asia and in some countries in Europe), one can only marvel at the leaps and bounds this 24-year-old has made in her career after being in Shanghai only a year and a half.

And we get the feeling that we'll be hearing more of Megan Fischer yet.

MATSU by Megan(www.matsudesign.com) are available by appointment at
Location: 1/F, No 1, Lane 183 Wulumuqi Nan Lu

Ready-to-wear label
Location: Mix and Match, No.334 Nanchang Lu

Tel: 021-64338029