Lizzy Bishop walks into Brighton’s Marwood coffee shop without fanfare and after some friendly banter with the staff, orders a coffee. This is very disappointing. I’d hoped the director of Brighton Fashion Week would at least demand champagne.

But it turns out Bishop has little in common with the fashion industry clichés Absolutely Fabulous spoofed so brilliantly.

Although she’s carrying a Chanel handbag, it’s secondhand like her maxi-dress, picked up in La Vie En Noir, a vintage shop on Preston Street where she also got her floppybrimmed hat: “Only a fiver!”

On her feet she wears flat, black and white pumps from high street favourite Office.

“I run around far too much to wear heels. I’m clumsy too so they’d only get scuffed.”

In fact, she goes on, she doesn’t really wear high fashion at all. “It’s too expensive for a start but also, I’m more interested in individual style, reworking vintage and mixing it with high street. I like individuality.”

If Bishop seems an unlikely fit in the traditionally highmaintenance fashion world, it might be because she never set out to be a part of it. A farmer’s daughter from the Midlands, the 34-year-old had hoped to work in the music industry but on graduating from university was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Disease, a cancer of the white blood cells.

After nine months of treatment she went travelling, spending a period in an artists’ commune in Spain.

On returning to the UK and determined to do something with her creative urge, she was presented with the perfect opportunity when a designer friend, frustrated by the lack of showcases for emerging talent, challenged her to put on a catwalk show.

At that stage, Bishop had never even attended a catwalk show. “But going through something like cancer and having to face your own mortality makes you think, ‘Why not?’ What’s the worst that can happen when your life’s already been threatened?”

She staged her first catwalk show in 2003 as one-off event Brighton Frocks – part of Brighton Fringe.

A decade on and what is now Brighton Fashion Week has grown into a four-day celebration of design talent both local and international that has helped launch names including Jess Eaton, whose astounding “Roadkill Couture” now graces the pages of Vogue magazine.

There’s been a lot of trial and error, says Bishop. “I’ve had to work hard to educate myself about this world and I’ve made a lot of mistakes.”

But she has benefited from Brighton’s supportive creative community with figures such as Eaton and photographer Kevin Mason of Create Studios offering advice and “tough love”.

“One of my chief aims in doing this is to show the world what Brighton has to offer and to raise its profile. The city has been so good to me. I never felt I fitted in and coming here felt like coming home.”

The event is now a largescale operation involving up to 100 people, a 70ft catwalk and designers from all over the world. Originally pitched somewhere between London’s Graduate Fashion Week and international showcase Fashion Scout, Bishop now believes they are a step on from both.

In addition to the popular Zeitgeist and High Street, which showcase fashion from both ends of the spectrum, this year sees the introduction of two new events. Sustain is an eco-fashion show designed to prove that ethical fashion doesn’t have to be “all hippies and hemp”, while Showreel offers a rare platform for emerging costume designers to show their work.

Designers are coming from Poland, Brazil, Serbia, Korea and Berlin to rub shoulders with local talents including Gresham Blake, Louise O’Mahony and Sarina Poppy.

The shows are split 50-50 between designers who have been headhunted by Bishop, who attends emerging talent shows here and abroad, and those who have applied to be there. As far as entry criteria goes, Bishop says she looks for those who do something different in their work.

“We encourage designers to be as creative as they want to be, to really go for it, be mad! We don’t have huge amounts of funding but we’ll always do our utmost to accommodate any ideas people have. We want the shows to be exciting and theatrical.”

While Brighton Fashion Week gets bigger every year, it doesn’t yet have the draw of its counterparts in London, Paris or Milan. This doesn’t worry Bishop, who considers them to serve different purposes. Brighton Fashion Week offers a more accessible platform for young designers, she adds. “In the early stages of someone’s career, a lot of their success will come down to getting recognition and building their confidence, and Brighton Fashion Week is very good at those things. We try to encourage people to keep going, to keep producing work and to act as a stepping stone for designers to move on to even bigger and better things.”

It also offers audiences of all backgrounds the chance to sit front-row on shows – a privilege usually reserved for the fashion industry’s movers and shakers.

Bishop recalls Jess Eaton’s “Trashion” show at the Corn Exchange in 2010 when she presented crisp packets, cling film and bin-bags as dazzling examples of “recycled couture”

and received a standing ovation. “I was just bawling my eyes out,” she says. “We’d taken a chance on her and she was totally brilliant. Even though she’s gone on to much bigger things, Jess remains loyal to us for giving her that early break and she always comes back to do a show with us.”

Bishop has had to get rapidly acquainted with the demands – and egos – of the fashion industry. “It can be very stressful backstage,” she says diplomatically. “We’ve had to work hard to pare down the team and make sure everyone who’s there knows exactly what they’re doing.”

She cheerfully agrees that fashion is a rather strange world and admits she’s happiest rummaging around the Brighton Racecourse car boot sale or through the rails of Lewes’s charity shops.

“But it’s incredibly satisfying to be working with people at the beginning of brilliant careers – and I think that’s part of the appeal for the audiences too. You’ll see designers at Brighton Fashion Week who will probably go on to become household names.

That’s exciting.”

Is Bishop the most down-toearth fashion type ever? Well, not quite. Just before we end our conversation she lets me in on a secret – green smoothies.

“You get spinach, avocado, cucumber, kale, a kiwi fruit and blend it with some water.

You’ll feel amazing!”

* Brighton Fashion Week takes place from Thursday, June 13, to Sunday, June 16, at various locations around the city. For more information, visit brightonfashionweek.com