Design Journey with

Bohemian, eclectic, free-spirited. Call it what you may but always with joie de vivre. Big skirts, comfy cottons, stacks of jewellery, and efficacious laughter. That is Loulou. "I am a bit of a banjara, always have been," she laughs. Born in 1945, in Kodaikanal to Belgian parents, she lived the slow life much before it became fashionable to do so.

- PRAGNYA RAO

Isla Maria Loulou van Damme

The Belgian designer shares glimpse of her luxuriously bohéme world with us, a journey that has spanned five decades across countries'

"I didn't go to school till I was nine, you would be find me hanging on the trees, playing with other kids," she recounts, before she was packed off to a boarding school in England before going to Germany and finding her way back to Brussels. She was 19 when Loulou met a young man, her future husband, who was moving to London and she decided to follow him there. With a hundred pounds in her pocket and a mint new sports car, she headed out to see what life held in store for her. Her first job was as a VIP hostess for BP and Shell, which was "extremely boring," she says. As fate would have it, she met a Danish lady, Lisbet, known to her from Mumbai, who owned a shop at the Taj Mahal hotel called Malabar. She had a store in London where the swish set would shop at. "It was a roaring hippie part of history, the Marie Quant era; I started working there as a salesgirl," shares Loulou. It was not long before she said, "Don't do the window display, let me," going on to design clothes at the store.