They asked me a year or two ago, I was in a bad time of my life. Then I decided to do it. Once or twice a week I'm in De Panne. The project is to design rooms. The first room, the Blue Room, will be finished at the end of this week, then later there will be the first family with a little child who come for a time. The rest of the place is not finished, but they don't have much money. It's all volunteers, people from hospitals.

I want to bring them out of the clinical atmosphere. They are ill, and they may not have long to live, but they have to live in some cold place, so I want to bring them into a dream. But it will be a very long and hard process to complete the place, I think it will go on for years. There are 16-17 rooms, and then the halls and the common rooms and the entrance. Three floors, I don't like the building at all, but I think I can make something of it. It's really a cold, grey building, but I want to make a white castle of it - all white. I contacted Boss Paints, they're a big company, and they agreed to do the project, they will sponsor all the material for the rooms. I'm very glad. When it's finished I want it all in white, so that it looks like something out of the ground.

I want to have three dimensional plasterwork. Somebody has to be able to do that. I've contacted a decorator who also works for Disneyland, Plopsaland and so on, so that is one person I asked to work with me. He will work on the whole project, and sometimes we ask friends and so on to come to help, and we try to go as far as possible. We're on the way to doing it, but I think we will still have difficulties. But more and more people are interested now because it's a unique project. Now we need to find sponsors for the rooms. They have an adoption programme for the rooms; one person can adopt a room and then we can work it out. More and more people are really coming now to do it. So that's quite positive. This is a project that gives me unbelievable energy. I don't have the time to do it, but I'm so attracted to go there and to continue this thing. It gives so much energy and inspiration, and it's a meeting with another world, and knowing that you can maybe bring something to these children and their families.

I imagine it must be traumatic to deal with these children.

It will be very emotional, not traumatic.

What can you tell us about the new collection?

I haven't designed anything for a year, and now I'm working on this present collection. Every piece has to be a Wow piece, but it doesn't have to be a big Wow, it can also be a little Wow. So I'm working for instance on pieces where with two buttons you can make a longer piece, and transform into something else. We are working with special forms of shawls that become a cache-coeur, or become a skirt. Folks are thinking about what's happening in the world, economically and so on. What can I bring that can continue the dream, but can also be multifunctional?

Metamorphosis is something that's common in fairy stories and in dreams. Shape-shifting and so on. Nothing is ever fixed in a dream. Now you're talking about clothes that have an effect of changing the person who's wearing them, but which change themselves as well.

One piece can have three or four possibilities, and you always see something else. And it's all in white, or based on white. There will be some colours, you can see the colours I bring here [shows some fabric swatches], blue, black, and also some structure but quite neutral, the blue and black together, a bit of dark red. I will make a limited edition, that's important. There will be maybe two or three, maximum five examples of each piece.

And then I'm working on furniture. [She takes out some photos of furniture designs] This is all made for me, I'm not a very good carpenter. I've been concentrating on this for one month. This is all done by hand, this work, in limewood. Right now it's made in Hasselt, so I have to travel up and down in my car, three hours there and back. We're looking for a production facility, but that won't be in Belgium. The furniture will be made, will be hand-made in exactly the same way, but in Indonesia. That will also be a limited edition, but to make a table like that so that people can afford to buy it, you have to have it made abroad.

The interior textiles are made in Ingelmunster. They are linen weavers, the cloth is pure linen. It's one of the few weavers left. They came to me and asked me to work on creating new textile effects. I made some drawings, and told them what I wanted the result to be, and they made a pattern, and that's what this is. It took months and months of work. Little by little we will make a collection, but now at first I want to start everything in white, and then we will add some colours. Painting I do here. The big work I do here, if I can find the time.

The furniture looks organic, like a living thing.

Yeah, it's moving. I want to bring out the movement in it. There's another piece, a table called El Toro, and it looks like two animals who are, not fighting but pushing against each other. There will be drawers, and it will be finished in white, not like in the photo but more matt. So this is the table, then there will be a little table, a chair, I will start a bed. But this range will be like classic pieces, I don't want to change it. I don't want to make fashion any more, that's just a way to make people buy. Someone has to turn, and more people will turn against it. I want to make things that people buy and then keep.

Most people's complaint about the fashion industry is that it creates the hunger only it can feed. The constant drive for change, which is also a drive towards obsolescence. You can only get people to wear the new season's clothes if you convince them to discard the old season's.

I want to start again, because it's a way of working with respect. Stock clearances and sales are a sign of no respect, nobody feels good about it, only people who like to buy for a cheap price, but it's an illusion, because so much production goes straight to the sales. It's not an honourable way to do business.

Who wears your clothes?

There is no line. There is no typical customer. It could be a girl of six years old, a young girl of fifteen years old, or a woman of 20, 40, 60, 70. There is one woman in Brussels who lives near the gallery, I think she is 75-80 or so, and she was always dressed in my clothes. She was a pianist and artist, but she only wore my clothes. And the top of the range clothes, so she only wore the big dresses and the gowns. She would walk through the gallery with a big dress or a coat on, and everybody noticed her. She was my star. And she would always take the most special piece, because I have some basics that are not so expensive, you can wear them very simply. When I see her it's really like a dream.

People like that woman who have bought clothes from you, don't they have to keep on coming back? They're not going to start shopping in Zara or H&M. Don't you have a responsibility to those people?

A lot of people buy one piece for a special occasion like a wedding maybe, and it's not cheap, there's a lot of hand work involved, so it's not cheap, so they want to go on wearing it afterwards. But I have more clients who always wear my dresses. I even knew people who would come at the beginning of the season, and they would say I want that, that and that, and I would put it away and when they had some money they could come and pick it up.

How much money are we talking about? A top of the line dress, for example, how much would that cost?

You can have a very nice big dress for, let's say, it starts at €1000 and it can go up to €5000. I try to keep it as realistic as possible, but that's for a special occasion. You can buy a dress like I'm wearing now, a dress for the day, for about €500, for a total silhouette with the jacket and everything maybe about €1000-€1500. I always wear my own clothes, day and night. I have one pair of jeans, and I put it on and everybody was asking, what's happening Kaat? Now I have some trousers in my line, but before I was always wearing long dresses.

So you're designing a new collection, how many pieces do you think there will be?

There will be fifteen different forms, but then variations, with almost 50 different possibilities.

And then on top of that you have painting, drawing, anything else?

The furniture, there will be at least four pieces. And we have this new fabric we've developed, which is for interiors, which has three different light points, it's in three layers, but it's in one piece. It's woven that way. There are pockets woven into the fabric, each of which has a different dimension of light. Then there will be my new jewellery line, and a new lighting line.

And now I'm going to be making new costumes for the Senate, for the people who bring the letters. They asked me to come up with some suggestions. I don't know how far I can go. I need to make an appointment to go there. It would be fantastic to do something humorous. I like to make uniforms, I adore drawing them, but they have to go for it of course.

Kaat Tilley's new show, Albino, will be presented on 18 September from 21.00, and on 19-20 September from 14.00, at Campo Molen, 12 Asbeekstraat, Asse. Tickets (€15 and €8) from www.fnac.be.

www.kaattilley.be

Go to part three of this extended web-only interview with Kaat Tilley here.

Part one was here. This is part two.