Italian-born designer and retailer Rita Valpiani celebrates 21 years in the fashion business this year. Sarah Foster reports.

SOME people are just born with an eye for style. They're the women in the street who turn heads; those whose accessories always match their outfits and leave the rest of us feeling inadequate. The same is true of good designers. They match colours and fabrics in ways that others would never think of and yet the end result is somehow irrefutably right. As well as artistry, designing clothes that others will want to wear takes self-assurance, and Rita Valpiani has both in abundance.

Over 21 years of designing and retailing, Rita has established herself as one of Yorkshire's leading fashion matriarchs. Her shop, Rita Valpiani, on Harrogate's Parliament Street, is now ten years old and boasts a database of 4,000 customers, including television and media personalities. But Rita's current success is far cry from when she first arrived in the UK as a young bride in the 1970s.

Born in Tuscany into an artistic family, she initially succumbed to pressure to enter a secure profession and trained as a teacher. But her true vocation lay in fashion, and her marriage to Yorkshireman Richard, who came from an award-winning textile producing family, provided just the opening she was looking for. "My husband had some good contacts and the right experience and he made it possible for me to source fabrics," she says. "I was learning English first and also a little bit about the trade."

As well as working with her husband in the family business, Rita embarked on a City and Guilds course, learning about things like pattern cutting. In 1983, she designed her first collection, but soon came to realise that the travel involved in designing full-time was not compatible with family life. It was to enable her to spend time with her two young children that Rita decided to branch out into retail. And when her husband came on board, his heritage helped turn the venture into an all-encompassing fashion business. "We are not just a shop, we're a fashion business," says Rita. "We complete the full circle from designing to manufacturing to retail."

With a home in Tuscany, the couple now divide their time between Italy and the UK, meeting manufacturers and suppliers on their trips abroad. They also keep a keen eye out for talented new designers to introduce to their shop, and over the years, have "discovered" two of fashion's leading lights.

"I think if you are a designer, you can recognise talent in others," says Rita. "We have a lot of designers who weren't very well known in the past and have grown to become big names. Ben de Lisi showed his first collection in Harrogate when he came from America and we stocked it. We picked Sarah Pacini up in Paris and first stocked her when she wasn't showing in England. I get pleasure from the discovery and a lot of our customers know they can find things here that will be big in future."

The shop is divided into different sections for menswear, young fashion, classic fashion, shoes and evening wear and brands currently in stock include jeans from Guide London, Essenza and Mohave; classics from Consortium, Space and Lauren Vidal; and young fashion from Cart the Airport, Celo and Garize. Rita has kept up her own designing through her Mela Rosa range, which means 'pink apple'. She explains: "I just liked the name and I think it fits because it's young fashion."

Through both her own designs and those of others that she stocks, Rita tries to offer her customers something different; something they won't find elsewhere. She says that by working on the shop floor she gets a good idea of what they want. "If you are in contact with people you find out what they want and it's much easier to give them it," she says. "People want things that are different and they want good value."

Rita boasts that customers start coming to her at the age of about 13 and continue well into old age, often spending hours browsing through her collections. Her enthusiasm for fashion is so infectious that her son Tom, 28, left his job in the City to join the business and continue with the family tradition. He now specialises in menswear and deals with wholesale and production.

While she has built her reputation and now has a ten-strong team to help her, Rita says she won't be resting on her laurels. Instead, she's working towards the next landmark, devoting as much time and energy to delivering the best for her customers as ever. As she puts it: "We want to carry on with what we're doing and do it better."